Mirages Are About to Appear: Ox-Head Village (2023) Review [Screambox Original]

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Notable Cast: Koki, Riku Hagiwara, Keiko Horiuchi, Rinka Otani, Haruka Imou, Akaji Maro, Satoru Matsuo, Fumiya Takahashi, Naoki Tanaka, Satoru Date, Riko

 

At just over the fifteen-minute mark in Takashi Shimizu’s latest horror flick, Ox-Head Village, our leading lady and her “not-boyfriend” go to a smaller seaside town looking to investigate a viral video.  An announcement over a loudspeaker is made, “the mirages are about to appear.” Everyone skitters to the water’s edge to see the mirages and Kanon, the lead character of this story played by Koki, starts to see the forms of people on the water. Ghostly people.

 

Although this would seem like the first ghostly images to start off a horror film, we’re already fifteen minutes into a Shimizu story. That means we’ve already seen plenty of visual trickery, ghostly images, and classic unnerving subtle spook work. Unattached hands, vague visages of oxen's head, and a minor case of doppelganger reflections. By the time these ‘mirages’ show up, Ox-Head Village has already been littering the landscape with classic J-horror visuals and tones. You’re damn right, it’s a Shimizu film. 

 

The first fifteen minutes of Ox-Head Village is a stark reminder of why the previously appointed sub-genre of J-Horror, an entire tone and style that Shimizu helped establish with his Ju-On (Grudge) films, can be so damn compelling. This third part of his “Village Trilogy,” which includes Howling Village and Suicide Forest Village, is Shimizu going back to the well that has kept him a staple of the haunted genre for decades. It’s also the best one of the trilogy. 

 

Putting the Cult in Cult Cinema: Yellow Dragon's Village (2023) [Screambox Original]

Director: Yugo Sakamoto

Notable Cast: Atomu Mizuishi, Mayu Suzuki, Takuya Matsumoto, Yuni Akino, Zingi Umemoto, Rikiya Kaidou, Yu Yasuda, Wataru Ichinose, Itsuki Fuji, Masayuki Ino, Kenta Osaka

 

Never underestimate the DIY indie film industry either. Sure, the big leagues and studio films have the money and time to make some impressive feats of cinema, but sometimes the most interesting slices of celluloid are the ones found in the cracks of the system. Take Yellow Dragon’s Village for instance. The film looks to be made by its on and off-screen creative teams for roughly $100 and the promise of shots at the local bar at the end of each day, but there is such a freedom to its playfulness that immediately strikes. 

 

While the film might be listed as a horror, sometimes a drama, on various platforms, it is far more than that. Yellow Dragon’s Village is premiere-low budget filmmaking at its finest, delivering a coy sense of humor along with its genre-bending play on expectations in a way that sets up its audience for one thing and then batters them with another. It uses its serious filmmaking concepts and then promptly, more than once, throws them out the window for the sake of toying with its audience.

 

Debuting on the streaming service Screambox, it’s that horror tag that represents the initial expectations that Yellow Dragon’s Village is playing with. Director Yugo Sakamoto, the one-man do-it-yourself filmmaker who delivered two (!) fantastic action films last year with A Janitor and Baby Assassins, tackles the horror genre with a story that starts off like any classic horror film. A group of college-aged youths find themselves stranded in the forest. It’s only when they stumble upon the titular village, where the locals offer to help them out, that they uncover a cult looking for their next sacrifice.