Horror you can buy for ¥980


How can this possibly go wrong?

¥980 is about $10 right now. That is to say, it’s not very much money. It’s particularly cheap for a DVD containing “over 120 minutes of astonishing horror footage.” And yet, that’s exactly what 本当にあった 恐怖の心霊・都市伝説DVD BOX (“Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX”) offers at that price.

I was more than a little skeptical. I mean, the price point was the first warning sign. The second was that I found this cinematic tour de force in my local Family Mart, of all places, stuffed in-between the weekly women’s magazines and ¥100 onigiri. Family Mart does not sell horror, you know. They’re mostly focused on essentials like potato chips, coke drinks, extra batteries, and umbrellas. A giant box proclaiming to have “real footage so scary you can’t shut your eyes” was a bit conspicuous.

But, I mean, for ¥980, I figured what the hell. Worst (and most likely) case, it’s terrible and I can laugh at it. And maybe, just maybe, there’ll be a gem hiding in those 120 minutes. At 8 yen per minute, you can’t really go wrong. Heck, if I bought this thing off Amazon I’d have to pay for shipping. So I bought it.

This is not the first time I have done this. A couple of years ago I came home with a set of DVDs called Tales of Terror from Tokyo, which sounded terrible and, based on the packaging and box notes, looked like complete schlock. I was pleasantly surprised by Tales of Terror; it turned out that small, 5 minute episodes were a pretty good format and that a couple of the directors involved with the series had produced some pretty neat stuff. I like the idea that a director has a very short amount of time, and probably no budget whatsoever, to find a way to make things scary. Some of the best horror has its roots in simplification by necessity; The Blair-Witch Project is one famous example.

The first hilarious thing about Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX is that it really is just a box. “DVD BOX” usually means “box set,” here in Japan, but in this case, it’s just a giant, empty box. Well, it’s not entirely empty: there’s some filler cardboard and a single disc. But that’s all. No liner notes, no


There it is in all of its glory. ¥980 well spent.

nothing. At ¥980 these guys are probably making a killing.

The first “story” is a collection of shinrei shashin pictures: photos of regular people in which ghosts are supposed to have been inadvertently captured. The first one is clearly a simple photoshop of the vampire’s face from Nosferatu, and the rest are similarly lame. The sequence of photos ends with the sound of a woman screaming. Not a good start.

Fortunately (and I say “fortunately” because anything is better than watching a video of still photos), the remainder of the DVD contains actual video. The rest of the DVD is a series of “stories” (their word, not mine) about a young woman who ventures into scary, and reportedly haunted, places with her video camera. She carefully climbs a long rock staircase to a supposedly haunted shrine, she ventures into old, abandoned houses looking for certain mirrors that are said to reflect ghosts, and generally freaks herself out. The presentation is more than a little Blair Witch inspired; she keeps a running monologue going and periodically turns the camera to face her (which I found particularly improbable, considering that she’s supposed to be in a scary dark place and the camera is her only source of light). This really is horror on a shoe-string budget.

The thing is, as simple as it is, it almost works. Japan is chock-full of fantastic places to make scary videos like this. It’s got old, moss-covered, dilapidated shrines, there are war-era tunnels and bases to be found, not to mention your standard set of abandoned homes in the middle of nowhere. Even with no budget, the producers of these stories have absolutely fantastic sets to work on because Japan is full of scary-looking places.

But of course it does not work. There are too many basic problems for the scenes to be involving; the reporter woman can’t seem to keep the camera pointed in the way that she is moving so half the footage is a dark view of a floor someplace. And she keeps complaining about how dark it is without once activating the night vision mode on her camera (which the filmmakers make the mistake of introducing to us in the first scene). But the most amazing thing about this series is that nothing actually happens. The reporter ventures into a scary location, gets scared, and then leaves. No ghosts or otherwise scary things ever show up.

