Horror movies have seemingly unlimited ways to terrify people. From aliens to demons, ghosts, zombies, zombie-demon-ghost (I’m sure it exists), and on and on, you name it; it’s out there. Except for a handful of horror movies, the one thing almost all of them have in common (besides nearly everyone dying) is a monster in some shape or form. The brilliant and disturbing world of Japanese Horror, also known as J-horror, has given us some of the most bizarre and iconic monsters ever conceived.
From scaly monstrosities to ghostly children, here are the creepiest monsters ever created in Japanese horror movies.
11 Onibaba – Onibaba (1964)
.jpg)
Onibaba translates to “Demon Hag.” The film takes place in the 14th century and follows an old woman and her daughter-in-law struggling to get by. They dampen their financial hardships by killing soldiers they come across and selling their things. The movie is very down to earth, but things get supernatural when one fateful night, the old woman confronts a samurai general wearing a strange mask. He claims he wears the Hannya mask, which is not typically used for battle, to protect his handsome face.
Like all those before him, the old woman leads him to his demise, but this time is slightly different. When she tries to remove his mask, it is incredibly difficult, and once it finally pops off, flesh from his face comes with it, leaving him disfigured. When the Old Woman uses the mask for her own personal reasons, she finds it will not come off of her either. Ultimately, her daughter-in-law helps her remove it by cracking it open, revealing her face, now disfigured. This is the inescapable curse of the mask.
10 Yuki-onna – Kwaidan: The Woman of the Snow (1964)
Kwaidan is an anthology horror movie. It is adapted from stories of Lafcadio Hearn’s collections of Japanese folk tales. The film contains four stories, one being The Woman of the Snow.
During a snowstorm, two woodcutters take shelter in a hut. One of them is an older man who is killed by a Yuki-onna spirit. Yuki-onna translates to “snow woman.” She takes pity and spares the younger man’s life due to his handsomeness and youth. She leaves him with the stipulation that if he ever says a word of what happened to the other man, she will return and kill him. Later on, he meets a gorgeous young woman named Yuki, who is traveling through his town. The young man falls in love with Yuki, and they have three children together. One night, he tells her about the events that occurred with the Yuki-onna and that she looks strangely like the snow woman. She then reveals that she is the Yuki-Onna. A snowstorm suddenly hits, and she tells him she will not kill him because of their children, but if he treats them poorly, she will.
9 Kappa – Death Kappa (2010)
Death Kappa is a wild campy B-movie parody of a Kaiju film. A young washed-up J-pop singer, Kanako, returns to her small town to see her grandma, who is instantly hit by a car of drunk teens, who then… keep on driving and then, crash into the shrine of a mummified Kappa. The shrine is launched into the ocean, and then the Kappa is brought back to life! The Kappa meets Kanako and loves her awful songs. They become friends, but then it turns out scientists are trying to get the Kappa to use its DNA to turn people into superhuman fish people. They capture Kanako, and Kappa comes to save her. But that doesn’t work out great because a nuclear bomb is set off, killing… all of them. Yep. Movie over? No. Just then! For no reason, a giant Godzilla-type monster shows up and starts destroying the town.
Thanks to the nuke, Kappa is now huge. And an epic fight ensues, the town gets pulverized, lots of civilians die, and, of course, Kappa wins the battle. Oh, and then Kanako somehow survives a nuclear blast to the face and shows up at the end, topping off one of the most insane films ever made. While the Kappa is not the antagonist of this story, he earns a rightful place on the list because the design is, without a doubt, one of the most creepy things you’ll ever see.
8 Rokurokubi – Yôkai Kidan (2006)
Yôkai Kidan is a bizarre film that features three actresses dealing with a physical transformation into Yokai, which are, in Japanese folklore, spirits, ghosts, and monsters.
Out of the three girls, one, in particular, is by far the creepiest. The two that are undoubtedly unsettling but don’t take the top spot are Mihiro Iwasaki, a model obsessed with what others think about her, and her fingernails eventually grow, to unnatural lengths, virtually become weapons. The other is Mana Saeki, a high schooler with a lousy attitude and trusts no one. She turns into what is known as a Nopperabo, which is a yokai with no face. And the girl that takes the cake for the creepiest of the bunch is Michiko Yamane, an introverted college student who, by night, metamorphosizes into a Rokurokubi, a female yokai with a long snake-like neck.
7 Noroi – The Curse – Noroi (2005)
Noroi, also known as Noroi: The Curse is about a paranormal writer and journalist making a documentary titled “The Curse.” After his last investigation, his house burned down, killing his wife, and he went missing. The film is mainly found footage but a mix and match of different styles. There is some B-roll spliced in, some more or less semi-pro documentary-style footage, and some unprofessional videographer footage such as The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield.
The curse is caused by a demon named Kagutaba, that was summoned in a ritual, but things got out of hand, and the demon possessed a woman. We do not see the demon’s physical form. There’s really only one part where a boy’s face is bloodied and distorted, resembling the shape of the mask of the demon, and it is incredibly creepy.
Despite the monster not having much of a physical presence, Noroi: The Curse is beyond just creepy, with little crawling demon fetuses, ghosts, and a lot of people dying. This film is a must-see if you are a fan of found footage horror.
