I love Noroi for a lot of reasons, but I think the thing that makes it stick with me the most is because it feels so real. It's very low-key, it's not flashy, it's not overly dramatic. It's very grounded. It is done in the style of a 'found footage' documentary- and it's done so well, you forget you're watching a movie sometimes. You feel like you're just watching a documentary. The acting is incredibly candid. It makes you believe in what you're seeing.
The sense of dread builds over the course of it's run-time very slowly. It has no jumpscares, no cgi, no horror makeup- that is not where the horror comes from. It imbues a dark, gut-twisting feeling in you as the movie reaches it's climax. And that feeling doesn't go away. It follows you into the night long after the movie has ended. The images flash in your head as you're trying to sleep, you reflect on that woman's actions, you feel a little ill.
The scary imagery in the movie is barely decipherable, buried under the lens of low-quality video footage. It forces your eyes to try to make out what you're looking at, and when you fail to fill in all the dots, the fear and dread hits. It's a very unique feeling, one we are rapidly losing due to the advent of high-quality camera footage at our fingertips. Long gone are the days of 280p shitty 'real ghost footage' on youtube. I truly believe "low-quality" footage to be far scarier than any high definition scary makeup, cgi, etc- nothing wrong with those things of course, though. That's just another reason why Noroi sticks with me (along with the director Shiraishi's other work).
Then, there's the historical aspects of the film that I love, that also lend to the realism. The old religious village that was forced to evacuate to make room for a modern dam, leaving their centuries-old homes sunken under a man-forged lake. A very sobering reality for many old Japanese villages in real life (also a theme in the Higurashi series). The religious practices & traditions we learn about from the village, the footage of the Kagutaba ritual, the scrolls, it's incredibly detailed and realistic. I just love stuff like that. You can tell the director is a huge history nerd and it rules.
This movie makes me feel sick. I won't get into it for spoiler reasons (I truly believe everyone should see this movie), but the contents are truly harrowing, and made all the more harrowing with how realistically they are presented.
God it's so good.
EDIT: IT'S ON YOUTUBE FOR FREE GO GO GO
