Part 2 of our cult conversation/analysis of Koji Shiraishi’s Cult (2013) and Occult (2009). How do the themes of these films compare to his masterpiece, Noroi (2005)? My husband Danny’s answer surprised even me. You can listen to the episode on YouTube, or scroll down to read the transcript, if you prefer.

Host: Hello and welcome back to the middle of the video. We were about to talk about some bullshit and here it is.

Moving on to Cult, I’m going to ask myself the same questions that I asked you. Cult is about these three actresses playing themselves, and they’re part of the idol culture in Japan, where it’s more TV than movies. They have this studio system, they’re locked into contracts, and they have to do these jobs. They get told that they have to go investigate a haunted house. The cult in the title is some neighbors next door to the haunted house who are trying to bring a demon to the house. There’s the cult of the entertainment industry that sent these people even though they’re very uncomfortable, and there’s a religious group that keeps sending priests out to try to do battle with whatever’s in the house—and it kills a couple of them.

Then there’s a third guy that’s basically played for comedy, but the whole thing seems to be a comment on that exploitative nature of the entertainment industry—that these women are getting possessed by demons to various levels and they are told that they have to go to work. My favorite part of the movie is when the weakest of the women goes to quit her job and she goes to her agent. He just starts berating her about how she can’t stop doing this job, but because she’s been minorly possessed by this demon, she uses psychokinesis to pin him against the wall with a table. I really like that scene. I like how she’s fighting back against this structure that she’s working for.

What’s appealing to me about Cult is how many women there are in the movie; there’s the three actresses, there’s the two women living in the house, the next-door neighbors. Like I said, I’m going to admit that Occult is probably a better movie. I hadn’t thought about that till tonight when we started talking about it, just because Occult does such a good job of being absolutely repellent. The actor that plays Eno is so good at being such a shithead that I just prefer this other mockumentary.

As far as the director’s signature for Cult, Occult takes place in a city, and Cult—I think they might be in a city, but the main action takes place in this very quiet, very normal-looking neighborhood where you wouldn’t think… I know you pointed out, what did you say about looking at the outside of the house and the inside of the house?

Danny: The outside of the house is very old-looking. It reminds you of these small older-looking houses if you’ve watched any Japanese TV, movies, or even anime. But the inside of it was all fancy and modern. It was a real stark contrast there.

Host: That may be by design to show the normalcy of the neighborhood and then what’s really going on inside the house. There’s a twist there: there is an actual cult that’s trying to bring about this demon just like in Occult. But it’s not really a cult in Occult—it’s a guy. In Cult, it’s a cult.

He has the signature of something going on in the house next door, which is the same thing that happens in Noroi at the beginning when there’s a mother and daughter in a house and the neighbors are making a sound like a thousand babies crying. Then again in Cult, it’s a mother and daughter living in a house with evil people next door. Cult seems to be on the surface played much more for comedy, but I thought the director put himself in it to make himself look foolish, like that sort of self-deprecating sense of humor.

Danny: I could see that. I could definitely see that.

Host: I’ve gotten off track like usual. I wanted to say, because I like to put these personal touches in, that they went to McDonald’s a lot while they were planning their bombing in Occult.

Danny: Yeah, even before their first real interview or meeting with Koji and Eno at McDonald’s, where he borrowed a 100-yen coin which plays into the ending of the film as well.

Host: Do you think they explicitly stated that they were at McDonald’s in that movie?

Danny: I thought it was pretty obvious. I think so, at the beginning. Not so much later on, but you see the wrappers and you kind of see the cup and everything. Because the wrapper flies off—that’s the first miracle that happens in front of Koji. It’s so small, you just think it’s a coincidence until things get bigger and bigger. Suddenly there’s a big old ball of worms up in the sky, birds are flying towards you, and you don’t know what the hell is going on.

Host: There was a ball of worms in Cult also. When they had their final confrontation in the house with the demon, the young girl’s head turned into a bunch of worms.

Danny: Oh, that’s true.

Host: I wanted to talk about something I return to over and over. As horror fans, we have to put up with a lot of shitty third acts in movies. First of all, you’ve written some screenplays and been involved in some film production. Why is it hard to end a movie?

Danny: You build up… I don’t know about anybody else because I usually have an ending in place when I start to write. But with writing, anybody that’s ever written knows that your story can go very far to the left, to the right, anywhere, and you’re just along for the ride. You build all these things up, and I think a lot of people’s weakness is just ending it on a big note. They put all their big stuff towards the beginning and mainly towards the middle, and then the ending is just a poof.

Host: The very ending of Occult, the last scene that we see, it’s ridiculous. Do you think it ruins the movie?

