I saw Marebito, and got kind of a cosmic horror of Lovecraft vibe, without the obvious convention of tentacle monsters. The movie kind of undermined that vibe near the end, by giving too much credence to the explanation, “He’s crazy, so maybe he made it all up.” In Lovecraft he might be crazy, but he would still be correct. I want Marebito to become an influential movie, like it’s onto a certain aspect of horror that isn’t done often enough in movies.
Here’s a related post from a horror blogger:
http://and-now-the-screaming-starts.blogspot.com/2009/12/movie-showing-monster.html
(He also questions the conventional wisdom of “don’t show the monster” in horror, which maybe I’ll talk about another time.)
Also, after seeing this movie I looked up the “Richard Shaver” stuff. It ties into a certain sort of mythology that kind of interests me, similar to mole men, reptilians, or Lemurians.
it’s really an indie film…he just tackled how japanese people tend to forget they social lives because of work(the scene where he was talking to the dead guy near the shore)…he mentioned words like how they were better of before leaving by the sea…it’s a fucking hard to understand metaphor…i had to see the movie twice just to understand it…i’m pretty sure that there are more to it that only people who really knows japanese culture would understand(too bad we’re not japanese lol)…
Maybe because I was looking for it, I ended up interpreting that on a much larger scale, like we were better off before we started to breathe air and walk on land. Which isn’t just criticizing recent Japanese culture but the very idea of civilization.