Ring is back in cinemas with all-new restoration, and completes the curse by returning to DVD & Blu-rayMarch 18, to celebrate 20 years since it first crawled out of the screen and petrified a generation of horror fans. It made the lank-haired, juddering “dead wet girls” a staple monster of modern horror and began a boom for the eerie, extreme, and sometimes all-out bonkers world of “J-horror” – among them Ring’s many sequels and remakes, Ju-On, also with its many sequels and remakes, Dark Water, Audition, and Pulse.
But just as Ring is about a dark urban legend, the story comes from a centuries-old Japanese legend – which some say is based on actual events. Many more J-horrors also draw unsettling power from supposedly true stories. Here are five Japanese horror films and the stories behind them.
1. Ring (1998)
The Film: Based on the book by Koji Suzuki, Ring tells the story of a cursed videotape that kills viewers seven days after watching its grainy contents – unless the viewer copies the tape and passes it on. Two reporters – Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) and Ryuji (Hiroyuki Sanada) – learn the tape was created by the mind of a psychic girl Sadako Yamamura (Rie Ino), who met her tragic fate at the bottom of a well. After 90 minutes of screeching tension, the film’s real mystery – how does the tape kill its victims? – reveals itself with a soul-chilling money shot: Sadako clambers out of the well and right through the TV screen, frightening viewers literally to death.
The backstory: Sadako is a 20th century update of Okiku, one of the Nihon san dai kaidan –Japan’s “three big ghosts”, alongside fellow legendary yurei (Japanese ghosts) Oiwa and Otsuyu.
There are dozens of variations of the legend across Japan, but most follow the same story of servant girl Okiku, who either loses or breaks one of 10 priceless plates belonging to her master – a crime punishable by death. She repeatedly counts the plates before being thrown down the well. Okiku’s yurei emerges each night and counts “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9…” before letting out a blood-curdling howl.
The story, also known as Bancho Sarayashiki, has been retold as a traditional Ningyo Joruri puppet show, a Kabuki play, and in other books and films. The “real” Okiku’s well is at Himeji Castle, which claims be the site of the true event. But folklorist Zack Davisson argues that the legend is even older than the castle.
Ring’s circulated videotape – which plays on the common Japanese horror trait of techno-fear – updates the art of folklore itself, being copied and retold countless times. The film's director,Hideo Nakata, has said that a cursed VHS tape that had to be watching withing a week was once an urban myth in Japanese schools.
2. Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)
The Film: A jealous husband kills his wife Kayako (Takako Fuji) and son Toshio (Yuya Ozeki), turning their family home into the site of a terrible curse. The furious spirit of Kayako expels a throaty death rattle before killing any poor soul who’s unfortunate enough to visit, move into, or look in the general direction of the house. This is actually the third film of a 13-movie franchise, essentially the same idea done over and again – like a curse destined to repeat itself.
The Backstory: Ju-On creator Takashi Shimizu has said that his original intention was to create something he found personally frightening, and took inspiration from a troupe of dancers who that scared him as a child.
Kayako and ghostly sprog Toshi are also created in the classic image of a yurei from a Kabuki play in the Edo Period. Like Sadaka from Ring, Kayako is an onryo – a malevolent yurei whose wrath is dished out to avenge a betrayal or broken heart.
Though not directly referenced, Kayako is the spiritual descendent of Oiwa, Japan’s most famous ghost. The story goes that Oiwa’s devious husband poisoned her with an ointment, which disfigured her face and left her with a scarred, drooping eye (a visual borrowed by one-eyed terror Sadaka in Ring). After her death, Oiwa’s spirit plagued her family with misfortune. The legend goes that a shrine was created to appease the spirit, but it later burnt down. The story became the popular Kabuki Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan.
The real Oiwa has a gravestone located at Myogyoji in Sugamo, Tokyo. It’s traditional for cast and crew working on productions of her story to visit the grave to pay respects and ward off her curse.
3. Carved (2007)
The Film: Kuchisake-onna (Miki Mizuno), the ghost of deranged mother whose mouth is sliced open either side, abducts and mutilates children with a giant pair of scissors. The film came several years after the J-horror boom but taps into one of Japan’s most notorious urban legends.
