a film alert to the unease in the simplest things
When it comes to horror films, there’s definitely something to be said for limits. Not upon the result (censorship), but in terms of process: restrictions imposed upon the means by which a story is told. In this digital age, every conceivable vision of hell is but a few terabytes of data away. Yet as anyone who’s ever seen Thir13en Ghosts, or that superfluous remake of The Haunting will attest, there’s nothing remotely frightening about CGI. It’s insufficiently visceral. It lacks substance.
Goose Bumps: The Movie is an extension of the television series of the same name, which aired on the Fuji network between 2007 and 2011. Like those shows, the segments here favour lengthy, rather otiose titles ('The gap between dream and reality is all darkness’) and propose an aesthetic based on exclusion. No ghosts or malevolent spirits—no intimations of the supernatural whatsoever, in fact. No heightened music or sound effects. Performances must be naturalistic, rather than melodramatic. A strict focus on quotidian reality.
The result, almost Dogme-like in its asceticism, proves unexpectedly effective, a film alert to the unease in the simplest things. A sudden, inexplicable change of manner, for example—a shift in expression from friendly welcome to undisguised hatred. Or a woman waking up in her apartment one morning and opening the curtains, only to find handprints on her windows . . .
As such, its tone owes more to recent Japanese literature, to authors like Taichi Yamada and Yoko Tawada, than to any of its J-horror auteurs. (With the possible exception of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, always an outlier in the genre.)
That said, the first tale here is a bore. A muted psycho-thriller about a girl who turns the tables on a man who may or may not be a potential assailant, it plays like a C-grade Roald Dahl yarn—right down to its entirely predictable, faintly misogynistic 'twist’ ending. However, the second ('Six deadly days of crazed love’) is better: a handsome young courier delivers a parcel to a woman in an apartment building, only to subsequently find her stalking him—telephoning at odd hours ('I want to see you, Takashi . . ."), waiting like a sentinel in the shadows near his home. Her appearances—and her appearance—managing to hit a discomfiting spot between comedy and terror.
That his new admirer is a dwarf given to wearing a red cardigan, suggests a debt to Roeg’s classic Don’t Look Now—yet this low-budget feature could hardly be more removed from the baroque splendour of that film. Shot on high-definition video, this feature has the low-contrast, ungraded look of that medium at its most mid-range. Yet ironically, something about the banality of the framing, the undifferentiated flatness of the images, actually works to the advantage of the film, communicating all too well the flattened texture of life in a major metropolis.
As befits a city of isolated individuals, this is a film in which two figures rarely share a frame. Where most conversations are conducted at a remove—via cellphones, or video-intercoms, or via SMS. Thus, in the third story ('Curiosity brings fantasy and complete darkness’), a salaryman, returning home from work, becomes fascinated with the string of text messages being sent and received by the pretty young woman in front of him, a dialogue which seems to suggest a murder has taken place. And in the sixth ('Conflict with the threat of temptation and suspicion’), a housewife, at home while her husband is at work, finds herself menaced by a telephone call-centre worker who seems to know rather too much about their lives.
But the best tale here is the fifth, in which a woman keeps finding balled-up little squares of paper in her pocket, counting down remorselessly from 30 to 1. Like the second story, it moves rather too swiftly for its own good, sacrificing tension for pace; but the suspense and the mystery are powerfully twinned—that is, until a final, lazily predictable twist, which not only makes no sense, but actually winds up invalidating much of what has preceded it.
Though clearly working with limited resources, director Koichiro Miki manages to play some discreet yet destabilising tricks with perspective—a balcony, for example, that ends with a view of the neighbouring buildings, is later seen facing onto railway lines. As if the everyday world were constantly in flux, and no one has noticed. (Shades, again, of Tawada’s fiction.)
For my money, though, the most terrifying thing here is never even acknowledged, much less answered: why does Komori-chan call 'I’m home!" when she steps in the door to her apartment—when, as we later see, she lives entirely on her own? As ever, the most insidious terrors dwell firmly in one’s imagination.
