Starting in 1990 as a compilation of 100 "true horror" tales from ordinary folks around Japan, "Kaidan Shin Mimibukuro (Tales of Terror)" has spawned a series of short films broadcast on the BS-TBS cable and satellite channel and three theatrical omnibuses. The franchise is the snack food of J-horror.
The fourth and latest, "Kaidan Shin Mimibukuro: Kaiki" (Tales of Terror: The Bizarre), is directed by Makoto Shinozaki, based on a script by horror specialist Ryuta Mitake. Since debuting in 1995 with "Okaeri," a spare, powerful drama about a woman's descent into madness that was a key film of the 1990s' Japanese New Wave, Shinozaki has cut an idiosyncratic path across genres, from "Wasurerarenu Hitobito (Not Forgotten)," a heartfelt 2000 drama about the vanishing World War II generation, to "0093: Joheika no Kusakari Masao" ("Her Majesty's Masao Kusakari"), a goofy 2007 spy parody, and this summer's "Tokyo-jima (Tokyo Island)," a black comedy about a woman alone on an island with several dozen sex-starved guys.
Horror, however, is new territory for him, though his take on the two stories of "Kaiki" will be mostly familiar to fans of J-horror, from the long-haired female zombie who lurches through his first episode, "Tsukimono" ("Demon"), to the little girl ghost of the second, "Nozomi." But Shinozaki, known for his playful way with genre conventions (the "Deka" ["Detective"] series of parody shorts he produced was a movie nerd's idea of relaxation), inserts offbeat notes into both stories, from the comically bizarre ("Tsukimono") to the tearily sentimental ("Nozomi").