Noroi doesn’t bother with anything like that. Cloverfield’s Rob and Beth begin the story by pretending they’re not in love, and confess they love each other just before the bombs start to drop. The Blair Witch Project’s Heather begins the story as an overconfident amateur filmmaker, and ends by admitting she’s in way over her head. Most found-footage movies at least try to sneak in a few traditional cinematic building blocks, like character arcs. In theory, this is what most found-footage horror movies attempt to do-but Noroi’s purity is rarer than you might think. This is the unconventional but successful trick at the heart of Noroi: By refusing to follow the beats and tropes of a normal horror movie, it ends up feeling real. And because Kobayashi is experienced, the "found footage" is edited more like a conventional documentary meant to entertain and inform a mass audience, which means that Noroi-even at nearly two hours-is paced more like a real film than some weirdo’s old home movie. Because the character holding the camera is supposed to be a professional cameraman, Noroi largely avoids the headache-inducing shaky-cam popularized by legions of Blair Witch Project imitators. This immediately fixes several problems that typically plague found-footage movies. So what makes Noroi stand out from the dozens of bad, cheap imitators that cropped up in the wake of The Blair Witch Project, which came out five years earlier? Director Kōji Shiraishi makes one brilliant choice upfront: Unlike most found-footage movies-which are usually presented as raw footage shot by a doomed amateur- Noroi is introduced as a mostly-completed "documentary" crafted by a seasoned journalist. Found-footage movies have a bad reputation among horror fans-which is fair, since most of them are terrible.
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