Is Sadakaya the pinnacle of modern Japanese horror? We hope not.

Perhaps the single biggest reason why Japanese horror movies ‘stick’ is the fact that movie franchises this side of the globe are obsessed not just with blood or gore, but with unpacking fear itself, minus the usual ornamentations.

By ornamentations, we refer to the usual strategies to get people to become uneasy – like religion. Movies with nuns and priests automatically hail the Judeo-Christian mythologies, and well, you know the drill. Even Neil Gaiman in his rendition of Hell in the Sandman comic series was unable to escape the ‘inevitability’ of going back to the God of the Bible, to resolve the conundrum of Hell being closed by Lucifer ‘just because.’

While Japanese horror movies aren’t really ‘deep’ in the sense that you can have a lot of fun picking out historical references or really complex relationships between the characters (usually, that’s left out in favor of beefing up the general plot), horror fans still have a lot of fun with how horror is reinvented with each new movie.

But if we were to go into how they are made, and how the formula works, what would the formula look like?

The formula of the modern Japanese horror movie

Horror can be defined as “a very strong feeling of fear, dread, and shock.” Let’s use this definition because it covers three unique bases that these movies hit repeatedly throughout each new release. How do the filmmakers in Japan ensure that people will get a healthy (or sometimes not so healthy) dose of horror?

While mash-ups are generally considered moribund in the film industry (for obvious reasons), the insane mash-up Sadako vs. Kayako is quite a clear specimen for examining tropes and figures in Japanese horror.

First you have the vulnerable humans – basically a bunch of boys and girls who are sitting ducks when the supernatural villains arise. In the case of this movie, there’s two of them – Sadako (from the Ring franchise) and Kayako (from the Grudge). Both have spawned legions of fans and appearances in video games, and both are as bad-ass as you can be as horror villains.

The two villains are backed by curses that reproduce themselves in unique ways. And the result is singularly horrifying – it’s always death, and that makes the villains unstoppable because curses are traditionally viewed as unstoppable.

Fed by negative emotions like anger, sadness, and hate, curses can build up terribly over time, which is why in the well scene in Sadako vs. Kayako, the fusion of the two into Sadakaya unleashed a massive, writhing mass of hair, flesh, and eyes, symbolizing the amount of death, anger, and hate that has been feeding the two villains’ respective curses.