If you have ever gone down the rabbit hole of Japanese shinrei (psychic video) mockumentaries, seeing Hiroki Iwasawa’s name attached to a new feature is immediately good news. Best known for his work on Honto ni Atta! Noroi no Video and Kidan Hyakumonogatari, Iwasawa wrote, directed, and edited A Story Beginning With Kuniko (クニコからはじまる話), which takes the infamous “Kuniko” segment from his 2015 horror anthology Shigazō (死画像) and builds an entire 115-minute feature around it.
For anyone who missed the 2015 clip, “Kuniko” presented itself as a local news report about the body of a missing girl named Kuniko Oikawa being found, right before the video signal starts warping into something seriously unpleasant. That segment picked up a genuine cult following among Japanese found-footage fans, and the new movie picks up the thread when a knife-wielding woman breaks into a paranormal documentary production office and badly injures a staff member – claiming a specific cursed videotape must be returned to where it came from or humanity is finished.
From there, an investigation crew tracks down an online conspiracy theorist who claims the tape was originally submitted to Shigazō and holds footage far worse than the Kuniko clip. Iwasawa bills the whole thing as a non-linear horror movie, jumping between seemingly unrelated pieces of recovered footage before tying them together, which honestly suits his rough-around-the-edges mockumentary style way better than a standard linear ghost story.
Yuji Takao, Nanami Amagai, Hajime Akie, Saki Yumi, Hakutsuki Shiomi, Minami Miyakoshi, and Kaho Fujii appear in the cast. The movie is already streaming on U-NEXT in Japan following its Japanese DVD release on 2 October 2026 (with the trailer included on the disc and wider streaming rollouts expected), and you can buy it here.
More Asian horror movie news.
- Erica – Japanese Psychological Horror Gets DVD Release in October
- The Origins of J-Horror Brings Six-Disc Collection of Japanese Horror to Blu-ray
- Tenement Gets Dark Sky Blu-ray Release This September
- The Sacred & The Cursed: Severin Brings Four Joko Anwar Horror Films Together in Huge Blu-ray
Collection - The Curse Gets Japanese DVD Release This October
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