Masters of horror: Imprint

Completely agree. The Japanese have always mastered freaking me out. The US horror is mostly cheese except for a few exceptions IMHO.

There was one out of Korea a few years back "The Host" that I really liked. It's more of a monster movie, but it's one of the best ones made IMO (better than any American attempt IMO). Check it out if you get a chance.

I like the Masters of Horror series, but chose not to watch Imprint. I have asked my niece to watch it (she likes this stuff) and let me know how bad it is.

I saw Imprint a number of years ago - amazingly well done short! Surely the very definition of horrific

Have the DVD - re-watched it a few months back. I really liked it, and it stands up to repeated viewing.

Buckethead wrote a song about this...

+ YouTube Video

My niece finished watching it with her friend, she said it was one of the weirdest things she's ever seen. There was a lot of laughing and repetition of the phrase "wtf".

The Japanese are the kings of disturbing stories! There's a big difference between North American "BOO!" horror movies and the continual progression of a disturbing storyline or environment.

For example, the Resident Evil series is more "BOO!" scary, but the Silent Hill series is more "crap-your-pants-and-cry-in-a-corner" scary... Although in that case, they're both made my Japanese companies. I forget where I was going with this, so I'll just comment how the Americans will probably rip it off with an english version in a few years.

Asia, especially Japan, is putting out its share of crap too. How many times can they make a bunch of teenagers jump in front trains or have a haunted school house? I hate teenagers and kids in horror films--Mostly. Japan's always done a better job at ghost stories. Most of the current golden age is about style rather than serious story telling, although there's some very good stuff. "Ju-On" is a good example of style making the limited gore seem like it's done with taste. They do seem to be in their heyday, though. It was the same with Italy. My two favorites are the unintelligible "A Tale of Two Sisters" and "Shikoku", despite a cheesy B-movie ending (and despite being from a previous millenium). I like the modern Japanese ghost stories enough that I went back looking for older films by Nobuo Nakagawa, Masaki Mori, Yoshikiro Ishikawa, Goro Katano, etc. And, of course, "Kwaidan" is just required.

The US and ROW seems to have climaxed in 2002. Actually, it was more like a short-lived resurrection from 1999-2002, after being dead for nearly 20 years. Still, I think the best films of the last decade or so are the creepy as Rosemary's Baby "May", the opera adaptation "Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary", (both from 2002), and H P Lovecraft Historical Society's "The Call of Cthulhu", and "The Others". If I try to list some of the other rather good Japanese films, the list ends up being rather long, and there's a bunch from the USA that'd fit in.

Did I mention the pornographic "Blind Beast" from 1969? Or the very silly "Matango" aka. "Attack of the Mushroom People" from 1963?

Re Masters of Horror. My favorite from that series is "Dreams in the Witch House", but I'm a huge fan of Lovecraft.

Oh, man... I could talk about horror films for weeks... If you like the Japanese stuff... have you seen "The Abandoned"?

You know... there've been horror films for 100 years. You might want to take a trip back in time.

Rape and torture are painful for me to watch. Oddly enough, I can watch the opening to Saving Private Ryan with no problem, however. Brutality or bodies hacked up don't bother me at all. I can rationalize that somehow more than the other.

I basically cringed for over and hour during Pan's Labrynth. A very good movie but just brutal with torture.

Anything Takashi Miike is WTF fodder.
Awesome episode, a notch creepier than Jenifer.