I love low-budget cinema, always have. Time constrains, financial minimuns and a whole lot of adversity make it so directors adventurous enough to attempt a timid start of their career end up gathering highly imaginative teams, crafting complex scripts without a single Hollywood-esque concession, and all in all relying on the performance of the actors and the genius of the camera work. This is a quite intriguing film, case study of the above. It corresponds to the indie period of Japanese director Kōji Shiraishi [白石 晃士], whose filmography can be described as ''inconsistently good''. Let alone at his own resources and scripts he produced some of the best (and less known) Japanese supernatural horror films; but when resigned to participate on long-running franchises, given traditionally-bad scripts and just the necessary budget for cheap CGI, things went wrong quite fast. Concerning his desillusionment with the Japanese film industry, we shall discuss later in more detail.
オカルト [translated as Occult] is a 2009 film fully written, directed and produced by Shiraishi himself, who also features as a character in the film itself along with his friend director Kiyoshi Kurosawa [黒沢 清], author of the also highly imaginative Pulse [回路] (2001). The film cast is exiguous and it is mainly recorded via handycam, with scarce and ocassional panel shots displaying the same late-nineties granular quality. The unavoidable limitations are nevertheless adding to the quality of the film and its pretended nature, a found-footage tape. Shiraishi can proudly claim his title as Japan's most dedicated director to the horror found footage genre (currently in a quite ruined state, worldwide). His approach had already solidified by this period, via his first serious incursion through The Curse [ノロイ] (2005), a highly unconventional psychological mockumentary film involving an incredible amount of locations, characters, and symbolic elements. Far from a commercial success -though it did ok- the film's (deserved) following eventually turned it into a legit cult film, status it proudly displays today. Since, unlike his first long-running film Ju Rei: The Uncanny [呪霊 劇場版 黒呪霊] (a nice take on the Ju-On series) the screenplay was done by himself, he returned to The Curse a number of times the following years. Thus, some elements of Occult are fully reminiscent of this seminal work; Shiraishi enriches this work with grey-morality characters, bizarre supernatural hearsay (and manifestations, too), and disturbing references to Shintō religiosity. In all these elements, the works may look in fact identical. This might be another reason as to why Occult basically lacks any diffusion at all when compared with either previous or subsequent works of the director, and has been neglected to the point of being difficult to find for some time. But Occult displays some new and daring elements The Curse lacked; the setting becomes urban and not rural, as in ノロイ. Thus, the focus is no longer on on manuscripts and ceremonial clues hidden in remote villages, but in the mind of the alienated, nihilist man of the metropolis. It also raises the stakes: this may in fact be the only good Lovecraftian-esque film out there (since Nic Cage did not quite polished The Color Out Of Space, 2020; I'm sorry, Nicholas).
The film starts out with the depiction of a slashing incident at a mountain resort; the killer also badly hurts a man (Shohei Eno) by carving an enigmatic logo on his flesh. Then, the perpetrator jumps from a cliff out to the sea, theoretically dying but leaving no body behind. All people involved in this incident, including the relatives of the casualties, become transfixed by apparently bizarre and inexplicable phenomena, and these become object of interest to a small filmmaking cast involved in reporting paranormal sensationalism. Their interview trail jumps from one person to another, until they reach Eno, who then becomes a main character of shorts. And boy what a character. His cast is Shohei Uno [宇野祥平], who did a fantastic acting job, bringing to life a complex, fluid performance to screen. His alter ego, Eno, is at times charming and innocent, at times demented, rude and sleazy, and always suspicious. First introduced as a victim of the slasher, Eno's life becomes completely different as he gets those weird symbols carved in his back. When the film crew finds him, Eno is virtually homeless; his jobs are temporary and badly paid, he eats a bit of junk food to get by and has to rent 24-hours net cafes in order to sleep and clean himself. He looks unbothered by this rough life as he recalls the incident, but also looks completely serious when he assures he witnesses miracles on a daily basis.
The shocking revelation will lead to an uneasy collaboration between the film crew and Eno: they will lend him a handycam for him to record these strange occurrences, as material for their reporting; in exchange, they will pay him for every one of them and also let him sleep on their small office. Virtually all of them deem Eno as untrusty, as his fast responses and imperturbable easiness (added to his love of alcohol and lack of etiquette) very much look like the mask of a veteran conman. But -and here Shohei Uno's performance is in fact impressive- the more time Eno spends time with our eye into the movie, the cameraman, the more he enters the gray area. We simply have no clue at all about what Eno thinks, his actual morality or -more importantly- if he is for real about his supernatural claims. In his precarious situation, anytime he asks for something (quite easily, it seems) he looks like a grifter; but then unexpectedly he returns the favor, or demonstrates the actual need behind that petition. Thus, Eno's acting becomes the plot driver and out actual incentive for the film itself, something entirely impossible in most commercial films lately. In its austerity, the film then opens various plotlines as the crew strives to not only reveal the motivation behind the resort killings, but also to obtain information on Eno and his strange symbols.
