Around the turn of the millennium, by which point horror had sunk into a smirky slasher slough, two connected forces heaved it back out of its grave. One was The Blair Witch Project – a shoestring American production that embraced the eerie lo-fi distortions of its camcorder and 16mm footage. The other was the glut of terrific Japanese chillers such as Ring, Pulse and Dark Water that found their way to the west via boutique distributors such as Tartan Asia Extreme, and which abjured cartoonish jolts of gore in favour of gnawing supernatural dread.
Millennials rejoice! The unquiet spirit of the age is dazzlingly recaptured in the debut feature from Ryota Kondo, expanded from his identically titled 2022 prize-winning short. Missing Child Videotape, which had its world premiere at the Tokyo Film Festival this week, contains what admirers of Hideo Nakata, Kiyoshi Kurosawa et al might describe as all the good stuff: unnerving images on hairy old VHS cassettes, strange telephone calls that dissolve into unearthly burblings, derelict structures in the forest that don’t appear on any maps.
It’s set in 2015, but its soul belongs to the previous decade if not before – and it’s intent on dragging its cast and audience back there, by the creepiest possible means. This is a commendable aim which presents only mild logistical difficulties: when the titular videotape initially turns up in the post, our hero Keita (Rairu Sugita) and his flatmate Tsukasa (Amon Hirai) aren’t initially sure if they’ll be able to find the necessary equipment on which to play it.
The tape arrives in a parcel from Keita’s mother, and was found in his estranged late father’s personal effects. It contains 13-year-old footage of his younger brother Hinata on the last day he was seen alive: the two boys went off to explore a local mountain, stumbled on an abandoned building and struck up a game of hide and seek, during which Hinata walked – almost as if being led – into its shadowy insides.
Rewatching it kindles a need in Keita to comb the area again, in search of clues or just closure – which in turn attracts the attention of a local reporter (Kokoro Morita), whose editor sorrowingly recalls the original case. Meanwhile, Tsukasa comes along to help because he’s been able to sense ghostly presences since childhood: as in many of those earlier J-horror classics, the existence of the spiritual realm is an uncontroversial fact of life.