The Backstory: Some say the story of the “Slit-Mouthed Woman” dates back 500 years, after a samurai punished his adulterous wife by slicing her mouth ear-to-ear. Whatever the origin, it had become an urban legend that turned (sort of) urban fact by the late Seventies, when reported sightings of Kuchisake-onna erupted into a nationwide panic, fuelled by mass media coverage and schoolyard rumours.
The urban legend goes like this: a woman wearing a surgical mask approaches a child and asks, “Am I pretty?” If they answer “No” she kills them with a knife or scythe. If they answer “yes”, she pulls off the mask to reveal her sliced-open face and asks the question again – but yes or no, it invariably ends with the kids being hacked to death. (The correct answer is apparently to say she’s “so-so” looking – which seems obvious in hindsight – or to barter with her with sweets.)
The legend cuts deep into the Japanese psyche: a demented manifestation of traditional beauty ideals, gender repression, and cultural anxieties. The moral panic turned the Slit-Mouthed Woman into both a terrifying demon and cultural icon (think somewhere between our own “killer clown” craze of 2016 and the mass hysteria of Mr Blobby’s popularity years earlier).
Police patrolled the streets and issued public warnings to stay away from people in masks, while children reportedly walked to school in groups. One prankster was even arrested for making herself up to look like the Slit-Mouthed Woman.
4. Tokyo Psycho (2004)
The Film: This low-budget, gross-out stalker movie – all barbed wire, flayed skin, and putting live worms in people’s mouths – takes some cues from The Silence of the Lambs. Komiya Osamu (Taniguchi Masashi) is a transgender serial killer who obsesses over a graphic designer and sends her notes warning “You were born to marry me!” He even uses a freshly chopped-off face to disguise himself, Hannibal Lector-style.
The Backstory: Just as Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein inspired The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill (not to mention also inspiring Psycho’s Norman Bates and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Leatherface, just to round off an unholy trinity), Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki inspired Tokyo Psycho.
Between 1988-89, photo technician Miyazaki abducted and killed four girls aged four to seven in Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture, and molested and dismembered their bodies. He kept the hands and feet from his first victim, then put the ashes of her burned remains in a cardboard box and left it outside her family’s home; he drank blood and ate the flesh from the hands of another girl. Miyazaki also taunted his victims’ families with crank phone calls and postcards detailing the murders.
Miyazaki was found with a large collection of violent and p*rnographic anime and gore films, including films from the controversial Guinea Pig torture series, which led him to be dubbed the “otaku killer” – otaku meaning obsessive geek culture – which created a moral panic over explicit media and otaku.
Some critics have argued that his collection was exaggerated or even fabricated to tap into public contempt for otaku and secure a conviction. Miyazaki was hanged in 2008.
5. The Forest (2016)
The Film: Not an authentic J-horror, but an American studio’s poor imitation of one. It sees Sara (Natalie Dormer) head into the Aokigahara forest to search for her troubled twin sister Jess while getting harassed by some bothersome tree-rustling spooks.
The Backstory: Also called “The Sea of Trees”, the Aokigahara forest is a 14 square mile woodland that sits under Mount Fuji – and is believed to be one of Japan’s most haunted locations. Folklore says that families would commit ubasute there – the act of abandoning the old or infirm in a remote place to die – and that the yurei who haunt the forest lead the sad and weary away to get lost.
You can take the supernatural stuff with a pinch of ceremonial salt, but the forest’s association with death is very real. Japan’s suicide rates are among the highest in the developed world and each year an unknown number of people go to Aokigahara – which is also known as “the suicide forest” – to take their own lives.
Visitors report finding clothes and personal artefacts scattered across the ground, or even the bodies of suicide victims (you may remember YouTube fame-hound Logan Paul came posted a video of himself joshing around there next to a hanging body).
Police reports say that in 2010 an apparent 247 people attempted suicide there, with 54 of them succeeding, and more than 100 people killed themselves there between 2013 and 2015. But it’s also believed that there are many more bodies that go undiscovered, hidden beneath the dense foliage.
Police and volunteers organise monthly sweeps for bodies or survivors, and leave trails of coloured tape so they can find their way back out the maze of rocks, roots, caves, twisted tree formations.
Ring is out on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital download March 18