The quest proves difficult, and includes many claims involving other criminal cases, ancient folk religion and even UFOs. Shiraishi plays on the film's title by displaying an array of pop culture occult elements as either distractors or clues; as in ノロイ, these elements, as presented in a cold-third person fashion (typical of a found-footage film) serve to introduce Shiraishi's audience into the same universe of information as that of the actual characters of the film. There is no ''god's perspective'', a cross-characters comprehensive view to articulate these scattered bits of unrelated data. This fogginess and uncertainly vastly contributes to the film's engaging atmosphere, and invest the viewer in the source of those phenomena and testimonies. As Shiraishi himself stated on an interview:
I like to portray the feeling of being scared and fear itself within film, so I’ll probably continue to do this. But rather than violence, an intense fear, for example: about nature, fear and menace, the existence of the extraordinarily awful – or however you’d like to put it.
As the crew investigates Eno's situation, they discover he has been saving a vast sum of money, and in fact has been living in such an uprooted way to do so. While they fear he might be preparing for a killing, just as his aggressor before him had done, the cameraman can't avoid becoming sympathetic to him. Eno's directness and his seemingly peaceful demeanor in the face of terrifying apparitions (conveyed via quite cheap effects, such as shadows superimposed on the screen) earns him credibility when he reveals how there's always someone talking to him, and might be on a divine mission. Shiraishi then enters the film as an amateur folk investigator, who has spent his spare time researching an ancient mountain which used to be consacrated to a Shintō deity, Hiruko [蛭子]. You have to be deep in Japanese religion to know about this figure, who briefly appears in the most ancient Japanese text, the Record of Ancient Matters [古事記] (around the 7th century). This is a most particular figure, for he was the first earthly divine creature, being born of the ancient august deities Izanami and Izanagi ['He who invites' and 'She who invites']. But since it had been Izanami who had first started the intercourse, an aberration, a monstruosity came forward from her. Hiruko was a generic name, involving the character for leech [蛭] and that of child [子]; it refers in ancient Japanese to a child born without legs and arms, a blob, a teratologic creature. Feeling the grief of this tragedy, his parents resolve to abandon this nevertheless divine being in the sea, above a basket. Then little less is said of the godly Hiruko and his sad destiny, floating above dark waters to later ingress mythology again via local cult beliefs in the medieval eras, under figures such as that of Ebisu [恵比須]. Many consider this belief greatly precedes the writing of the Record itself.
Mysterious petroglyphs embedded on that mountain are similiar to those of Eno, who will then prepare the setting for a fabulous third act, of which I won't talk about in case you want to see it. But by adding such an elaborated story behind the low budget, almost verité production value, the film ends up becoming about an irruption of the monstruous and the divine in the everyday life. The movie is self-conscious about it, as the cameraman lends his handycam to Eno at the very end, in case he travels to a possible spirit world. And this is pretty much a cosmic horror setting, in the lovecraftian tradition; a flawed and seemingly ordinary person happens to be touched by accident or destiny to go down a rabbithole of progressibly vaster wonder and horror, to the roots of reality and the Godhead. And, as in Lovecraft (or in the Old Testament for that matter), the Godhead happens to be something quite terrible, amoral and maddening. While fully suffering from the budget constraints in the aesthetics area (and the very end of the movie can very well make you laugh), the progression of the third act is actually genius and rewarding. It is a sign as to what cinema could be still, despite its commercial and relentless dumbing down. Fully relying on acting and a decent screenplay/script, the film becomes one among Shiraishi's golden years. Years that very well could not come back.
Shiraishi has been transparent on the motives behind his declining from highly original indie pieces such as the aforementioned to plain trash such as Sadako vs. Kayako [貞子 vs. 伽椰子] (2016), very much on the intellectual and aesthetic level of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). Short answer: he needed to eat. On an interview dating back from 2009 concerning his gore film Grotesque (made illegal on United Kingdom, mind you), and long before having to promote horror blockbusters he stated the following:
Yes, I’d like to make one [Hollywood style movie], I want money, making small films in Japan is simply not profitable. If you don’t make a big movie, you can’t make a decent money, I’d like to achieve commercial success at some point so I’d like to try to make a Hollywood movie. If I could make a big movie in Japan, I don’t think it’d be as good of a film (...) When you make a big movie in Japan, you get bombarded with forceful input from all different sources within the infrastructure (...) the film itself has a tendency to become less and less interesting. Because of this, if you make a big Japanese movie there’s a higher probability that the end result could be an unentertaining film.
