Japanese horror once struck a lot of fans in the West as fresh because it was less about fantastical creatures — say, flesh-eating zombies — than everyday dread. Instead of popping up out of nowhere, fear crept up like sinister fog from apparently mundane places and things — a moldy apartment, a videotape, shadows on the computer screen — on perfectly sane, average people.
Yoshihiro Fukagawa's new film, "Makiguri No Ana (Peeping Tom)," takes a different tack, if one familiar from an older tradition of horror, in which the scares come from a fragmenting mind that can no longer distinguish between reality and illusion — or from a world in which boundaries (between life and death, the present and the past) have dissolved.
It has more in common, in other words, with Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" or, reaching farther back, the work of Edogawa Rampo — Japan's premiere author of the erotic and bizarre, who wrote his most famous stories and novels in the 1920s and 1930s, long before anyone thought of the "Ring" series.