What would you do if your new house seemed haunted? In Never After Dark, one family turns to a psychic medium for help. However, the house hides more than anyone expects.
Dave Boyle directs the new horror film. It draws inspiration from classic Japanese horror, or J-horror.
The movie uses eerie visuals, slow-building tension and a strong sense of dread. These elements recall the J-horror films that became popular around the world during the late 1980s and 1990s.
However, Never After Dark does more than pay tribute to the genre. Boyle uses familiar horror ideas and gives them a new direction.
The story also raises a simple question. Should we fear the dead, or should we fear the living?
Boyle sets about subverting J-horror
The film follows Airi, a psychic medium played by Moeka Hoshi from Shogun. Airi helps spirits cross over to the world of the dead.
Her latest case takes her to a large house in the woods. She arrives to perform a cleansing ritual. Soon, she encounters forces that push her far beyond her expectations.
The setup draws on several familiar J-horror themes. These include haunted houses, ghost stories and psychological fear.
Boyle wanted to respect those traditions while creating something different.
The director discussed the approach in an interview with Bloody Disgusting. He explained that the team studied classic J-horror and traditional Japanese ghost stories known as kaidan.
Many traditional stories feature a vengeful ghost. In many cases, the spirit comes from a female victim.
Boyle decided to challenge that familiar pattern in Never After Dark. The film takes a different approach to its central ghost and its connection to the story.
Fear the dead – or the living?
One prime example of the subversion is the ghost.
In Never After Dark, the ghost is not named, but he’s credited as the “slit-mouth man” or the “gaping mouth man” – a version of the popular Japanese folklore about the slit-mouthed woman.
This tells Japanese audiences, in particular, of the film’s apparent shift away from traditional ghost-related storytelling.
The theme also gets subverted.
Instead of fearing the dead, it could be argued that perhaps the living are much more terrifying.
Boyle moreover talked about working with a lot of veterans of the Japanese film industry, which he said brought “a real sense of history and experience”.
“They understood that we were trying to do something that was a little bit of a twist on the usual,” he explained.
Continuing the acclaimed J-horror phenomenon
Boyle is no stranger to the Japanese film industry.
He has worked with numerous Japanese cast and crew in his previous movies, such as his 2006 debut feature Big Dreams Little Tokyo, the 2014 mystery-thriller Man from Reno and his recent show House of Ninjas for Netflix.
Never After Dark, however, will be his first plunge into the horror genre.
And what better approach to take than to echo the J-horror classic phenomenon?
J-horror is known for its distinct, uncanny approach to the narrative, relying on lingering dread, haunting folklore and quiet tension rather than jump scares.
Popular J-horror classics that went beyond Japan’s doors include Ringu (1998), which told a story about a cursed videotape and gave audiences quite a scare through Sadako, the long-haired girl who crawls out of the well and television screens.
There was also Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), a story about a haunted house in Tokyo.
One of the definitive classics is techno-horror Pulse (2001) – which Boyle, incidentally, is set to reimagine in a new remake for Screen Gems, Spyglass and Parker Finn’s Bad Feeling.
There’s no definite timeline for that project yet, but Never After Dark hits American theatres on September 25 after its initial release earlier this year, just in time to get a scare fix right before Halloween.
It has garnered some rave reviews already, including from horror icon Stephen King, who called it “amazing and haunting”, and The Black Phone director Scott Derrickson, who praised it as “intelligent, unpredictable and bone-chilling”.
If you do intend to watch the film, this is perhaps a good time to remind you to never do it after dark – you may not know who’s watching with you.
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