One Way Ticket: Ghost Train (2026) Review

Director: Tak Se-woong

Notable Cast: Joo Hyun-young, Jeon Bae-soo, Choi Bo-min, Kim Ji-in, Kim Woo-kyum, Jung Han-bit, Kim Na-yeon, Lim Cheol-soo, Hyun Bong-sik

 

When it comes to a horror anthology, it’s always a joy to see how the creative team can conjure a structure, balance the stories, and make it all pay off. If you get it right, find the tone and keep up the pace, even if one or two of the smaller stories don’t hit fully, the whole retains its strengths.

For Ghost Train, director Tak Se-woong goes all in on the urban myth of a haunted train station, delivering a handful of great ghost stories and a surprisingly solid wraparound that presents each tale in a shockingly fun, modern way. If anything, the film often comes off as less of an anthology, particularly in the latter half, and it plays with expectations in fun ways that deliver jump scares without ever pulling away from the character piece and themes at its core. Needless to say, Ghost Train is a spooky, conceptually fun way to kick off 2026 in horror. 

 

Being in the content creation industry for a larger company is not always easy, and for Da-kyung, played by Joo Hyun-young, her horror YouTube channel is in danger of being drowned out by all the beauty tip channels. However, her latest series, which is based on the hauntings around a particular train station, has caught the eye of a young producer at her company. She schedules an interview with one of the station's workers, an older gentleman who should have plenty of stories, and as he shares each, she finds herself delving deeper into the realm of the supernatural. 

 

Daguerreotype (2016)

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Notable Cast: Tahar Rahim, Olivier Gourmet, Constance Rousseau, Mathieu Amalric, Malik Zidi

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has become not only a household name in the horror community, but has made a name for himself in the art circle as well and as a filmmaker he has been branching out of his usual genre of choice for the past several years now. Continuing to venture out from his regular choices, though being seemingly familiar once we get to it, Kurosawa has crafted a piece outside of Japan for his first non-Japanese language picture, to France, with the chilling romantic ghost tale, Daguerreotype a.k.a The Woman in the Silver Plate.

Pulse (2001)

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Notable Cast: Haruhiko Kato, Kumiko Aso, Koyuki, Kurume Arisaka, Masatoshi Matsuo, Shinji Takeda, Jun Fubuki, Shun Sugata, Show Aikawa, Koji Yakusho

“What got you started on the internet?”

“Nothing in particular…”

“You don’t like computers, right?”

“No.”

“Wanted to connect with other people?”

“Maybe. I don’t know…everybody else is into it.”

It’s a simple scene in the larger realm of Pulse. Two different people, a young man living on his own and a young woman who works on computers for a living, are brought together by a strange website asking a basic question, ‘Do you want to see a ghost?’ It’s their rather mundane interactions and somewhat awkward chemistry that really does encapsulate the entire concept and brilliance of this often-overlooked J-Horror classic, recently given the pristine Blu Ray collector’s treatment by Arrow Video. This is a film about a lot of things. Ghosts, friends, suicide, the fears of a technology and the cultural lag we feel as a society as it continually outpaces our understanding, yet it’s a theme of connection that truly grounds the entire film in a layered manner and lifts it above so many of its horror peers, in J-Horror and beyond. It’s a scene where two unconnected people are brought together in fate like means to try and make a connection that brings to life the subtle script and inspired atmospheric direction of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It’s perhaps not the most memorable, flashiest, scariest, or inspired scene, but it’s one that proves just how insightful Pulse is as a cinematic feat. This is a film that, like its ghosts and protagonists, crosses over into a must more philosophical and terrifying realm where the things on the surface are not always what they seem.  

Bamy (2016)

Director: Jun Tanaka

Notable Cast: Hironobu Yukinaga, Hiromi Nakazato, Misaki Tsuge, Toshi Yanagi, Yuki Katsuragi

Ghost stories in Japanese cinema have sort of faded away for the most part, aside from trying to squeeze out every drop of profit that companies can from franchises like Ju-On or Ringu, but J-horror (as dubbed by Western culture) in general is a dying genreas a whole, or is it? No, all jokes aside, Jun Tanaka takes the romanticized stories of ghosts that the likes of Kiyoshi Kurosawa has done before during the boom of the genre, and resurrected it and made it all his own by way of indie film making, with the chilling and overall creepy, Bamy.

Journey to the Shore (2015)

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Notable Cast: Tadanobu Asano, Eri Fukatsu, Kaoru Okunuki, Akira Emoto, Yu Aoi, Masao Komatsu

I walked away from this film as irritated as I was pleased and thankful that I had the chance to see this newest outing (save Creepy, which I think hasn't even opened in Japan yet) by longtime favorite of mine, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Retribution, Tokyo Sonata). It's a film that is slow, beautiful, heartbreaking, and at the same time it's uninteresting and dull in parts. Oddly, I think it works in the end, though I couldn't help but find myself not caring at moments, but I'll get to that later.