Nowadays, one can only talk about Japanese horror cinema with a hint of nostalgia. The J-horror boom – the time where Japanese horror successfully resonated with the unvocalized fears of spectators all around the time, has long faded and most temporary films in the genre merely tread its well-worn thematical paths.

However, the fear of the cinemagoer to discover another formulaic Japanese horror film might lead him to avoid the genre all together and gloss over directors who seek to break the suffocating hold the Japanese cinema industry has over the genre. One director that might fall victim of such unfear treatment, is Ryota Kondo.

With his award-winning debut-feature film, Kondo plays with the formulaic mould to deliver a horror-tale that plays with the cruel hatefulness that festers within our unconscious and marks our repressed desires – a Freudian idea corroborated by decades of analytic treatment. The Otherworldly dimension within Missing Child Videotape resonates with our own Otherness, with the hate that lingers subdued behind our social facade of friendliness.

Kondo’s narrative commences in 2015. A bell rings throughout the woods. Keita Kodama (Rairu Sugita), a store clerk and occasional volunteer to search for missing children, successfully locates Shohei Matsushima (-) in the dark woods. The following day, Keita Kodama arrives home to discover that his mother has send him a box with an unnamed videotape. That very night, Keita asks his roommate Tsukasa Amano (Amon Hirai), who can perceive dead people, to watch the tape and the footage he made of his own brother’s disappearance in a mysterious abandoned building deep in the mountains.

Many critics and reviewers will praise Missing Child Videotape for balancing drama, mystery, and atmospheric horror so well, we cannot contend ourselves with such statement from a psychoanalytic perspective. Ryota Kondo’s film is, first and foremost, an exercise in exploiting the signifier and proving how central the signifier is in our experience of the world around us. 

In Missing Child Videotape, Kondo fluidly associates signifiers and visual objects to create a compelling narrative littered with small twists and sudden turns and thoughtfully orchestrates collisions of signifiers, whose echoes breathe life into the film’s dramatic dimension (e.g. Keita’s subjective position) and elevate the impact of the sinister unravelling of the mystery of Hinata’s disappearance and mount Mashiro (Structure-note 1).

Given Kondo’s emphasis on the signifier, it comes to no surprise that surges of visual horror are quite sparse within his narrative. While the importance of atmosphere will surely compel certain critics to draw comparisons between Ryota Kondo and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the way they ripple the mundane and call forth the sinister otherworldly is somewhat different. While the former relies on the reverberations of the signifier to puncture the mundane, Kurosawa employs subtle visual distortions within the frame to turns the mundane unheimlich and give the signifier a threatening quality.

The element of mystery is introduced within the narrative via the interactions between Tsukasa Amano and Mikoto Kuzumi (So Morita), a reporter interested in super-volunteer Keita. Mikoto, who eventually comes to investigate the link between the disappearances and the mountain throughout the narrative, introduces narrative elements that develop the sense of mystery in the narrative to the spectator – e.g. the disappearance of Keita’s brother, the strange call from Keita’s father.

However, the introduction of the disappearance of Keita’s brother by Amano, does not merely inaugurate the mystery of the mountain, but allows the spectator to grasp the profound impact this disappearance has on his subjective logic. Keita’s subjective logic is structured around the need to find missing children so that their loved ones do not have to suffer from the traumatic aftershocks (e.g. familial disintegration, lingering presence of a sense of guilt, being pitied, …etc.). In this sense, Keita does not merely search for missing children to assuage his guilt, but also to phantasmatically repair the cracked image of himself projected within the other. However, the otherworldly dimension that emanates from the mountain will force the spectator to reevaluate Keita’s subjective dynamic and unearth its true traumatic motor for him.

The dimension of mystery and the lingering sense of dread is visually supported by the darkish colour-design and faded lightning-design. Kondo’s thoughtful play lightning and colour-schemes helps him to create an atmospheric frame that amplifies the echoes of the signifier. For Kondo’s purposes – creating a horror of the signifier, slow dynamism is less suited. Kondo does not need to slowly intensify the unheimlich quality of narrative spaces like Kurosawa does.  

The faded lights constantly fight against the dark forces of shadows, accentuating the omnipresence of the ominous blackness. Characters are, beyond their knowledge, already embraced by the horror that lurks within the darkness of the visual frame. Stains of darkness are also present within exterior-scenes by virtue of characters draping themselves in black clothes and by the persistence of overly-present shadows in the background (e.g. trees, chairs, … etc.). The contrast between shadows and the faded lightning also helps in elevating Kondo’s shot-compositions, accentuating his carefully crafted compositional lines (e.g. frames within frames). 

Kondo’s horror of the signifier is also supported by a thoughtful approach to sound, diegetic (e.g. the sound of footsteps in the forest, a gust of wind, …) as well as non-diegetic (e.g. the subtle ominous sounds that emanate from the videotape and signal other otherworldly presences). While the former is employed to put the spectator on edge and seduce him with a sense of mystery, the latter is utilized, with elegance, to foreshadow the entanglement of the otherworldly. In fact, Ryota Kondo proves with Missing Child Videotape that he fully understands that what dictates the atmosphere within a horror genre film are the aural elements.

Kondo uses ominous musical accompaniment sparsely within his narrative. His choice to decorate narrative transitions, some dramatic moments and some sinister revelations or occurrences with subdued yet ominous compositions reaffirm Kondo’s commitment to call forth a sense of subtle dread from emphasising the signifier with a well-orchestrated blend of darkish photography and the diegetic and non-diegetic aural atmospheric elements.    

Ryota Kondo’s Missing Child Videotape proves that the emaciated and abused body of J-horror still has some life within it. Directors, like Ryota Kondo, understand that the golden-age of J-horror cinema cannot be replicated and one can only create something fresh by utilizing the lessons of the horror-masters to play with the suffocating confines that imprisons the genre.  

Notes:

Structure-note 1: Kondo, however, does not merely rely on the clash of signifiers to structure the unfolding of the mystery of Hinata’s disappearance, but also on failure of the signifier to materialize. Takeuchi’s utterance “As you may know, on that mountain …” attains a foreshadowing quality by being radically broken off and by emphasizing the putting into abeyance of a signified relevant to the case.

The answer to this question is slowly unravelled in the following concatenation of scenes.