How KAIRO Defined J-Horror & Made Japan’s Demons Real

Women — no, not women, specters — draped in long, white gowns, often muddied or trampled, as though they’d been dragged out of graves. Walking with broken feet, reaching with crushed arms, speaking with torn tongues, seeing with drowned eyes. The yūrei — literally, “the faint spirit,” of someone dead, unable to move on from our world — have always coexisted with the living in Japanese culture.

Ghosts linger there in homes, in shops, and on streets. Atsutane Hirata, a prominent Japanese scholar, wrote of them, “The spirits of the dead continue to exist in the unseen world which is everywhere about us; and they all become gods of varying character and degrees of influence. Some reside in temples built in their honour; others hover near their tombs; and they continue to render service to their prince, parents, wives, and children, as when in the body.”

A painter, Maruyama Ōkyo, captured a yūrei on silk with the painting “The Ghost of Oyuki” in 1750. His vision of a dead woman, whom he said stood silent over him while he slept, is melancholy but without suffering, without a hint of malevolence. She is a far cry from what the yūrei would become in Japanese cinema hundreds of years later. In Kuroneko from 1968, the yūrei women are taciturn, devious spirits, part-cat and part-human, their animalistic sides barely repressed while they seek revenge for their brutal rapes and murders at the hands of local samurai.

The yūrei is bound to our world by the lack of cosmic closure. In most art and literature, they’re women. These agonized, vengeful spirits with long, black hair were lifted from folklore into fin-de-siècle Japan with Don’t Look Up, Ringu, and Ju-on: The Grudge. A new wave of Japanese film began as old ghosts were transmogrified onto the silver screen in one horror film after another. But in 2001, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (unrelated to that Kurosawa) created one of the most haunting and defining works of the new Japanese horror movement: Kairo, known stateside as Pulse.

A Nation Living With Its Ghosts

This Ringu and Ju-on era, dubbed “J-horror” presumably for the sake of American DVD sales, puts the absolute fear of God into me. After the first scare in Ju-on: The Grudge — which I watched at a birthday party when I was 15 — I refused to sit through the rest. (This is what’s referred to as a “formative moment.”)

Similarly, two minutes into Kairo, I took off my headphones and never put them back on. Subtitles were good enough, I thought. Even then, sometimes I covered my eyes. Yet I maintain that the quality of Kurosawa’s filmmaking borders on masterful, and doubtlessly, Kairo is one of the great works of modern horror. If the DVD case weren’t the most terrifying cover imaginable, I might very well own it.

In trying to ascertain why these films have this effect on me, I had to look at what makes them different from, say, Kuroneko. I can handle Kuroneko, whose steadfast reliance on the distant shogunate past of Japan and on Japanese ghost stories, known as kaidan, makes the horror palatable. Kuroneko couldn’t be more different from the J-horror films of the late 1990s and early aughts. Instead, it’s more in line with the escapist genre pleasures of Akira Kurosawa and similar samurai films in production at the time, despite its kaidan roots.

If Kuroneko represents tradition — its suffering spirits are even dead ringers for “The Ghost of Oyuki” — then Kairo dramatically diverges course. For one, the archetypal yūrei figure, the Ringu black-haired zombie, is nowhere to be seen. The undead are unmistakably not of this world, but they aren’t stilted, crawling boogeymen, the malicious shiryō phantasms of other J-horror hits. They’re disarmingly human, and this uncanny tension between living and dead is what makes them so terrifying.

As far as plots go, Kairo’s… doesn’t. There is a story, but at a certain point, you’re too scared for your brain to do the extra legwork of figuring out who’s going where and doing what, but the general bones of the tale are these: Several hardworking university researchers investigate the sudden reclusiveness of a colleague, only to be drawn in by haunted hard drives and spooky websites (again, this movie came out in 2001), which upon them unleash ghosts that force the young researchers to kill themselves. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the best J-horror films were remade for American audiences in the early 2000s to much lesser effect. The remake wave included another take on Kairo, called Pulse, which came out in 2006.

In our original Japanese Kairo, the yūrei in the film emerge from — well, the plot is vague on that front, but we’re led to believe they manifest via a website that asks users “Do you want to meet a ghost?” Or maybe they’re just always there all the time and the website is an extra catfishing tool.

