On YouTube, you can find virtually any type of aesthetic: bright, pixelated early internet graphics allude to dream-core, deserted malls and offices evoke 1990s nostalgia, and dimly-lit Japanese inns and temples overlain with creepy music are labeled J-horror ambiance. Whether or not these videos are faithful to the genre, the label’s circulation in internet pop-and-sub cultures attests to J-horror’s deep embedding within the Western cultural imagination.

Though often used as a catch-all for Japanese horror, the term J-horror originally referred to a brief period between the late 1990s to the early 2000s, where films made by a small group of directors, most notably Nakata Hideo, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Shimizu Takashi, gained a global cult following. Drawing on traditional Japanese folklore, Western horror in the 1960s, and the era’s burgeoning internet anxieties, these directors went on to make Cure (1997), Ringu (1998), Kairo (1999), Ju-on (2002), films that alerted the rest of the world to Japanese cinema.

In the early 2000s, the Western horror market was dominated by slasher franchises, whose practiced jump-scares, constant spillage of inner organs, and meta-genre humor had tired its audiences. So when Ringu arrived in 2002, it signaled a fresh type of horror. Rather than overrelying on graphic violence, Ringu built its terror through a quiet, harrowing atmosphere shaped by Japanese cultural traditions and the anxieties of a rapidly modernizing world. Two decades later, the girl crawling out of the TV stands aside Ghostface, Chucky, Jigsaw as some of contemporary horror’s most recognizable iconography.

The Onyrō

But before she crawled out of the TV, the girl had haunted audiences across plays, animations, and early horror films. Originating from Japanese folklore, the onryō, or vengeful spirit, found its way to modern audiences through two major cultural productions, the 19th-century Kabuki play Yotsuya Kaidan and Nobuo Nakagawa’s 1959 reimagining Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan. Both tell of the story of Oiwa/Iwa, who, killed by her unfaithful husband, returns as spirit to enact revenge.

Sadako, the onryō at the center of Ringu, inherits this tradition. After being drowned in a well by her mother’s lover, Sadako returns, not through ghostly apparition, but via a VHS tape, condemning anyone who sees it one final week in life. Beneath its supernatural horror, Ringu, like Yotsuya Kaidan, is a tragedy of the wronged dead. In one of the film’s final scenes, Sadako’s skull floats up in the well where she is murdered, and a thick liquid whelms up from its empty sockets, and we are reminded of the horrific and unjust nature of her death. Seeming captivated by the onryō, director Hideo returns with a more melancholic approach in his 2002 film Dark Water.

Split into four different perspectives, Shimizhu Takashi’s Ju-on takes on the onryō in fragmented and non-chronological order. In skewing a linear timeline, Takashi isn’t trying to confuse his viewers, but adapts his narrative technique to the essence of his subject. The onryō, the physical embodiment of the past in the present, no longer exists in time, forever frozen in the moment of her murder. 

Source: IMDb

Stories of the onryō have compelled different audiences for centuries, because within each exists a familiar tale grounded in reality. Imagination has made them to be supernatural beings, yet the onryō who seek revenge on the living are the everyday victims of domestic violence, of neglect and abandonment, of the many horrific ways women and children have been, and are continually made to suffer within our patriarchal society. Unable to find justice in their lives, the onryō can only do so through stories of their death.

Techno-horror

At the turn of the century, the internet seemed to offer a sudden connectivity to the rest of the world. In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo, officially translated as Pulse but literally as “circuit,” ghosts occupy the new web, driving real-world occupants to either suicide or to simply fade away. Like all good horror, the ghosts in the machines are both literal and symbolic. In front of half a dozen screens displaying early internet addicts, Harue condemns their meager existence to no better than ghosts, not knowing this statement would resonate across the next two decades, where hikikomori culture would claim millions.

Similarly, though Ringu adapts a century-old tale, the film is concerned with the modern technological landscape. No longer the onryō of Yotsuya Kaidan, Sadako’s revenge expands beyond her murderer, indiscriminatorily released through a new medium of mass transmission. The TV and VHS tape then become central sites of horror: the tape’s grainy texture alienates the images to suggest a supernatural realm, the unnaturalness in this ability to pause and rewind motion, the horrifying scene of Sadako’s image becoming Sadako herself. 

Source: IMDb

Slow dread

Apart from the VHS, a central part of Ringu’s horror lies in the sudden but inevitable phone call foretelling a character’s death. Unlike other Western films using this technique (most notably Scream), the phone call in Ringu does not immediately result in murder, but gives a seven-day notice. To audiences accustomed to a faster-paced narrative, these seven days seem too long of a wait for something scary to happen, in addition to spoiling the exact time of death. However, it’s precisely within this slowness that produces J-horror’s signature atmosphere of dread. 

Only after the protagonist Reika receives her countdown does Hideo escalate the film’s tension, through her identity as a single, divorced mother. It is of her child Reika thinks of as she frantically searches for the truth, and yet the worst scenario still comes to pass: he watches the tape. Sadako is completely absent in this scene, and yet it is one of the film’s most horrifying: Reika waking up in the middle of the night, the camera cutting to reveal the empty tatami, the blurred sounds of the TV in the next room. 

One of J-horror’s most terrifying scenes is an agonizingly slow one, defying all conventions in composition, editing, and pacing. In one scene in Kairo, a ghost’s silhouette is barely visible at the end of the dark hallway. The camera never cuts away as she walks towards us, extending her arms and legs as if in slow-motion, forcing us to remain on the unnaturalness of her walk. After two steps, she stumbles, and her face, previously hidden in darkness, is briefly revealed before she rights herself up again. With no jumpscares, the scene’s terror resides in its uncanny valley effect: the slightly-off humanness of the ghost’s presentation, the mystery of its motive.

Source: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Soundscape

Though not without its share of shrill violins, J-horror’s soundscape is unusually quiet, even mundane. In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, a detective investigates a series of horrific murders, yet it is in the domestic sphere that some of the film’s most dreaded sounds emerge. The film opens with the detective's wife in a psychiatric hospital, a major cause of his emotional turmoil that is reinforced every time he returns home to the slow, deep drone of the empty washing machine that his increasingly sick wife has left on. This deep drone, at first innocuous, begins to take on the detective's paranoia about his sanity, anxiety about his wife, and slowly, with each iteration, the audience begins to fear that in his state, he might somehow cause her harm.

In an interview with Offscreen, Ringu director Hideo describes the arduous process of mixing the phone call in Ringu, first choosing from fifty tracks to then mix four sounds. “Because they did not want them to sound like Hollywood phones,” the director jokes. And it doesn’t. With no accompanying scream or any other scary music overlain, the phone ring is a sharp, isolated sound, sudden enough to startle yet never overly dramatic. Like the drone of the washing machine, the phone call by itself isn’t all that scary; it is the continual atmosphere of dread that imbues these otherwise mundane sounds with a sense of horror.

Source: IMDb

When talking about what made J-horror so successful, there are many arguments hinging on exoticizing Japanese culture, reducing its many global influences to orientalist generalizations, but cultural essentialism is hardly an explanation for its horror. It’s the dread that builds upon itself to become unbearable. It’s the helplessness in the face of a loved one’s suffering. It’s the feeling of utter isolation in a world that is supposedly more connected than ever. In a time where the internet is overflowing with AI bots and slop, a techno-horror film made almost three decades ago holds surprising resonance to our current predicament. So turn back the clock. The answer to our fears might already be there.