Japanese horror movies, under the label J-Horror, were once quite the international thing. Hollywood remade the shockers "Ring" (1998) and "Juon" ("The Grudge," 2002), while foreign video labels snapped up rights to the originals. All that is now a distant memory, though. Fantastic film festivals in the United States and Europe still fill their schedules with scary movies from around the globe — but Japanese films are not often among them.
Naoto Takenaka's new horror comedy "Yamagata Scream" hints at why. After so many repetitions, the natural response to all the long-haired female ghosts, pasty-faced dead kids and other J-Horror cliches is not a startled gasp, but a horse laugh.
Best known abroad as an actor — he was the toupeed Latin dancer in "Shall We Dance?" (1996) — Takenaka has had a long, if spotty, parallel career as a director, starting with "Muno no Hito" ("Nowhere Man," 1991), a comedy based on the manga of Yoshiharu Tsuge that screened at the Venice Film Festival.