The Master Of J-horror Is Back With 'Stigmatized Properties', But Does It Live Up To Expectations?

So if ANYONE could make an awesome horror movie, it would be the director of Dark Water and The Ring, surely… right?

Nothing like starting a movie review with a bit of sarcasm right? But surely the appeal of this movie is that fact that one of the greatest J-horror directors of all time is taking on the concept of the haunted Japanese house.

Or, as they’re known: Stigmatized Properties. Which co-incidentally is the name of this movie.

What’s this movie about?

Yamame and Nakai are a comedy duo called Jonathans, but their latest show is a failure, eliciting a chuckle from only one audience member, a fangirl named Kosaka.

When Nakai wants to split up the duo to pursue a TV writing career, Yamame is left with nothing until the TV station director decides, on the spot, he wants Yamame to spend some time in a haunted apartment and document the results.

With the help of Nakai and Kosaka, who coincidentally gets a job at the same TV station at the same time as a make-up assistant, he encounters and documents a spirit, and the show is an instant success.

This leads him to renting out more haunted apartments, but it comes at a cost. An evil spirit has latched onto him, having an effect on his physical and mental health.

My Thoughts on this Movie

Seriously, it’s a great idea. Haunted Japanese houses make for fun J-horror movies, right? So then, whats the issue with this film?

Personally, for me, it was the fact that the movie couldn’t decide if it was a horror movie with comedy elements, or a comedy movie with horror elements. And in the end, the muddled mixing of genres has had a negative effect on what ended up on screen.

For the most part, I found the story fairly interesting. I appreciate that the writer and director resisted the urge to make a “haunted house reality TV” style movie with that found footage-type trope, but instead created a proper narrative, only using the haunted houses as backdrops to allow the scary elements to occur.

But there is nothing scary in this film. And the over-acting from lead actress Nao, who plays Nokasa ruins any scary scene she is in, where her scared reactions look completely out of place in a film like this. She’s tried to make it more suitable for her character by playing her as being very shy and timid, thus it looks like she gets scared easily. But then on the other hand, she’s a character who has ability to see ghosts and spirits, so why does she get so scared every time it seems to happen?

And while the performance of Kazuya Kamenashi as Yamame is debatable, there is a character I really loved, and even though she was another over-acted character, I really enjoyed every scene she was in. And that’s the excellent and super creepy real estate agent Yokomizu. There’s just something unique and appealing about her character, and I especially loved the scene where she was providing apartment options to Yamame in Tokyo, and she had a special apartment for him hidden in her mini shrine. More characters like her in movies would be most welcomed.

It was also nice to see Mao, from One Cut Of The Dead, in the film as the TV director’s assistant.

But that’s about all I enjoyed about this film. A handful of characters and a plot premise. But the awkwardness of the way the scenes play out, the frustrating relationship early on between Kosaka and Yamame, the average looking special effects especially with the final evil spirit and the general length of the movie really work against it.

Overall

I was really, really excepting far too much from this film considering the pedigree and the real lack of decent horror movies from Japan recently.

But my quest for a modern, enjoyable Japanese horror movie continues, with the exception of One Cut of the Dead, and both of these movies are comedy horrors. This was a comedy right? God it felt like it. Sorry, thumbs down for this.

If you’ve seen it, what did you think?