Some of you will remember me saying this, but this is more for the folks who just showed up.  The Japanese do the very best ghost stories on the face of the earth.  Sure, we’ve got slasher flicks on lockdown and we invented the zombie movie, but the Japanese were telling ghost stories before America was a twinkle in Amerigo Vespucci’s eye.

But before I go any farther with this, I’m going to show you exactly what I’ll be talking about, right in advance.  Check out the synopsis for Exte, the upcoming Japanese ghost story movie.

Customs agents discover a huge amount of human hair along with the bald corpse of a young girl. This arouses the curiosity of Yamazaki, a mortuary employee with a hair fetish, particularly since the girl’s hair continues to grow. Now a mad hair-peddler with an endless stock of locks, Yamazaki hocks his wares to salons to be used for hair extensions. Meanwhile, Yuko, an up-and-coming hair stylist, is entrusted with the care of her timid and frightened niece, Mami, whose body bares the signs of abuse. It’s not long before death surrounds them and their extension-wearing clientele. The hair, it seems, has a life of its own, with lethal, vengeful intentions. And Yuko and Mami must untangle the mystery before more deaths occur.

This will be reaching video stores July 29th.

I’m just letting this sink in for a minute–yes, it’s a movie about ghosts and killer hair.  This is actually par for the course with the Japanese; killer hair was a part of major Japanese titles like Ju-On (which later became our Sarah Michelle Gellar nightmare The Grudge), and just plain lunatic movies have been part of the Japanese tradition of cinema for a long, LONG, time.  There are some real doozies out there–anyone interested in finding out just how deep the rabbit hole of crazy in Japanese cinema goes should try a film called Crazy Lips, but be forewarned–it’s just plain old insane.

The upshot is that, no matter how many horror movies you’ve seen, you’re going to be hard pressed to find parallels in Japanese cinema to anything BUT Japanese cinema.  The downshot is, of course,  you get movies about killer hair.

Speaking of killer hair, try the Grudge series trivia on Kwanzoo, and get your fill of trivia before they fill you full of hair.

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