The Accursed

Movie Reviews (Popcorn Frights 2021): “Howling Village,” “Val,” and “The Accursed”

Howling Village Japanese director Takashi Shimizu takes viewers back to the heyday of J-horror — of which he was a big part, including helming Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003), and the American reimagining The Grudge (2004) — with his 2019 effort, Howling Village. Featuring hallmarks of the director such as an ever-present sense of dread and eerie figures lurking all around, this tale sees Kanata Morita (Ayaka Miyoshi in a fine performance), a doctor at a hospital, go down a deadly rabbit hole when her teenage brother Yuma (Ryota Bando) and his girlfriend Anika (Rinko Otani) go searching for the titular location — a place of urban legend — with tragic consequences. Kanata has been seeing strange figures at the hospital where she works — or has she? When the other members of her family act strangely in different manners, and Yuma goes missing when he tries to return to Howling Village, Kanata learns that there