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The story
A casual chat about “the scariest horror movie” caught fire on 5ch’s “Anything Goes Live” board (Nandemo Jikkyou G). Opinions split over just how well-known REC (the 2007 Spanish POV horror film) really was, and the conversation spread to the appeal of mockumentary horror and terrifying scenes from Japanese films and game adaptations like Silent Hill, Kairo (Pulse), and Kuru (It Comes).
What people said
They just ran one recently
Forget who it was, but it had some comedian in it
Then there was Part 3, though…
It got that much buzz and still counts as a hidden gem?
Well, even Terminator turns into a dud by part 3, so it can't be helped
Come to think of it, a horror series that actually gets scarier by part 3 is genuinely impressive then
Was it really that big a deal back then?
It Follows: 'Yeah, fair'
In Japanese horror, it's usually the protagonist who starts the brawl
Mockumentaries are unfair – they're entertaining whether they're goofing around or playing it dead serious
The Iinuma family (from Noroi) were pretty scary
Pretty sure it was shot on a tiny budget with a home camera, but it got news coverage for being insanely scary and entertaining – didn't it pull a decent audience in Japan too?
Huh, is that so… I only found out about it from a magazine ad back then
so I had no idea how much coverage it got on TV or online
Reminds me of The Blair Witch Project
That one was scary
I was deep into horror back then so I assumed it was famous, but maybe to the general public it actually was a hidden gem?
Just going by personal experience, but nobody around me had heard of it, so I always figured it was in that category
I thought REC got some buzz back then alongside Cloverfield as a POV-style film, but maybe that's just how it was
Love the scene where they're like 'we're getting out of here!', break down the entrance, and it's not outside at all – just more hallway
It's more unsettling/gross-out than scary, and there are a few things you could nitpick, but it was pretty solid overall
Horror movies like this that work as a microcosm of society are great – Chirudo was good too
If so, I'd like a quick rundown of your thoughts
The Passenger was pretty decent
Hyouketsu was garbage. I suspect the director shot it without really understanding the script…
The only cases I can think of where the go-to exorcist loses are Sadako vs. Kayako and The Medium (Megami no Keishou)
In Kuru (It Comes) and Cult-type films, after the good side loses, something absurdly strong just shows up from behind anyway
Kuru (It Comes) is pure despair
Rie Shibata 😭
Re: #112
I'd forgotten the title, but that's the one I had in mind – so it's 'Kuru,' huh
Feels like a bunch of masters/experts kept dying in it
Right at the start, when the creature comes shambling toward you from a distance, I let out a 'gah…'
I love the original game too, and I was really satisfied [with the movie]
But the sequel the same director recently put out was honestly disappointing 😔
Silent Hill is scary and fun, but it feels like it's a bit different in flavor from your typical creature-horror adventure somehow
This scene was crazy scary
This is the only scene I know, but apparently they deliberately avoided walking like a normal person or something
Makes me wonder if the almost-stumbling part was intentional or genuine
The Western film 'Less-' might come kind of close
I feel like It Follows kind of ends up being that inevitably
since it just keeps following you the whole way
A Journey Through the Night
Background and Key Points
REC (2007) is a Spanish found-footage horror film – a Barcelona news crew trapped in a quarantined apartment building with a demonic-infection outbreak – shot on a low budget with handheld cameras, echoing the shoestring approach of The Blair Witch Project years earlier. It spawned sequels of diminishing regard (poster 33 name-drops “Part 3” as the point where the series lost its footing) and inspired the American remake Quarantine. Worldwide it grossed roughly 3.5-3.8 billion yen, a number one poster (74) actually looked up mid-thread, but nobody could pin down its Japan-specific box office. That gap is the crux of the disagreement: was REC genuinely a cult “hidden gem” in Japan, or did it get real news and magazine coverage that just didn’t reach everyone? Posters split along personal exposure lines – some recall TV/net buzz and comparisons to Cloverfield’s contemporaneous POV wave, others recall zero word-of-mouth among peers and only a magazine ad.
Readers unfamiliar with Japan’s horror-fandom landscape should note that “hidden gem” (穴場/知る人ぞ知る) claims here are anecdotal, not box-office fact – nobody in the thread produces actual Japan distribution figures, ticket sales, or DVD rental data, so the “was it famous or not” debate never actually resolves. It’s easy to assume a film’s international reputation among horror devotees maps onto general-audience awareness in a specific market, but that’s exactly the assumption the thread exposes as untested. The tangent into Japanese titles like Noroi, Kairo, and Kuru also shouldn’t be read as evidence about REC’s popularity – it’s a separate, parallel discussion about what makes Japanese-style horror scary (creeping dread and psychic mediums) versus Western horror’s tendency toward physical confrontation, not a comparison of box office reach.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyou G) thread “What’s the scariest horror movie, huh 😨”.
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