Kairo wrings nearly an hour and a half out of that premise before going completely over the edge, but the film basically follows one student at a time as they each meet grisly, unwelcome ends. Not that the plot matters much — all the scares pour out from Kurosawa’s technique, the deliberate pacing, and the tightening of the screw up to and beyond the point at which the tension becomes unbearable.

Nothing in Kairo induces more full-body shivering than the hallway scene. A twentysomething student enters a dark dead-end room, ignoring all the warning signs: It’s marked off by red duct tape. It’s spooky as hell. For God’s sake, it’s called the Forbidden Room.

But he goes, entering through the only door there. He’s met with an empty, black space, and suddenly, the wall ignites in an otherworldly glow, and he sees eerie blood-crimson symbols on the wall. He remembers this place. Maybe he feels as we do, that this might be the room he’s fated to die. When he turns around, there’s a woman, enshrouded in the shadows at the end of the hall. She may not even be there, we know. The film has played this trick before, and the ghosts always departed as quickly as they arrived. If the man double-takes and looks again, will there still be someone there? All we need is the camera to cut away.

But we don’t cut away. And the woman begins to move. The yūrei in Kairo never moved before, we think. And she doesn’t just move — she robotically postures toward him, like a claymation effect, as though she’s forcing her limbs into motion, pausing to dip, fluidly, gracefully, threateningly, like an animal in the wild sizing up its prey, and then she keeps coming. Did I mention there’s no sound to her footsteps? All we get is the man’s quiet frenzy and the grotesque choral anticipation of the soundtrack. We know there’s nothing he can do now except hope the yūrei disappears, but she doesn’t disappear, and the man backs up until he’s splayed out on the floor, desperate, nowhere to run.

Compare this creeping dread to the ghouls in Ringu and Ju-on. Those spirits drip with menace and hellish intent, but the ghosts in Kairo are mundane. The film plays on that Japanese belief that the disturbed dead spirits of loved ones hang in the air, omnipresently. There is no singular ghoul to combat in Kairo. Purgatory is full, and the overflowing dead are returning to reality — there may be only several ghosts, or there may be millions. The scale of the horror is beyond us.

Another ghoul appears in the equally creepy library scene. Enter another college kid, Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Katô), a boring schlub who’s studying economics, has the hots for the computer assistant, and is just trying out this crazy thing called the Internet for the first time. Clearly, he’s a prime ghost target.

We’re not even sure why Kawashima goes into the library. Is he there to flirt with the computer assistant, Karasawa Harue (Koyuki)? Is he there to learn about ghosts? He’s soon lost amongst the bookshelves, unable to find the exit. Then Kawashima sees a boy, pale and hunched in the shadows against a bookcase. “Who is that?” he asks.

Another student answers him in a way that, in an American horror film, nobody in their right mind would: “You’ll have to catch him to find out. Start right now, and you might succeed.”

To the Western viewer, two fears sink in as this young man runs to the bookcase to try to grab the ghost. The first comes from the realization that in this world, ghosts are everywhere and everyone knows about them. The second is the fear not that the young man won’t catch the ghost, but the fear of what would happen if he did.

Do You Want To Meet A Ghost?

Kairo and its J-horror siblings focus on the everyman. J-horror protagonists aren’t just innocent; they’re boring. No walking tropes — no horny jock, no brave underdog, no final girl. In Kairo, the heroes are student researchers in a greenhouse and on a university campus whose personalities can be best described as “they work hard and care about one another.”

How little they deserve their gruesome ends adds to the terror. The young heroes of a horror film never do, but in Kairo, it’s different. Kevin Bacon gets stabbed through the neck with an arrow in Friday the 13th, and I’m more or less OK with it. But Kurosawa’s students (he wrote the film as well) feel so realistic, so devoid of archetype and cliché, that watching Kairo never feels as though I’m watching characters. Sure, Kawashima and Harue are the creations of a screenwriter, but Kurosawa keeps his distance. Remaining at arm’s length from the students aids the film’s more verité sensibilities, so when the characters do kill themselves, it feels overly cynical and sensationally grotesque in a way that American horror doesn’t.

The yūrei never directly kill anybody, only induce depression and finally suicide in their victims. Yet the devious hum of the soundtrack, the slow dread-inducing photography, and the terror alight on their victims’ faces tell us they’re manifestations of ara-mitama, the violent, mean side of the spirit.