And he was right in the money with this statement, which proved to be true. The high budgeted clothing and lightning, the production value and the renowed actors (many of them musical idols) come at the expense of films becoming clones of each other, to the point of ridiculousnes, a fatal flaw in most Japanese (and American) films. Storytelling is sadly becoming a lost art as more innovative and less connected people struggle with small projects such as Shiraishi did back in the day. Being that so, it's always refreshing going back in time and enjoying the hidden gems of years past until someone somewhere decides it is time to stick it to a too complacent industry, too rich for its own good. For the time being, Shiraishi has released a live action of the classic Hell's Girl [地獄少女] (2019) a few months ago. Highly budgeted, it might be even entertaining; but highly improbable that a franchised movie will become genius, original and intriging, as オカルト remains to be.
I like to portray the feeling of being scared and fear itself within film, so I’ll probably continue to do this. But rather than violence, an intense fear, for example: about nature, fear and menace, the existence of the extraordinarily awful – or however you’d like to put it.
As the crew investigates Eno's situation, they discover he has been saving a vast sum of money, and in fact has been living in such an uprooted way to do so. While they fear he might be preparing for a killing, just as his aggressor before him had done, the cameraman can't avoid becoming sympathetic to him. Eno's directness and his seemingly peaceful demeanor in the face of terrifying apparitions (conveyed via quite cheap effects, such as shadows superimposed on the screen) earns him credibility when he reveals how there's always someone talking to him, and might be on a divine mission. Shiraishi then enters the film as an amateur folk investigator, who has spent his spare time researching an ancient mountain which used to be consacrated to a Shintō deity, Hiruko [蛭子]. You have to be deep in Japanese religion to know about this figure, who briefly appears in the most ancient Japanese text, the Record of Ancient Matters [古事記] (around the 7th century). This is a most particular figure, for he was the first earthly divine creature, being born of the ancient august deities Izanami and Izanagi ['He who invites' and 'She who invites']. But since it had been Izanami who had first started the intercourse, an aberration, a monstruosity came forward from her. Hiruko was a generic name, involving the character for leech [蛭] and that of child [子]; it refers in ancient Japanese to a child born without legs and arms, a blob, a teratologic creature. Feeling the grief of this tragedy, his parents resolve to abandon this nevertheless divine being in the sea, above a basket. Then little less is said of the godly Hiruko and his sad destiny, floating above dark waters to later ingress mythology again via local cult beliefs in the medieval eras, under figures such as that of Ebisu [恵比須]. Many consider this belief greatly precedes the writing of the Record itself.Mysterious petroglyphs embedded on that mountain are similiar to those of Eno, who will then prepare the setting for a fabulous third act, of which I won't talk about in case you want to see it. But by adding such an elaborated story behind the low budget, almost verité production value, the film ends up becoming about an irruption of the monstruous and the divine in the everyday life. The movie is self-conscious about it, as the cameraman lends his handycam to Eno at the very end, in case he travels to a possible spirit world. And this is pretty much a cosmic horror setting, in the lovecraftian tradition; a flawed and seemingly ordinary person happens to be touched by accident or destiny to go down a rabbithole of progressibly vaster wonder and horror, to the roots of reality and the Godhead. And, as in Lovecraft (or in the Old Testament for that matter), the Godhead happens to be something quite terrible, amoral and maddening. While fully suffering from the budget constraints in the aesthetics area (and the very end of the movie can very well make you laugh), the progression of the third act is actually genius and rewarding. It is a sign as to what cinema could be still, despite its commercial and relentless dumbing down. Fully relying on acting and a decent screenplay/script, the film becomes one among Shiraishi's golden years. Years that very well could not come back.
Yes, I’d like to make one [Hollywood style movie], I want money, making small films in Japan is simply not profitable. If you don’t make a big movie, you can’t make a decent money, I’d like to achieve commercial success at some point so I’d like to try to make a Hollywood movie. If I could make a big movie in Japan, I don’t think it’d be as good of a film (...) When you make a big movie in Japan, you get bombarded with forceful input from all different sources within the infrastructure (...) the film itself has a tendency to become less and less interesting. Because of this, if you make a big Japanese movie there’s a higher probability that the end result could be an unentertaining film.
And he was right in the money with this statement, which proved to be true. The high budgeted clothing and lightning, the production value and the renowed actors (many of them musical idols) come at the expense of films becoming clones of each other, to the point of ridiculousnes, a fatal flaw in most Japanese (and American) films. Storytelling is sadly becoming a lost art as more innovative and less connected people struggle with small projects such as Shiraishi did back in the day. Being that so, it's always refreshing going back in time and enjoying the hidden gems of years past until someone somewhere decides it is time to stick it to a too complacent industry, too rich for its own good. For the time being, Shiraishi has released a live action of the classic Hell's Girl [地獄少女] (2019) a few months ago. Highly budgeted, it might be even entertaining; but highly improbable that a franchised movie will become genius, original and intriging, as オカルト remains to be.
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