Anatomy of a Scene: The horrifying ghost walk in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s ‘Kairo’
Although modern horror cinema may have you thinking otherwise, the greatest movies of the genre, made by the likes of Tobe Hooper, William Friedkin and John Carpenter, are masters of atmosphere, where the tone and mood are carefully curated for dread. Much-condemned ‘jump scares’, found rife throughout contemporary horror, provide momentary surprise from moments of terror but rarely leave you with the bone-chilling existential terror that films such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s extraordinary 2001 movie Kairo do.
Born from the same paranoia as Hideo Nakata’s Ringu regarding the forthcoming technological revolution at the turn of the new millennium, Kairo explored the concept of malevolent spirits trying to get to the world of the living through the internet. Whilst such may sound like a corny tale that scrapes the bottom of the Goosebumps barrel, Kurosawa conjures something far more compelling with an insidious tale that swells with ingenuity.
Telling the story of two groups of people investigating the possibility that the internet is being used as a gateway for the dead, the film’s most infamous moment comes when Yabe (Masatoshi Matsuo) investigates a friend’s apartment after he has committed suicide. Upon leaving, he notices a door sealed with red tape and cannot stop himself from entering, with his decision sealing a haunting fate.
Entering the room, he finds a dark corridor with jagged edges and an indecipherable message scrawled on the back wall in red. Aside from being admittedly eerie, there is little else of note, with the camera fixated on the back of Yabe until a presence announces itself with the choral dread of Kurosawa’s soundtrack. An unstable female voice that shrills between notes, not unlike a stereotypical impression of a ghost, the vocals announce the arrival of something ethereal, unnatural and satanic, upending the beautiful chorus of a hymn.
After a short time, Kurosawa switches perspectives. With Yabe out of sight, instead, we now stare down a dimly lit hall where, if you squint, you can just about make out the figure of a woman in a black dress blending into the background.
Framed as if part of the set and not of the real world of the living, Kurosawa forces the viewer to explore the back of the scene and decipher for themselves what they can find. Indeed, it appears she is just a normal woman, yet as the scene goes on, you find yourself physically recoiling, backing away as you try and work out exactly what you’re looking at before it’s too late.
This is no haunted house ghoul, the woman has no evil eyes or melted face, indeed, it’s difficult to make her face out at all until she slowly eases towards the camera with impossibly slow motion. As if trying to mimic humankind, the strange spirit slowly saunters towards the camera, stumbling at one point only to regain her balance with a curious shuffle, offering us our only view of her cold, still face.
Locking us down the barrel of the corridor for what feels like an eternity, Kurosawa frames the scene as if it were a nightmare, with even Yabe falling to the floor in stiff paralysis of the horror. Ambiguous and uncertain, there is no knowing what we are seeing at all, with the director tapping into the terror of the ‘uncanny valley’, with the obscure, cryptic figure offering no indication as to her real intentions.
A technical marvel of horror filmmaking, Kurosawa tied together every aspect of the craft to make the scene one of the genre’s most frightening moments, even taking into consideration the performance of the ghoul herself. Ballet dancer Akiko Kimura, who had studied dance theory at Waseda University, Tokyo, was employed to take on the terrifying role, with her unparalleled abilities offering far more than an enthusiastic extra ever could, giving a graceful fluidity to the ethereal spirit.
When she eventually arrives at the feet of Yabe, who has now cowered behind a sofa, Kurosawa doesn’t break the deadlock of tension with a jump scare. He eases the anxiety to a natural conclusion, with the ghost peering over the character with malevolent pity and the score terrorising the viewers’ nerves one last time.
“Death was eternal loneliness,” a separate spirit utters later in the film, with this desperate line resonating with the dread-filled pace to which time seems to slow. The uncanny ghoul seemingly floats through the air, not with a clear desire for violence but perhaps with the hope that its silent pleas for emancipation from the despairing underworld might be heard in the land of the living.