And then, and then, as if the producers of this set were on some mission to make the most impotent horror film ever, the series gets even more boring! After the initial reporter has ventured


I’m so scared, I’m filming myself!

into scary-but-ultimately-harmless places several times, a new series starts in which a different girl does mostly the same, but in places that are even less scary (one of the sequences is, I shit you not, about a hill that, according to the DVD, some people think looks like a face). “Oh, I feel something. It’s very sad here. I can feel something like an old man, and he’s very lonely,” the girl drones. Five minutes later the sequence is over and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. And then another starts and again, NOTHING HAPPENS. The last sequence they mix up a bit by having two girls (!!) and a couple of guys venture into some supposedly-cursed area (if people dying in a location is enough to curse it, every square foot of Japan must be cursed), and talk about it for a while, and guess what? NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS AND THEY LEAVE!!

This is so far worse, so far, far worse, than I had imagined it could be. At least if they had a guy in a rubber mask I could believe that they were trying. But no, despite the fantastic locales (goddamn face-hill excepted), any potential these sequences might have had for horror is absolutely, completely squandered. They could have made them 10x better without actually spending any more money. Having a guy in a black outfit with a black face mask standing unobtrusively in the corner of one of the scenes, unnoticed by the reporter but obvious to the viewer, would have been enough to push this nonsense into the realm of “potentially watchable.” The reporter people don’t even get properly scared; they just sort of complain about the spot and leave. I mean, come on, I’m going way out on a limb for you guys here. I purchased a video for ¥980. Throw me a bone! Or at least a plastic skeleton! ANYTHING.

I guess that if there is one interesting takeaway from this video, it’s that the filmmakers are obviously working under the impression that their target audience already believes in ghosts, curses, evil spirits–the whole package. They believe their audience to be in such a vulnerable state already that they can get away with simply suggesting that maybe, possibly, according to somebody’s brother’s sister’s mailman’s uncle, there’s a ghost around here somewhere. The whole set operates off this idea that the area is scary because it is potentially haunted; the stories don’t give you any reason to believe in them–you have to be a believer already. And maybe that actually describes some people in Japan.

In any event, 8 yen per minute was a rip-off for Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX. But at least I got this blog post out of it.

24 thoughts on “Horror you can buy for ¥980”

  1. Haha, I enjoyed this review.
    Sounds like it was pretty awful.

    Perhaps someday I can see Tales of Terror from Tokyo.
    I think the 5 minute episode length is pretty neat.
    There’s a sort of short film festival online called Channel 101 that I submit to sometimes.
    You basically submit a short pilot (5 min. or under) and it gets voted on and possibly picked up so you can make more episodes.

    Anyway, some pretty interesting things can come out of having such a short time limit. It requires you to get creative.
    And it’s much harder to get boring.

    Haha, I can’t believe 8 yen per minute was a rip off..

  2. I liked the idea of the black silhouetted man in a film like this. Along with the creepy scenery it could make for an underground cult film if marketed properly. It reminds me of a series of video clips which have been dubbed The Slender Man videos. Where a film student was making a movie and during filming he was being stalked by a slender man. The clips were edited together by a friend long after the director dropped the project, transfered schools, and they had not spoken. There is just enough information to where you can’t tell if this is a clever hoax or a real case of someone being stalked for an unknown reason. Here’s a link to the intro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmhfn3mgWUI&feature=related It’s pretty creepy, I kept expecting some jump out scare but no, it’s just presented so seriously.

  3. I’ve heard of Tales of Terror from Tokyo but couldn’t find it anywhere. The 5mins format can be very interesting. Even the first “ju-on” short movies were made under this format (actually, perhaps even for Tales of Terror from Tokyo itself?)

