MAREBITO (Japan, 2004)
Directed by: Takeshi Shimizu
Starring: Shinya Tsukamoto, Kazuhiro Nakahara

Takeshi Shimizu directed Ju-on and the hit Sarah Michelle Gellar horror film, The Grudge. But between those two movies, in only eight days, he shot this digital video excursion into hell. Starring director Shinya Tsukamoto as a freelance photographer, this is one of those movies where nothing jumps out from under the bed, there’re no shock cuts, or giant howls of music. Instead, there’s just a movie that creepily and quietly wraps its coils around your neck and slowly slips beneath your skin. Tsukamoto snaps a shot of a suicide and becomes obsessed with the idea that at their moment of maximum fear, humans get a glimpse of something otherworldy. His obsessive pursuits take him to Hell. Yep, Hell. But for Takeshi Shimizu Hell isn’t a firey pit populated by guys holding pitchforks. For him it’s a far creepier hidden landscape underneath Tokyo, full of blank-eyed zombies and a young woman chained up in a cave. The photographer takes her home, but she’s slowly dying under his care. She won’t eat anything, she won’t drink anything and she’s wasting away until he accidentally comes across the one substance that she will drink, and she wants to drink plenty of it.

Cryptic, and full of weird dialogue that’s designed to keep you off-balance, Marebito is a movie that isn’t content to deploy the same old tired J-horror tricks to keep you scared (there’s not a single dead, wet girl with long black hair wearing a white dress anywhere to be found). Instead, this flick wants to hypnotize you until you’re totally open to its influence, and then it wants to fill your head with evil.