Danny: At one point I thought it did because I hated that ending when I first saw it. I watched that movie, I was enthralled, and then that ending… I’m just going to go ahead and spoil it. Koji gets out of prison, he gets a camera, and the 100-yen coin that Eno was carrying with him when he did the bombing drops out of the sky. He’s freaking out, and they look at the footage. It shows Eno right up to the explosion, and then you get this goofy kaleidoscope jellyfish head swimming around going, “It’s hell, it’s hell.” It is so stupid. Then his head detaches from his body in this weird Houseu-kind of style and just flies away. It looks like somebody’s Windows 98 screensaver for a moment, and then it ends.

Host: Cult doesn’t really have an ending, it just ends. But I am a fan of the ambiguous ending in a movie where you can decide what happened. That’s the same thing that happened in Noroi, but in a much more artful way where you’re left wondering what happened next.

Danny: Yeah, when it’s done correctly it can heighten it and make you want more. An example for me would be the first Hell House. It had a real weird ending to it, and I liked it because it was kind of unexplained. Then they explained it in movie after movie with diminishing returns. There are a few other movies like that too. Black Christmas is one where part of me wants to be mad because I don’t know who the killer is, but the other part of me finds it really creepy at the end. It’s ending, and you know something really bad is about to happen to that one girl, but there’s nothing you can do because you’re leaving the scene.

Host: With Cult, it’s the same. The people in the movie think that it’s over, and it’s obviously not over.

Danny: Yeah, and I think that’s Koji’s deepest jump into the whole Lovecraftian thing because you don’t know what this entity is. In the previous two movies—the first movie you’ve got Kagutaba, who is like a small demon that was created. In Occult, the entity is supposed to be Hiruko, who is the leech king or the leech boy. In this one, they don’t even say its name. So it’s presumably some kind of Eldritch horror that’s about to rise up and destroy Tokyo, much like Godzilla before him.

Host: Why are you obsessed with found footage horror? We’ll end on this note.

Danny: I thought really long and hard about this because I never paid it much thought; I just enjoyed watching it. But I think it’s because there is a part of me that loves to see things that maybe I shouldn’t be seeing. This started when I was a little kid and I would go into my local video store. You’d go into the little special, darkly lit room where they had all the horror movies. Most places had porn, but we didn’t have that in our towns—it was all horror movies. That’s when I first got my taste of Faces of Death, and it felt like you weren’t supposed to be watching this.

That graduates. Yes, I’ve gone to those terrible sites like rotten.com back in the day and watched that stuff. I think with found footage, a really good one makes you think that you’re looking into these people’s lives at the worst possible moment for them, and that you shouldn’t be watching it, but you just can’t turn away.

Host: And we all thought in the ’80s that Faces of Death was real!

I would have to say my attraction to found footage is like a drug that I’m chasing. It was August 1999, seeing The Blair Witch Project in a completely sold-out theater in the middle of the night, and that feeling of dread. I want to add, just as an aside, that nobody thought that movie was real. People will try to retcon that, but no one that I knew thought that it was real; we just thought it was a scary movie where you didn’t have all the answers to what was going on.

We had to go somewhere and chill out and smoke a joint at 2:00 in the morning after seeing that movie because we were so stressed out. We went home, went to bed, fell asleep, the air conditioner kicked on, and it scared me so much that I woke up out in the hall running away from the movie.

You brought up the Hell House movies. The first one was pretty upsetting for me because we watched it this summer while I was on chemo, so everything had this sort of gravitas. Noroi should be more upsetting than it is, but it’s just such a fun ride. But that’s it—I’m always chasing the high of that first viewing of Blair Witch. Cult and Occult don’t quite get me there, but there’s some reason that we rewatch those two movies every year.

Danny: Yeah, I just enjoy those. They’re two of the best found footage movies I know. There’s many more out there—there’s way more bad, but there’s a bunch of good found footage movies or mockumentaries, whatever you want to call it, not only in Japan but also around the world. One that comes to mind… I believe it’s called As Above, So Below?

Host: Oh, wasn’t it set in France?

Danny: It was in France, in the catacombs. That was a good one. I think I probably said the name of that wrong.

Host: No, I knew what you were talking about.

Danny: Yeah, I just love found footage. I think these two movies are actually closer to each other than they are to Noroi in a way. It just feels like he moves on and upgrades his Eldritch horror lore, or whatever his little cinematic universe is, with each film that he came out with in that particular area. He’s done many different types of films, like The Slit-Mouthed Woman and Sadako vs. Kayako.

Host: Yes, all those, yes. Okay, I’m going to leave it there. I can’t remember what’s up next for the channel, but after whatever I’ve got planned next, I’m going to talk about my favorite actual documentary, Sherman’s March. That came up in my mind when we were watching Occult, and I thought, this is taking off on those documentaries that start in one place and end up somewhere else. I’m going to do something between now and then, I can’t remember, and then I’m going to do Sherman’s March. If you get a chance to see Cult and Occult, they are both on YouTube, correct?

Danny: They are.

Host: I would recommend doing a double feature. Thanks again for joining me on the channel, Danny. It was my pleasure. All right, and have a good night.