  6. I liked the idea of the black silhouetted man in a film like this. Along with the creepy scenery it could make for an underground cult film if marketed properly. It reminds me of a series of video clips which have been dubbed The Slender Man videos. Where a film student was making a movie and during filming he was being stalked by a slender man. The clips were edited together by a friend long after the director dropped the project, transfered schools, and they had not spoken. There is just enough information to where you can’t tell if this is a clever hoax or a real case of someone being stalked for an unknown reason. Here’s a link to the intro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmhfn3mgWUI&feature=related It’s pretty creepy, I kept expecting some jump out scare but no, it’s just presented so seriously.

    These were great.

  7. If you live in Canada, you can rent any of the volumes of “Tales of Terror from Tokyo and all over Japan” from the mail order company zip.ca

    🙂

  8. yeah I’m on Entry #22 atm, Its starting to get a little farfetched now but the first 15 or so entrys were really good.

  9. Just watched quite a few of the slenderman videos.
    Pretty creative, but when I got to #14 where the kid has fake blood all over his face it kinda lost it’s magic.
    The subtlety is key.

  11. All I’ll say is: Aokigahara Forest.
    Look it up. It’s both terrifying and tragic. Would make for a pretty great setting in a horror game.

  12. Oh man. Aokigahara Forest. I’m half surprised no one has ever made a horror film/game about that place. Maybe people are avoiding writing about it to further discourage more suicides. But bad taste has never stopped the horror industry.

  13. I can’t wait for the American remake!

    They already did one. It’s called “Ghost Hunters”.

    The problem is everyone has learned that all you have to do is run out into the woods and talk to a camera about how scared you are and make a profit. I’m sure the makers of the Blair Witch Project are still laughing all the way to the bank.

  14. I’m sure the makers of the Blair Witch Project are still laughing all the way to the bank.

    Actually the creators behind Blair Witch got majorly screwed over by there distributors. The film grossed over 140 mil but the directors received nowhere near as much.

    Also, Blair Witch is the one of the best of its kind. It worked because it was subtle and thankfully handled itself quite well(unlike many other hand-held films… I’M LOOKING AT YOU PARANORMAL ACTIVITY!) One hand-held, pseudo doc I can give the highest recommendation is the awfully underrated Noroi: The Curse. One of the last films to truly chill me down to the bone.

  16. Chris, I know your high tolerance for schlock, so this must indeed be REALLY bad…

    And that makes me want to see it.

  17. Bit of a silly question maybe… but was there no way they could have come up with a better name than :

    “Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends”

    I mean, if you have to signpost it as being ABSOLUTELY real, i’d be inclined to think it was not…

    was this something lost in translation or just symptomatic of the lack if imagination?

    interestingly,one of the things i loved most about silent hill/ resident evil was the diaries – they always implied the horror / terror, and rarely stated it outright (save for some exceptionS)

  18. I also thought the “Absolutely Real” part was funny. Absolutely Real Urban Legends? Huh?

    It’s mostly lack of imagination. There’s an (old now) series called 本当にあった怖い話 (honnto ni atta kowai hanashi), which is like “Scary Stories that Really Happened” or “Absolutely Real Scary Stories,” and this series is trying to ride on its coattails by adding the “absolutely real” part in there. They are not alone, it’s a common phrase now in horror schlock.

  19. I didn’t know what to think about Blair Witch when I watched it, but after it was over, I enjoyed it.

  21. They could have at least make a movie with footage like from the 4th kind’s so called actual videos.

    I want to see them act like they were possessed by Aliens or in that movie’s case, absolutely real Ghosts.

  23. http://www.klab.lv/users/disfigurator
    Thank’s again for interesting insights, but I’m writing about one problem with this article and RSS feed. I’m using opera and after reinstall wanted to get your RSS feed back, so I clicked the link and got:
    “XML parsing failed

    XML parsing failed: syntax error (Line: 51, Character: 30)”
    – 51: Horror you can buy for ¥980

    It sould be nice if you could fix this problem.

  24. > Disfigurator

    Thanks for the report, I fixed the feed manually. I’ll need to fix my feed generation code when I get home–looks like it splits in the middle of HTML entities, which is no good.

    Thanks!

Comments are closed.