An occult found footage horror steeped in folklore and a demonic entity.

• Scare factor: ★★★☆☆
• Intriguing factor: ★★★★☆
• Folk horror factor: ★★★★☆
• Occult factor: ★★★★☆
• How shaky is the camera: very shaky

Noroi also know as Noroi: The Curse is a Japanese horror film that combines folk horror with the occult by using a found footage format. It stars Jin Muraki, Marika Matsumoto, Rio Kanno, Satoru Jitsunashi. Directed by Kôji Shiraishi and written by Kôji Shiraishi and Naoyuki Yokota.

Duration 1h 55m. 

Plot

Masafumi Kobayashi is a paranormal journalist investigating paranormal cases on request or on his own with his cameraman Miyajima. One day fate strikes when his house burns down with his wife Keiko in it, while he went missing. 

With his own footage of his last case, a documentary is made about his final investigations about an old village that disappeared and a demon called Kagutaba. The footage shows that he was contacted by a woman with a daughter about her next door neighbor. She can hear a baby crying but the neighbor doesn’t have a baby. Her neighbor  is a woman in her forties with a young boy. She acts very strange and hostile and turns Kobayashi away. 

Later Kobayashi comes in contact with a little girl Kana who is very young but a powerful psychic. He also is contacted by actress Marika Matsumoto who is a little bit psychic and was asked to join a tv-show that went up to a shrine in the woods near an old disappeared village. There she had an episode or some kind of seizure and on the tapes you can see a strange figure in the background. And at her home strange things start to happen as well.

Another psychic Mitsuo Hori who’s a bit of a nut job, and paranoid about alien worms, comes visiting Kana a lot to warn her until she goes missing. 

Kobayashi sees that these people are all connected and his investigation leads to an old village where they held a ritual to appease the demon Kagutaba. But during the last ritual before the village was flooded to make space for a dam, something went wrong. He suspects that the demon haunts Marika and that Kana is a victim too. 

Together with Marika and Mr. Hori, Kobayashi goes in search for the lost village and Kana to end the haunting of the demon. 

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Short Review

The film takes its time to tell the story. We get introduced to each character through several tv-variety-shows, in which they participated. Kana participated in a tv-show to test the psychic abilities of young children. Mr. Hiro was visited by a young journalist for a tv-show, which resulted in a very chaotic interview. And Marika, who is a real actress and plays a fictional version of herself, was asked to go with two guys from a show to find paranormal stuff, which they did. 

The found footage used in this film is the footage shot by Kobayashi’s cameraman Miyajima, who doesn’t have a very steady hand. The footage is often rather shaky and constantly moving and most of the time the people are shot from a close up angle which will tire your eyes a bit. 

The footage of the tv-shows are also very dynamic and chaotic, as is the pace, but these are less shaky and less close up. There’s also footage from 1978 of the last ritual held in the village, which adds to the story and makes it more intriguing.  

The film is a slow burn. First the main characters aer introduced, then the pieces of the puzzle are slowly put together by Kobayashi. This makes the film intriguing and interesting and it also builds tension. The atmosphere is not scary but you can feel there’s something off. It’s not a film where you would expect anything to happen at any moment, but it tells a realistic paranormal mystery that turns out to be quite sinister. 

The characters are a motley crew of people. Kobayashi is very calm and doesn’t stop before he knows the truth. Marika is very subdued a bit shy but brave. And Mr. Hiro is rather crazy. He’s paranoid, chaotic, restless and neurotic and all over the place. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t a legit psychic. And therefore his help is very much needed. 

The old village and the folklore surrounding it turns the story into a folk horror with strange rituals and even very sinister rituals in the past. While we don’t get to see the demon who is the main antagonist, his influence reaches far and the possessions are rather disturbing. 

The ending might not be a great climax, but it still does have some very creepy and nasty images and the final scenes are very disturbing and violent. 

Noroi is not a film for everyone. It’s slow, it doesn’t have a lot of scares, but it’s based on mystery and it plays more to the imagination with some very scary scenes that get under your skin.