David Boyle, the director of the Japanese horror film Never After Dark, is not Japanese. He’s white and American, but he has made films that are either set in Japan or, if set in the US, feature Japanese actors. His latest feature is not only entirely set in Japan but is in Japanese. It also works in structure and themes that are barely American; Japanese horror films, particularly those that involve ghosts, tend to present a more complex and less moralistic relationship between the living and the dead. In the case of Never After Dark, a woman, Airi (Moeka Hoshi), who is in her mid-30s and is a medium, runs a small business that helps ghosts who are, for some unfortunate reason, stuck haunting a house find their way out of this world and to the next. Airi is too sympathetic, too attuned to the shades to be a “ghostbuster.”
She is also the real deal. The film begins with Airi driving to her next assignment with the ghost of her sister, Miku (Kurimi), in the back seat. The two get along as if they were regular living siblings. So, it is clear from the start of the film that we will eventually see a ghost in the house (large, old, and isolated) that has hired the mild-mannered medium. And indeed we do. But there is something wrong about this particular ghost, something that actually spooks Airi: the ghost is in both worlds at once. A part of him is spectral, and another part physical. The medium has never seen anything like it. And to make matters worse, she fears the living more than she does the dead. That complexity is very Japanese.
Altogether, the film is expertly executed, and though a little slow, not without reason. The director really wants the viewer to pay close attention not only to the old house, but also to the mother and son who live in it, their clothes, their stories, their furniture, and the season of the year, which is autumn. A thick forest surrounds this house, which is next to a chapel and is accessed by a remote country road. In short, the greatness of this film, as with all ghost movies (such as Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others), is found in its atmosphere.
But now that we are talking about Japanese ghost films, I want to also share what I consider to be the best of the best in this genre:
1. Kwaidan by Masaki Kobayashi (1964)
This anthology film is based on four Japanese ghost stories collected in a book by the Greek/Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, who spent the last part of his life in a Japan that was rapidly modernizing due to the Meiji Restoration (1889-1912). Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things was published in 1904; Kobayashi’s film was released in 1964. The latter is, to be honest, far better than the former because, again to be honest, Hearn was not a great writer, but Kobayashi was one of the masters of post-war Japanese cinema. The first film in the anthology, “The Black Hair,” has a stimmung and sets whose beauty is almost supernatural.
2. Kuroneko (Black Cat) by Kaneto Shindō (1968)
This stark black-and-white film is set during a feudal-era war and concerns two ghosts, a mother and her daughter-in-law, who were raped and killed by a group of samurai. They return to the living world as ghosts with a mission. The daughter-in-law seduces samurai who enter a forest, leads them to a phantom mansion where she and her mother-in-law brutally devour them. But here is the twist—a Japanese ghost story must always have a twist. One day the daughter-in-law falls in love with a samurai she must seduce and destroy. The ghost does not know what to do: kill him or love him? The rest of the film deals with her unfortunate dilemma.
3. Séance by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (2000)
Though made for television and based on the novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon by an Australian, Mark McShane, Séance is a superb movie and, in complexity, very Japanese. What happens is this: A sound technician whose wife happens to be a part-time psychic accidentally suffocates and kills a girl who, when fleeing a serial killer in a forest, hid in his equipment case. The sound technician had no idea the girl was in the case, which he brought home. It’s his wife who, through her psychic powers, figured it out. But instead of informing the police about what actually happened, she (with the reluctant help of her husband) misleads the detectives because she wants to become a famous and full-time psychic. Of course, the girl ghost begins to haunt the couple’s house.
