31 Days of Halloween: Day 15

Noroi: The Curse (2005) Director: Kōji Shiraishi

As a general rule, I hate found footage movies.  I think they are cheap, lack creativity, are cash-ins, and boring.  The Blair Witch Project (1999) is one of my least favorite movies of all time, and I even turned it off because I grew tired of watching people scream at the sky.  There are, however, exceptions to the rule.  I have not yet seen Cannibal Holocaust (1979), so I can't comment on it, but the Spanish horror film [REC] (2007) is fantastic, and has one of the scariest final 15 minutes of any film.  Noroi is another exception, offering quality chills in addition to an intriguing story and complex narrative structure.

Noroi is a fake documentary about a fake documentary, which is then about a documentarion investigating paranormal activities.  The structure is rather complex, with footage framed within footage, within footage.  The documentarion who stars in the film, Masafumi Kobayashi, is shown watching clips he has found or captured and the audience is often times shown the same scenes multiple times, but at different speeds and zooms.  This level of complexity immediately differentiates this film from others of the sub-genre.  It often times reveals things not visible before, making for some scary moments.

One scene follows a women on a TV show, where she and two others are walking around in the woods.  She hears something and feels eyes watching, but we don't see anything.  It turns out the first time we saw this footage it had been censored.  The full version reveals that one can see a figure standing in the distance behind the group for a split moment.

What was that?

Noroi succeeds in the same way [REC] does in creating horror with a found footage film.  Found footage films are not scary because people think they are real.  People who think they are real are stupid, and they can be scared with a paper bag.  I remember seeing Paranormal Activity (2007) in the theater, and some dense girl saying afterwards, "there's no way that's real!"  You think so?  Anyway, found footage films can be effective if the filmmakers focus on what makes these films unique, which is limited perspective.

By the very nature that a film is "found footage" that indicates that there is, in fact, someone behind the camera, and we are not simply looking into some mysterious window into a world.  If there is just one person behind the camera, and often times only one camera being used, then the film is unable to cut around to the best shot of the action.  As an audience, we are at the mercy of the camera operator, and can see only what he or she sees.  If the camera operator gets knocked down with the camera, then we can only see the ground, and people's feet running.

This creates a unique tension in films like Noroi and [REC], where we are like Joaquin Phoenix in Signs (2002), when he yells at the kids to get out of the way of the camera.  We are limited in what we can see, so there is a constant fear of what is on the edge of the frame, like being scared of what is just around the corner.  We know that what we ware seeing is not the whole picture, thus making what is unseen just as frightening as any monster.  

Noroi is a chilling movie from start to finish and never goes for flashy moments that undermine the rest of the story.  Paranormal Activity's ending seemed out of place and inconsistent with the rest of the film, while Noroi always stays true to the style and tone established.  The ending is mildly bombastic, but enough had been established throughout the rest of the film so that it felt "natural."  This is an extremely eerie movie, and one of the best of its genre.