I’ve been a fan of Koji Shiraishi ever since I watched Noroi: The Curse, one of the best Asian found footage horror movies I have seen, and if you’re a fan of his as well, he is also behind a film called Kinki, also known as About a Place in the Kinki Region (Kinki Chihō no Aru Basho ni Tsuite), released in Japan in August of 2025, which I have not yet watched, but Kinki looks like it’s playing around with familiar Shiraishi ideas as he did in Noroi.
This Is Exactly the Sort of Thing Shiraishi Is Good At
Kinki is about an editor working for an occult magazine who disappears while investigating a collection of strange incidents around the Kinki region of Japan that brings freelance occult writer Chihiro Seno, played by Miho Kanno, into the investigation alongside Yusei Ozawa, played by Eiji Akaso.
They both then begin going through the material the missing editor had collected, which includes stories about missing children, strange accidents, mass hysteria, unexplained events and supposedly supernatural locations, before they start finding links between them.
That’s really the bit that interests me personally, as I’m a sucker for this sort of horror where you get a collection of seemingly unrelated incidents that all comes together by the end, and obviously, Noroi: The Curse is the comparison that’s going to come up, and I’m perfectly happy with that because it’s a damn good comparison to have.
Shiraishi has spent a lot of his career playing around with found footage, documentary horror, urban legends and supernatural investigations, so a story built around an occult magazine editor disappearing while investigating bizarre incidents seems almost tailor-made for him really, doesn’t it?
The original novel by Sesuji that the film is based on also has an interesting background – it started out online and was constructed through different pieces of information rather than simply being presented as a straightforward horror story, which included things like articles, interviews and forum-style material.
The film also doesn’t seem simply about one famous Japanese ghost, either, as it also draws on the wider world of Japanese urban legends, kaidan and stories about supposedly cursed or supernatural places, and that’s certainly something I find particularly interesting about Japanese horror – somebody hears something, somebody else adds another detail, then eventually you’ve got a story that’s been repeated so many times that nobody knows where it started, and Kinki seems to take that idea and turn the whole process into the mystery.
I’m Definitely Keeping This One on My List
I’m not going to pretend I know yet whether Kinki is going to hit the same level as Noroi, because that’s a pretty high bar, as I mentioned, but that’s not really what I’m looking for anyway, and if Shiraishi can take that same feeling of slowly uncovering something horrible and combine it with the source material’s fragmented storytelling, I think there is a lot of potential here.
Kinki (About a Place in the Kinki Region) was released in Japan on August 8, 2025, with a runtime of 103 minutes, and Tetsuya Oishi and Shiraishi handling the screenplay from Sesuji’s original novel.
The main cast includes Eiji Akaso as Yusei Ozawa, Miho Kanno as Chihiro Seno, and Atom Shukugawa.
Trailer
Check out these other Japanese horror movies too.
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