The J-Horror Virus

A really interesting documentary! Had a great time watching it!

Immeasurably disappointing documentary that makes extensive use of AI generated imagery, something I'm very surprised to see the lack of criticism over. Interspersed between interviews and relevant clips, there are frequent vignettes of AI generated images; meaningless visual gibberish that is distracting at best, and is a stain on what could have otherwise been a decent documentary. But considering the ethical objections to generative AI, that training data for these programs is stolen and used without permissions, I have to wonder how many of these classic films featured were used for training data? Such a question makes the visuals seemingly used to evoke a J-Horror style mood all the more sad, you've got to wonder how much of that visual noise is plagiarized from the films the producers wanted to pay tribute to, just algorithmically regurgitated into meaningless, contextless visual amalgamations? J-Horror deserves better than that.

Solid documentary on the history of J-horror with interviews from most of its most influential directors and a select couple actors. Got a little repetitive at times, but overall very informative and pretty entertaining.

Surprised to see a few people let down by this for a want of sophistication- yes it’s not a graduate level thesis on the subject, but it IS a comprehensive, accurate, and insightful overview; including the full chronology and most of the breadth of the subgenre & antecedents, interviews with the creators including both new incidental stories and comprehensive artistic/production stories. A few western commentators contextualize it as well; overall there is a degree of orientalist , where some insight into western cinematic and literary influences may have been helpful, but all in all, this is as excellent a summation as the movement could have asked for.

fascinating insight to a beloved genre and it made me write down so many titles i have yet to see and I was very happy to see films i like be shown that people rarely mention in the j-horror genre! definitely makes me wish there we had access to a lot of these older films in physical media as quite a lot of them are hard to find online, let alone subbed. speaking of subtitles, I'm no expert, but the documentary's subtitles felt a bit off at times like they weren't being correctly translated or some stuff was being left out?? i wanna know what the japanese directors had to say! dont leave out their jokes or dont just subtitle a japanese place or title as [Japanese] that's so lazy!! four stars just for the subtitles