6 Biollante – Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989)
Godzilla vs. Biollante, is not just another Godzilla movie. Well, it is, but it has a much higher weirdness factor than most. Although Godzilla is the most iconic and legendary Japanese movie monster of all time, he’s more fierce and imposing than creepy. Today, even a bit more lovable. On the other hand, Biollante is undoubtedly the most bizarre monster in the Godzilla universe and one of the creepiest Japanese movie monsters ever. She (yes, it’s a she) is a weird mashup of a rose, a human, and Godzilla.
The monster has two forms: a monstrous rose with teeth and the other, a colossal Godzilla-like monstrosity with tentacle-like vines with mouths of their own. The backstory of Biollante is tragic. She is the result of a scientist trying to preserve his dying daughter by splicing her cells with a unique rose bush and then adding Godzilla cells to make it indestructible. Needless to say, it doesn’t go well, and the end result is horrifying.
5 Teketeke – Teketeke (2009)
Teketeke is based on a relatively new Japanese urban legend that started around the 1960s. The tale of TekeTeke is that the terrifying and vindictive ghost of a schoolgirl who was sliced in half by a train, leaving the spirit with no lower extremities, will appear and kill young girls if they are by train tracks or nearby toilets.
One of the creepiest attributes of this spirit, other than only being half of a young girl, is that she doesn’t get around simply by floating like the typical spooky ghost; instead, she runs at abnormally fast speeds on her hands, creating a bizarre sound that resembles the sound of “teketeke” thus, the origins of the name. The Teketeke’s motive is that she was picked on in school, and her demise came when some cruel school girls prank her while waiting for a train. The prank scared her so much that she fell on the tracks resulting in her being sliced in half. So now, she hunts down girls and cuts them in two at the waist, so they will look just like her.
4 Kuchisake-onna – Kuchisake-onna (Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman) (2007)
Kuchisake-onna, also known as Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman is based on a Japanese urban legend. The legend is that a tall long black haired woman with a white mask, and a grotesque slit across her mouth, goes around kidnaping children. She carries an absurdly large pair of scissors, and if you come across her, she will ask, “Am I pretty?” If you say yes, she will show you her mutilated face, and if you get scared and respond yes again, she will give you the same scares she has; if you say no, well, that’s all she wrote.
The movie revolves around a town that Kuchisake-onna plagues. One of the local elementary school teachers meets with a young girl who claims her mother abuses her. But when the young girl runs off, the slit-mouthed woman grabs her. The girl knocks Kuchisake-onna’s white mask off, and the teacher sees the scars and now knows the legend is true. Unfortunately, no one believes her when she explains who took the little girl. Eventually, she and another teacher encounter Kuchisake-onna while she is trying to kidnap a little boy. They manage to kill the spirit, but once she dies, her body changes into someone else.
Since the spirit can possess and evidently jump from one body to another, evading death, it seems virtually indestructible. This little detail significantly adds to the fear factor of this terrifying ghost, making her one of the scariest on this list.
3 The Iron Man – Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a surreal and unbelievably disturbing body horror film that is not only incredibly creepy but is perhaps the hardest movie to watch out of everything on this list. Tetsuo: The Iron Man is about a metal fetishist who implants a metal rod in his leg. Unfortunately, his gruesome little experiment goes awry. When he sees his wound festered with maggots, he runs out into the street horrified and gets hit by a car driven by a Salaryman.
Later on, the Salaryman starts sprouting metal pieces from his skin. He has heated dreams of screeching metal, and more and more metal overtakes his body. Without spoiling too much, the fetishist returns, and things get increasingly bizarre as the fetishist pursues the Salaryman. There is imagery in this film that is so unsettling you have to see it for yourself to believe.
2 Ju-on: Ju-on: The Curse (2000)
Ju-on: The Curse, better known for its American remake The Grudge, revolves around several different people who have experiences with a cursed house. The curse is a young pale, lifeless boy, and his similar-looking mother haunts and kills whoever enters the house. There is no way out of it either; it’s all over once you enter. The story goes that the mother, who documented her love for another man in her journal, is passionately killed by her husband in a bout of rage when he finds out. Killing with so much anger caused her to become a Ju-on, a vengeful curse. The boy’s demise is never evident, but he, too, haunts their home.
They are incredibly creepy, and although the Japanese original had a lower budget than the American remake, it is still, in many ways, better. The narratives vary in a handful of ways, and the American version relies more on jump scares and less on flat-out unsettling moments with the spirits of the house. Even if you have seen the American remake, Ju-on: The Curse is one of the most groundbreaking films in J-horror and is a must-see.
1 Sadako – Ringu (1998)
The most famous and iconic J-horror monster in Japanese and American culture is the ghost Sadako from Ringu. You may know Sadako better from the popularized American version The Ring, where she is known as Samara. While Ringu and Ju-on are not as grotesque as a film like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, they are much more creepy. Both Ju-on and Ringu carry such popularity there was even a film made where they both battle it out. Nevertheless, Ringu started it all and takes the top prize. The story of Ringu is about a reporter who teams up with her ex-husband to discover the dark secret behind a cursed videotape. The way the curse works is that if someone watches the videotape, this pale terrifying long black-haired dead girl, Sadako, will come crawling through your TV and kill you seven days later.
There is one way out of this unfavorable predicament; one can make a copy of the tape and have someone else watch it, essentially passing the curse on to them. If not, Sadako’s ghost will be paying you a visit. Although there is a way to evade death by Sadako, making her not quite as daunting as Ju-on, there is something significantly more unsettling about her. Ringusingle-handedly popularized J-horror, leaving a whole generation of viewers with dread every time their TV went static. While the American version is considered more widely acclaimed, the original is very much worth the watch, even with a lower budget.