Corpse Party is one of those movies that you either get or you don’t. There’s little to gain from explaining the lo-fi aesthetics, the purposefully stilted drama, and the movie’s particular brand of violence. To some moviegoers, this will be a completely baffling, laughable film. To others, this emerges as a strangely effective tribute to a particular era and genre of Japanese cinema. Corpse Party is enjoyable in a very specific context. This doesn’t make it good, exactly, but it makes it successful in what it wants to accomplish.
The film follows seven high school students, a teacher, and the younger sister of those students. The nine of them perform a seemingly harmless ritual that’s intended to keep them in contact even after one of them leaves. It instead transports them to a cursed dimension, one that has links to the bloody history of their school. This unlucky few must flee from the violent spirits roaming the halls of this dimension, and figure out how to appease them and get back to their own dimension.
The film splits the characters up pretty quickly and has them dealing with a bunch of various issues. One girl is secretly in love with another girl. Another girl is jealous of her classmate for having her affection reciprocated. One of the guys secretly pines for that girl. And so on. In the midst of all this danger, the film puts focus on the various entanglements of these young people. Ultimately, this isn’t a movie about a sledgehammer-wielding monster or terrifying ghost children. This is a story of what lies beneath the placid surface of young relationships, the turmoil that each of these teenagers feels, brought into the light by the strangeness of their situation.
If one goes into this movie expecting a typical modern J-horror film, then one will leave disappointed. There isn’t much in here in the way of jump scares, or longhaired women shambling towards the camera. The film hews to an older tradition of Japanese cinema, resembling the much more subversive b-movies of the early 80s. If you try to parse this plot using standard logic, then it won’t hold up, either. The way they solve the mystery is pretty inane. But what matters, in the end, is that these young people, who at the start of the film appear to be perfectly normal, happy movie teenagers, turn out to be something else.
The film’s lo-fi aesthetics solidify its more classical roots. There is some use of visual effects, but none of it is any good. The use of CGI, is in fact, quite horrible, but that might actually help the aesthetic. The gore is mostly practical, though we don’t get to see some of it in the local version, which appears to have sanitized to a degree. The acting is what it is. It is in no way natural, but that seems to be the directive in this film. These kids aren’t meant to be having naturalistic conversations. Their stiltedness is another contributor to the effect.
This is all to say that Corpse Party isn’t for everyone. One has to have a little appreciation for irony and camp. And it might help to not be so attached to the way horror is done now. People have now been conditioned to expect horror movies to do one thing and one thing only: startle them every now and then with a scary image. But horror used to be a very low-budget way to tell stories of the darkness that lies just beneath the veneer of civilization, a way of exposing the violence that we keep tamped down in these supposedly peaceful times. Corpse Party belongs to that tradition, and it even does it well.
My Rating:
