Horror Obsessive
Somewhere between “watch this and die in seven days” and “don’t skip the ad,” j-horror’s cursed-media trope had to evolve or die, and Koji Shiraishi found the update: bury the curse in an autoplay clip. Kinki, the film most directly in conversation with Shiraishi’s 2005 breakthrough Noroi: The Curse, swaps the haunted videotape for something closer to a doomscroll, and the choice says more about where dread actually lives now than any jump scare could.
The film, released internationally as About a Place in the Kinki Region, made its North American premiere at the 25th New York Asian Film Festival. Its plot follows a familiar shape for anyone who has read a Ring knockoff: an editor at a fictional supernatural-interest publication, Ultra Mystery Magazine, vanishes, leaving behind newspapers, notes, and videotapes. A junior editor and a freelance researcher are handed the mess, and digging through it, they start falling into whatever swallowed him.
The Curse Gets a New Host
What makes Kinki worth tracking is the mechanism, not the mystery. Shiraishi’s earlier work built its horror around a documentary crew’s footage, since found footage has always needed a plausible reason for the camera to keep rolling. Kinki finds a 2026-appropriate answer instead: the curse travels through the auto-play videos its characters scroll past without thinking, the same mindless feed-refresh most horror movies have been too slow to weaponize. That detail updates three decades of j-horror curse logic, the videotape, the phone call, the chain email, for an audience that doesn’t rewind anything anymore.
It is also where the film’s smartest bit of design lives. A curse that used to require you to press play on purpose now just requires you to keep scrolling, which means every viewer walks in already implicated. The scares Shiraishi builds around missing-person social posts and a livestream that ends in a room full of nooses land harder because the audience recognizes the platform, not just the footage format.
A Genre Veteran, Not a Comeback
Framing Kinki as a Noroi sequel undersells what Shiraishi has actually been doing since 2005: he has directed found-footage horror steadily for two decades, including the genre crossover Sadako vs. Kayako in 2016. Kinki reads less like a comeback than a veteran refining a format he never actually left. Miho Kanno, who plays the freelance researcher pulled into the investigation, returns to horror after starring as the title character in 1998’s Tomie, giving the film a direct lineage to the J-horror boom Shiraishi grew up inside of.
The source material matters too. Kinki is adapted from a novel of the same name by Sesuji, structured as a collection of news clippings and interview transcripts, which received an English translation earlier this year. That structure, borrowed straight from the book, explains why the film’s first act plays like an anthology stitched from the missing editor’s abandoned research rather than a single continuous tape.
No release date has been set following the festival premiere, but a film this attuned to how horror actually spreads now, quietly, through a feed, deserves wider distribution than a single festival slot.
Quick Takes
- Koji Shiraishi’s found-footage horror film Kinki, internationally titled About a Place in the Kinki Region, premiered at the 25th New York Asian Film Festival.
- Kinki is the film most directly in conversation with Shiraishi’s 2005 breakthrough Noroi: The Curse.
- Kinki centers its curse on autoplay social media videos rather than a physical cursed object.
- Miho Kanno, who played the title role in 1998’s Tomie, stars as the freelance researcher investigating the disappearance.
- Kinki adapts a novel of the same name by Sesuji, which received an English translation earlier this year.
