I started watching Shiraishi's "Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi" movies

My favorite found-footage horror director is Koji Shiraishi, the director of Noroi - kind of a cult classic - and Occult, which is less well-known but equally fantastic. Noroi is both a found-footage horror story and an elaborate, loving recreation of Japanese daytime television. Occult is an incredibly funny (but dark) self-insert story where Shiraishi plays the slimiest, most unpleasant version of himself. I've watched a bunch of his stuff, and I've liked it all!

I haven't watched his "Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi" series, but I found it on Youtube, so I've watched several in the last few days. These are an interconnected series of just-barely feature-length films - the first is 70 minutes - about a pair of paranormal investigators who are desperate to sell DVDs of supernatural footage. I gather that these were direct-to-video releases. (Direct-to-video material in Japan was historically more well-regarded than it is in the US.)

Here's the first one:

All the funniest found-footage horror has a certain amount of contempt for the in-fiction filmmakers, I believe... and the SKFK movies definitely do! The main filmmaker character, Jin Kudo, is brusque and unpleasant and often harangues or mistreats the subjects of his films. Most of the ones I've seen involve a scene where Kudo attacks or hits a subject in order to get the footage he wants. In the second movie, he runs frantically around a room full-force slapping a group of miserable 20-somethings who have been possessed by a ghost, and the movie provides us with a subtitle along the lines of "The Kudo Method worked." His assistant, Miho, is often playing the "straight man" to his bizarre, over-the-top aggression. It's very dryly funny in exactly the way I found Occult funny.

These movies have been on Youtube since 2023 and have quite a lot of views, so I assume their presence there is legit enough that I won't blow up their spot by posting about it here. However, I wouldn't actually recommend watching this stuff first if you're interested in Shiraishi's work! I think you should just go stream Noroi, which is actually just on Tubi. Occult is a little harder to find, but most people seem to prefer Noroi, so I'd start you there.

Shiraishi has been incredibly inspirational to me over the last few years. Since watching Noroi and Occult, I've been full of the desire to someday make a comedy horror found-footage videogame myself. I think there's some great creative opportunity there. First-person storytelling is great in both games and movies, and I think this is one genre where there's still stuff they can learn from one another.