A Tribute to J-Horror

I recently made the purchase of a 50 inch television that dwarfs my room like some kind of gigantic looming overlord. It's amazing. And so I took this opportunity to invite a few friends over who were unfamiliar with Japanese horror cinema and expose them to it.
 I've long time been a fan of Asian horror myself, and Japanese horror in particular. Unlike its American counterpart, J-Horror has a way of creeping up on you eerily instead of outright bursting out of the shadows in an attempt to go for pure shock reaction. It opts to show you disturbing images rather than brutal, violent ones, and is altogether more subtle.
 Last night had us watching the following movies - personal favorites and great examples of J-Horror, each and everyone of them, for different reasons. Here are my top J-Horror movies.

They move slowly, their faces shadowed or distorted.

PULSE / KAIRO
 Rather than outright scary, Kairo is eery, sinister, with an underlying message bleaker than any other horror movie. The plot has several layers of depths to decode but is generous enough to provide the tools to do so.
On the surface, Kairo is a movie about ghosts reaching out to people through the internet, causing a series of sudden disappearances and suicides, and forcing the main characters not to find a solution and end the crisis, but to migrate towards one another in an attempt to find comfort in an increasingly hopeless situation. Once again, Kairo intends not to feed the viewer nightmares, but to slowly unsettle through sound and slow, deliberate camerawork that maintains a sense of mystery and queasiness throughout the movie. This movie spawned a horrible American remake.

In the darkness even of your blankets.

JU-ON: THE GRUDGE
 I first saw the American version of Ju-On when I was 12, and remember it giving me such horrible, livid nightmares and nyctophobia. No other movie had scared me since. The original Ju-On, which shares the same director, tells the story in a much more interesting manner than its counterpart, and hits the viewer with a vehement onslaught of disturbing images and sounds, with the overlaying theme being that of a curse that destroys any entity that enters a house haunted by the violent murder of a woman and child. Ju-On is merciless particularly to people who hold within them even a grain of belief in superstition.

AUDITION

The turning point.

 Audition is an interesting take on the slasher-horror genre. It's a fascinating movie split at the center into two halves: a romantic comedy and a horror movie, producing a unique and memorable tango between the two. It follows the story of a man who hopes to find the ideal woman by setting up an audition with the goal of meeting she who can play his soul mate the best. Instead, though, he makes the acquaintance of a faceless actress shrouded in more secrets than he can imagine. Audition is not a movie for the faint of heart, and is notorious for its sudden steep descent into brutality and sickening imagery.

NOROI: THE CURSE
Noroi was the only one of the four movies I hadn't previously seen, and what a startling discovery it was. The movie presents itself as a documentary, with all actors keeping their true names, and follows a paranormal journalist in his quest to find the link between a missing child, an alleged ghost, a string of deaths and a woman from whose house can be heard the crying of multiple babies. The resulting movie slowly feeds the viewer bits and pieces of an even more disturbing truth underlying the already uneasy facts. Noroi is the best found-footage horror film I've ever seen to date. 

Honorable Mentions:

RINGU (The Ring) is a slow-creeping mystery/ghost movie with an exquisitely disturbing ending and a very loyal American remake.
DARK WATER is also a ghost movie about a mother and her struggle to keep a ghost at bay from her daughter. Spawned a crappy American remake.
CHAKUSHIN ARI (One Missed Call) is another ghost mystery about students receiving a call (from their own phone numbers) forewarning them about their own deaths. Spawned a horrible American remake.