Their first victim, a greenhouse worker who fails to show up at work one day, hangs himself in his apartment. Crucially, we never see him hang. One of the students, Kudo Michi (Kumiko Asō), walks into his room and finds him like that. It’s a long way from American and European horrors, which pride themselves on the stylish and punchy fun of the kill. Few people in Kairo die on-screen, reinforcing the cynical, murky worldview by focusing more on the tragedy in their wake.

Even the locations feel like extensions of Kurosawa’s cynical approach to modern Japan. In the first hour of the film, most of the main characters work in that sunny rooftop greenhouse, where every well-lit shot and every splash of color feels like a bulwark against the horrors teeming around them. That bright backlighting always relieves the tension — we know nobody’s going to die in broad daylight, after all — but the first death happens while our main character is standing in the other room, oblivious. Anything can happen.

But every other location isn’t so bright. The film’s version of Tokyo seems as though Kurosawa sought out the ugliest, most shadowy buildings and the most tenebrific streets he could find. The film is overflowing with hideously contemporary locales — concrete block homes, back alleyways, and briar patch networks of wires and computers. Even the interiors are mostly dark, and half the screen is almost always in complete shadow. In Kurosawa’s Japan, nobody wants to splurge on their electrical bills.

Haunted Videotapes

Kairo premiered in 2001, on the heels of the Y2K paranoia. With Ringu, both films pit the modernization and growing tech reliance of Japan against its hard-wired traditions. Think of 1974’s The Conversation, for example, Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid thriller that debuted as America made a hard transition to industrialized urban life. Recall how that film portrays its big cities, big corporations, and big technology as cancers eating away at human decency and sanity. Kairo is much the same; sardine-packed city living consumes the souls of the citizenry, and a toxic brew results from the overcrowding mixing with the lack of human connection.

This same disillusionment with the direction of Japanese culture leaves its mark on other J-horror classics. In Ringu, the demonic video tape represents the revolt of forgotten folklore from within our own comfortable modern technology. The demon there isn’t merely an evil harbinger of death, but rather a reminder of a rich culture thrown to the wayside.

In Ju-On: The Grudge, economics tie more intrinsically to the hauntings, as an increasingly modern Japan is thrust into the trauma of a middle-class home where two brutal murders took place. That home is eerily old-fashioned in its furnishings; tatami mats and rigidly composed interiors remind one more of a bygone Japan than of the modern moment. Even when several detectives, paragons of the newfound truth and justice of a postwar nation, investigate the hauntings, they’re easily overpowered by the demon within the dwelling and killed.

In these films, Japan is at the end of a period of transition. Between 1945 and 2001, Tokyo exploded from housing 3.49 million people to over 12 million. The end-of-the-century setting finds Tokyo as a city uncomfortable with its own burgeoning population. The city was among the most densely packed in the world. Residences in Kairo occupy poorer sections of Tokyo, and the characters all live alone, away from the single-family homes that had become commonplace by the ’90s.

Live Grenades

The conditions that led to the Kairo’s production help to shed light on the film’s unrelenting cynicism. The 1990s saw the Japanese economy take a turn for the worse.

After postwar wealth lifted national mood, an overly speculative economy sunk it. The stock market crashed, more people were in debt than ever before, and the currency deflated. People sunk deeper into debt and poverty. The crisis would last so long that it’s now known as “the Lost Twenty Years.” Naturally, the nation’s economic collapse also saw a sudden rise in suicide rates, and illustrating this epidemic seems to be Kairo’s raison d’être.

Japanese culture has long viewed suicide as a noble act. Most Americans heard stories about samurai-led hari-kiri and suicide bombers during World War II. Hari-kiri, also known as seppuku, meant dying by your own blade, and it was especially widespread among ancient samurai. This was not a sympathy unique to the shogunate era. During World War II, propaganda encouraged Japanese citizens to take their own lives instead of surrendering to the enemy. Willing oneself to death was the ultimate way a citizen could claim solidarity and loyalty with soldiers in servitude to the Empire.

The book Descent Into Hell: The Battle of Okinawa by Ota Masahide comprises survivor accounts from 1945. The Home Guard distributed grenades and asked citizens to blow themselves up before the Allies came. Children beat their mothers to death with sticks. Fathers made sure their families were killed before taking their own lives. It’s a haunting read, and that such terrifying mass suicide was ordered by the military and reinforced by the government guaranteed a trauma that would never fully heal.

