Toronto J-Film Pow Wow
While Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" was widely dubbed "The film that introduced the world to Japanese cinema" during the 20th-century it could easily be argued that films like Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Kairo (Pulse)", Hideo Nakata's "Ringu" and Takashi Shimizu's "Ju-On" were the films that introduced a whole new generation to Japanese cinema in the 21st-century. At the start of the new millenium audiences had already been haunted, stalked and dismembered by a gallery of boogie men from Leatherface to Freddy Krueger and frankly the standard scares were getting a bit stale. In an attempt to devise new ways to keep people sleeping with the light on Hollywood turned East and found inspiration in the atmospheric and exotic horror being produced in Japan. The major studios started buying up the distribution and remake rights for a wide variety of films from a diverse group of filmmaker like the names mentioned above, but also more "extreme" directors like Takashi Miike, Shinya Tsukamoto and Sion Sono. The work of this loose group was was dubbed "J-Horror" and for a few years it was the hottest thing in genre filmmaking. Unfortunately we live in hyper-accelerated and fickle times and once the best horror from Japan had been bought up and recycled studio execs were left picking over whatever sub par product was left and the hot new sub-genre quickly fizzled out.
Regardless of the fact that J-Horror has gone past its sell-by-date that burst of attention at the start of the decade opened doors for a wide variety of not only Japanese but Asian films in general to make their way West and horror fans now have a whole new crop of cinema classics that can join "The Exorcist", "The Shining" and "Night of the Living Dead" in the pantheon of fear. To honour the genre that got so many of you interested in Japanese cinema in the first place we at the Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow wanted to pull together our list of Top Ten Favorite Japanese Horror Films from across the history of Japanese cinema. Proceed at your own risk...
To See the List and Read the Descriptions
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