Streeting next Tuesday, March 14, is Tartan Asian Extreme's MAREBITO, the latest J-Horror import from Takashi Shimizu. Shimizu is the talented young fellow behind JU-ON (2003), its sequel JU-ON II (also 2003), and the American remake, THE GRUDGE (2004). I was given a welcome jolt or two by each of these films, which I consider the work of a brilliant stylist, but MAREBITO ("The Stranger from Afar"), based on a novel by screenwriter Chiaki Konaka, is something altogether more extraordinary. I think it may be a masterpiece, a fresh and defiantly uncommercial horror film with a cold finger tightly pressed to the pulse of our times.
Be warned: It's an oblique picture, full of unresolved mystery, and utterly void of human warmth -- which means it's bound to alienate a certain percentage of its audience. But these are traits it holds in common with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, though I'd be doing the film a great disservice to come right out and proclaim it the 2001 of horror films. I won't know if it can sustain such comparison until I see it a few more times. The analogy isn't a perfect fit anyway; 2001 was like nothing the science fiction genre had known before, and the same cannot fully be said of MAREBITO's relation to the horror genre. MAREBITO's antecedents are fairly obvious -- PEEPING TOM, VIDEODROME, PI and LOST HIGHWAY, to name a few -- but it's more disturbing than all of them; Shimizu melds their diverse ingredients in a highly original way, with a fluid visual style that replicates the ebb and flow of human thought, even to the extremes of obsession and disorientation, and a knack for visual horror (and more importantly, dread) that frequently achieves perfect pitch.
Most importantly, MAREBITO is that increasingly rare horror film that speaks with unsettling but gratifying directness to our present-day fears and concerns. I think it may have nailed the perfect metaphor for our soulless, internet/information age existence; that it speaks for where we are today, or where we're headed, in the same way VIDEODROME did back in 1983. There is perhaps only one dialogue scene in the film that plainly isn't taking place on the plane of the protagonist's own abstracted madness, and it's the film's most terrifying moment because it's our only glimpse of the rational. What makes the film all the more astonishing is that Shimizu knocked it off in eight days, shooting in Digital Betacam.
This is Tartan Asian Extreme's box art for the release. It's lovely, but note how, in contrast to the original poster art reproduced above, the female figure has been clothed... and unshackled. Interesting.
I will be writing in more detail about the film for VIDEO WATCHDOG, but I wanted to alert you to the fact that something very special is on the release horizon next week. Not an old TV show, not a box set... just a new horror movie that I expect the genre's devotées will be watching and discussing, and possibly debating, for decades to come.