The End Of The World

Which brings us back to Kairo. According to statistics from the OECD, in 1998 the suicide rate in Japan was astronomically high. The recession collided with Japan like a massive wave, the current pulling together all the wartime trauma and repression and smashing it back against a nation struggling to move on.

Whenever someone takes their own life in Kairo, it’s a warped version of the suicides every Japanese citizen had to deal with throughout the ’90s and 2000s. Of the suicides the nation had been dealing with since the Edo Period. Friends, loved ones, children, parents all committed suicide to avoid financial ruin, overworking, social pressure, and a host of other contributing factors.

When we do see a character take their own life on-screen for the first time, they fall forward off an industrial silo and plummet headlong into the pavement. Kurosawa keeps the camera back, so we don’t just watch the woman die. We watch Kudo watch the woman die, though she has her back turned to us. We’re placed against our will into the role of the spectator, standing alone as her nation falls apart around her and the cold afterlife unfurls its dark jaw for her.

J-horror is constructed around the horrified spectator — think of Ringu, when the mere act of looking at a videotape consigns characters to death. Or Ju-on: The Grudge, wherein people are often rooted to the ground, unable to move, watching the shiryō crawl toward them, the victims’ eyes wide open and their mouths agape, like they can’t look away.

One of the spirits tells our university boy that “death is eternal loneliness” — to a nation packed in so tight and yet lonelier than ever, still haunted by loved ones who might’ve taken their lives days, weeks, or months ago, these words must have struck deep. What worse fate could be imagined than killing yourself to escape the horrors of life only to be damned to eternal loneliness?

Kairo clumsily reveals its main theme when one of the teens examines a computer. A series of grey dots bounces around the monitor, like a screensaver. But it’s a program — “if two dots get too close, they die,” says Harue, the computer assistant. “But if they get too far apart, they’re drawn closer. … It’s a miniature model of our world. But only the grad student who designed it understands it.”

Knowing the culture and history that inform Kairo, unfortunately, does not make the film less scary. But it does help me to understand why Japanese audiences had so strong a response to it, and it allows me to engage with the art as a kind of national coping mechanism — this was cinema reacting to the trauma the entire country was experiencing. A failed economy, a culturally engrained respect for suicide, and a longstanding belief that the spirits of the dead linger on Earth — it’s no wonder Kairo resolves with the literal end of the world.

That ending comes out of nowhere. One minute, Kudo and Kawashima are on a derelict subway car. The next, all of humanity is gone save for one last boat bound for South America.

But more effective than that out-of-nowhere apocalyptic end is the realization that for many Japanese, this was probably exactly how the crash felt. A slow burn, obvious warning signs, dumb mistakes, then — that’s it. The floor falls out from underneath, and there are no places left to hide. A suicide due to sudden economic ruin must feel just as random and just as ghastly as a suicide stemming from a ghost encounter. If anything, the ghost story might make more sense.

Kairo helped to invent a new kind of Japanese horror film, one prescient and fresh, using old boogeymen to deal with the crisis facing modern Japan. Yet there’s a dollop of tragedy to the film as well, as if it’s the first to understand that while ghosts reside among the Japanese, they were also once alive too.

The spirits from Ringu and Ju-on may be more iconic than the ones in Kairo, but they’re more classic horror monsters than anything else. In Kurosawa’s film, it’s possible some of the ghosts aren’t very old at all. Maybe they only died days ago — is one of those yūrei Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi), the man who hanged himself at the beginning of the film?

When Kairo returns to the Forbidden Room, the ghost encounter is touched by melancholia. For one, there’s no cross-cutting, and the music is mostly absent this time. For another, Kawashima, the student who got lost in the library earlier in the film, refuses to acknowledge that the ghost is even there. Until he tries to grab him, thinking the ghost will vanish.

Instead, Kawashima’s hands clap down on real human shoulders. “I… am… real,” the ghost growls, less a threat than a plea. Like this yūrei, Kairo’s ghosts aren’t unearthly terrors. They’re memories of people lost.

These specters drive Kairo toward its apocalyptic end. And though Kairo’s world is noisily, erratically falling to pieces, the yūrei are still eerily separate, without names or faces, silently preparing themselves for an eternity of death in all its horror, mystery, and inexorable loneliness.

Are you, too, terrified by J-horror? If not Kairo, what do you think the scariest J-horror film is? Let us know in the comments below!