[Review] The Howling Village
The premise of Howling Village appears, at first, to be standard J-Horror. A hidden village on the outskirts of town holds a dark secret. The sins of their ancestors haunt a family—with these themes, the precedent has long been set. Yet somehow, Takashi Shimizu has woven a unique story amongst a few cumbersome cliches and tiresome tropes, crafting a narrative that combines ghostly terrors with an inherited curse.
Inspired by a Japanese urban legend, Howling Village follows Kanada (Ayaka Miyoshi), a young psychologist gifted with second sight, as she searches for her brother after he goes missing wandering through the boarded-up tunnel of the ‘Howling Village’, a site rumored to be haunted. As she works to uncover the mystery of the village, she discovers that her own family has close ties to the legacy of those who once lived there and may have had a hand in the tragedy that befell them.
It seems Shimizu is borrowing from his own films, as much of the imagery is reminiscent of his earlier films. Shimizu had a hand in the early 2000s iteration of J-Horror with his seminal ghost story Ju-on: The Grudge (2002), continuing to make several sequels and even helm the wildly successful American remake The Grudge (2004). What was, at the time of his initial output in the genre, groundbreaking in the realm of supernatural horror, is now far too familiar to feel fresh. Wan, lifeless faces crawling from beneath bed covers no longer send the same chill up the spine, and white-robed specters appearing in the rearview mirror cause more groans than screams. They inundated the world of horror with recycled imagery, and despite Shimizu at one time being a pioneer of next-gen J-horror, he seems to have fallen into a trap of his own making.
That said, while Howling Village lacks innovative scares, it absolutely redeems itself with fantastic performances and a surprising third act. And truthfully, the depths Shimizu plunges with the themes of his films leave no doubt that he is a filmmaker who loves his craft and is not afraid to show his viewers the consequences of dastardly actions and the eternal sadness those spirits left behind will never escape.