Everyone knows about the successful and highly influential spate of Japanese horror films from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, This isn’t as well known as Ring or Ju-On: The Grudge but it’s still considered the progenitor of that wave. Unfortunately while the grainy film esthetic and general tone of the cinematography are similar, I found this one to be a not very scary and not very impressive example of the genre. After being subjected to truly horrific supernatural entities, a hypnotist no matter how implausibly skilled, just doesn’t rate that highly as a threat and worse still, the film is utterly uninterested in exploring the backstory of the villain.

Police detective Kenichi Takabe is investigating a strange series of murders with the assistance of a psychologist named Sakuma. Each victim has a large ‘X’ carved into his or her flesh and the murderer is readily identifiable. Yet the murderers have no real motive and are unable to explain why they killed their husbands or wives. Eventually Takabe wonders if the murderers were hypnotized and the police identifies a man, Mamiya, who is connected to all of them. He finds and apprehends Mamiya easily enough and discovers that his home is full of books about psychology in general and the techniques of Franz Mesmer in particular. However Mamiya seems to have amnesia and he responds to all attempts to question him by asking personal questions about the interrogator instead. Meanwhile Takabe has problems of his own at home as his wife Fume is mentally ill and reliant on him to take care of her. She is forgetful and gets lost even on the way to the shops. Takabe’s frustrations with her mount and even Mamiya finds out about it.

Stylistically this does recall the other Japanese horror films of that era and there is that same delicious sense of creeping dread as the murder victims pile up and we wonder what is going on. Watching this, I now realize that the images are deliberately grainy, particularly in darkened areas of the shot, to accentuate the horror and uncertainty. There are also some rather gory shots but they’re quick cuts, sometimes so quick that you wonder what it is you really saw. Once the actual nature of the danger becomes known, the film becomes much less scary even if Mamiya’s hypnotism is implausibly powerful and irresistible. I’m particularly annoyed by the depiction of how the authorities don’t seem to have much of a sense of ermergency. Plenty of police show up at the crime scenes, sure, but in the end the case is still led by a single overworked and overstressed detective. In real life, a killing spree like this would be alarming news to the whole country and prompted the creation of a large, dedicated task force. Here, even after the police realize what Mamiya can do, they fail to take the obvious precautions of keeping him under camera surveillance 24/7 and never letting him talk to anyone alone.

I could have forgiven this film if there’s actually some background lore as to what is going on. As I’ve noted many times before, this is a tough balance for horror films to strike as overexplaining things tends to detract from the mystery. Yet here the only lore we get is that Mamiya was a psychology student intensely interested in the techniques of Franz Mesmer and there is a reference to an early practitioner of his teachings in Japan. I expected that eventually there would be some link between Mamiya and Takabe’s wife Fume but I was disappointed in this regard. It even ignores the content of Mesmer’s actual theory who believed that all living things are connected by am invisible magnetic field and thus can influence one another that way. Instead Mamiya is depicted as being able to put nearly anyone into a hypnotic trance with just about anything and there’s no reason for that specific form of mutilation other than the imagery that it creates.

As far as I can tell, this film might have been something special when it was released but its successors have far surpassed it. The totally expected ending it went for is similar to what The Empty Man pulled off so perfectly. It might be of historical interest to dedicated fans of this particular niche but I’d say that most people should just steer clear.