Japanese lo-fi horror maestro Koji Shiraishi might be best known for his postmodern 2005 found footage masterpiece “Noroi: The Curse”, but with “Occult”, the director crafts a deepy disturbing Lovecraftian horror tale, once again utilizing the faux-documentary format to great effect.
It's a profoundly unnerving film, eerily placing the demented and supernatural within the mundanity of everyday life, as a documentary crew (led by Shiraishi, playing a fictionalized version of himself) follows the survivors of a mysterious mass stabbing. One of the survivors, Eno (Shohei Uno), reports seeing UFOs, hearing voices as well as other bizarre phenomena and becomes convinced that he is part of a bigger, supernatural plan. He begins to speculate what his role might be and as the documentary goes on, the crew slowly becomes entangled in an opaque plot cooked up by Eno, which involves an ominous ceremony supposedly demanded of him by God.
“Occult” is drenched in paranoia and filled with visions of all kinds of nightmarish, tentacled apparitions ripped straight out of the weird fiction canon. Aided by the cheapo analog aesthetic, Shiraishi conjures an uncanny atmosphere of menacing and darkly comic absurdity. Like “Noroi”, “Occult” is a slow burn, but so effective in its feverish descent into insanity (and implied audience complicity) that its folk horror-tinged examination of the madness lurking underneath the facade of the ordinary ends up being extremely gripping either way. An exceptionally strange and creepy film, capped off by an appropriately out-there ending.
