The Curse: The Japanese Movie That Is So Scary No One Finishes Watching It
Noroi: The Curse premiered in 2005 and quickly became a terrifying cult story that few manage to finish.
Noroi: The Curse is not a movie for the weak-bellied, fearful, or sensitive – in fact, before you see what it’s all about, its creators decided to add a warning designed to give you a key moment to remove it before let the story begin and you end up traumatized.
“This video documentary is considered too disturbing for the public to see,” says the legend at the beginning of the film that follows two hours full of moments that leave you shivering, with cold blood and with prickly skin.
It is not a true story, but its “found footage” style (in the style of The Blair Witch Project ) and all its elements were created to give you the feeling that you are watching something that really happened, and that is one of the reasons why this is considered one of the most disturbing films that have existed in the history of cinema, which has also gained cult status over the years.
Why is Noroi: The Curse considered the scariest found footage movie of all time?
In the middle of 2021, found footage is no longer a novelty, we have films like Cloverfield, The Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity and many more, but The Curse (which is considered one of the most disturbing of J-horror) is different and its “Darkness” depends in large part on you really don’t know what to expect when you first see the movie (so we’re not going to reveal too much of the story).
After his haunting warning, Noroi is turned into a documentary created by a journalist named Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki) , who specializes in the paranormal and is investigating a series of unexplained cases, that of a house where crying babies are heard. that don’t exist, a series of strange deaths, the case of a teenage girl with psychic abilities and a ghost hunt that doesn’t end well.
Kobayashi discovers that the cases could be connected with an ancient ritual and with a demon named Kagutaba, which ends up turning his story into a nightmare full of bloody images and strange events that, as seen in the beginning, lead to his disappearance. Kobayashi, who left behind a burned house and a dead wife.
What makes The Curse different is that it is found footage that is not presented as it was found (as in the case of La Buja de Blair ), but was supposedly put together by a professional journalist, which gives it a more cinematic look and macabre at the same time (in addition to not having the typical found footage tremors that end up making you dizzy), and all this has the objective of playing with your mind to convince you to believe in ghosts, demons and your worst fears.
Also, the fact that the audience knows from the beginning that things did not turn out well for Kobayashi and that his investigation ended up destroying him gives a fatalistic tone to the story that helps make everything feel more tragic and you imagine the worst. even before you see what actually happens, which ironically ends up being worse.
Another good trick of the film (which comes from the same producer of The Grudge and The Ring ) is that it has actors who play themselves to get more realism, and it did not reach the United States and the rest of the world with its release, which also allowed those who found it to see it without knowing much about it, taking the story as what is read in its warning, a brutal documentary that is too disturbing to be seen.
Koji Shiraishi , the creator of the movie, even made up a whole story about demons and ancient satanic rituals so that his big bad and all the connected cases would make sense and be believable (and Noroi didn’t have a Facebook or IMDb page to prevent that would confirm that it was only a movie).
Noroi is different from all found footage, it even plays with stereotypes by presenting those who summoned the devil as Western people, they do not have a predictable rhythm and make the impossible and the unlikely become realistic, and this is why few achieve see it in full on your first try. This movie is one of the great examples of what makes Japanese horror movies great.
Where can you see it?
Fans often upload the movie to YouTube from time to time, but it mysteriously disappears and has to be uploaded again, but you can watch it On Demand through Amazon Prime.