Japanese horror movies have various ways of making you squirm, shiver or watch the screen through your fingers. But sooner or later most scares of the spook-house variety become annoying. How many more times do I want to see a ghostly hand surging from a tub of bloody water to grab an unsuspecting wrist? How about . . . never?
And yet, done properly, the uncanny never fails to give me the creeps. Unlike shocks, which are momentary, certain Victorian-era photos and paintings, intended to evoke feelings of pathos, instead open creaking doors to the darker, spookier chambers of my mind that always seem to have been there. Cue the closing zoom-in of "The Shining."
A visual and emotional touchstone in Mari Asato's new horror film "Gekijoban Rei: Zero (Fatal Frame)," as well as a case in point, is John Everett Millais' well-known painting, "Ophelia."