It's always very difficult to figure out a way to review a documentary. I say this every time I review a documentary, which I don't do often, and it never gets any easier. The big positive is that when I do review a documentary it tends to be one that I have a strong reaction to. I hoped to enjoy The J-Horror Virus, which is why I bumped it to the top of my viewing schedule as soon as it was more easily available to me, and I am happy to say that it didn't let me down.
Co-directed by Sarah Appleton and Jasper Sharp, this is a well-balanced and well-shaped journey through the boom period at the turn of century that made horror fans start to take notice of the films coming from Japan (as well as China, South Korea, and Thailand). If I started to list the best films from this time then you would probably head off to watch them right now, hopefully coming back here to finish this review after you've finished your viewings, so I'll just hope that we have some common ground when it comes to a fair knowledge of the big titles.
Restricting themselves to what they quite rightly cite as the peak years of J-Horror appreciation, Appleton and Sharp also ensure that they cover the essential factors that came together to create a perfect storm: a history steeped in great ghostly legends and the ability to get great equipment and results on much lower budgets. Not only do they assemble the expected talent from behind the camera (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Shimizu, and Shin'ya Tsukamoto among them), but they also get some great tales from Rie Ino'o AKA THE Sadako from Ring and Ring 2.
As I have been at pains to point out on many other occasions, horror is a consistently important and profitable genre, helping both studios and the cinema tills through some very difficult times. The J-Horror explosion not only helped horror fans to find some modern classics, including films that established iconography and shiver-inducing moments still reverberating through the genre now, and surely for many years from now, but it also helped people to discover a greater variety of films from the likes of Takashi Miike, Takeshi Kitano, Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Kôji Shiraishi, as well as a few others. If you want to know the full width and breadth of titles that fans were discovering at this time then just hunt around online for a full list of the Tartan Asia Extreme DVDs that were released (a distribution company that many were sad to see disappear, although many of the titles have since been released by other boutique labels).
But I digress. J-Horror is an important part of cinema history, and Appleton and Sharp do an excellent job of contextualising and celebrating it. Like any good documentary, this reveals some wonderful bits of information you may not have previously known and it makes you keen to learn more about the central subject matter, which can easily be done by working your way through the many titles namechecked/shown. Sugoi.
8/10
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