Pitched somewhere between Lake Mungo and Blair Witch Project (though it ends up edging closer to the latter - makes sense, as the former only came out three years later) Noroi is a Japanese faux documentary presented as the last video (VHS, of course) put out by an underground paranormal investigator/journalist.
The film within the film starts with our fearless journalist Kobayashi (Jin Muraki) investigating some weird, baby-like ghostly sounds manifesting in a family home. When he goes next door, where the sounds seem to be coming from, the neighbour chases him away. Investigating further, Kobayashi finds that the sounds from a recording do indeed sound like human babies - plural, and a bunch of dead pigeons near outside the neighbour's house.
Smash cut to black, with some text informing us the neighbour soon disappeared and the family that reported the sounds died in a car crash.
And so it goes: the film keeps accruing incidents like this, and ends up centering around three psychic individuals - a variety show actress (Marika Matsumoto, playing a fictionalized version of herself) who senses something paranormal while visiting a shrine; Kana (Rio Kanno), a young telepath girl who's soon abducted; And a barely coherent clairvoyant nutjob (Satoru Jitsunashi) who wraps himself in tinfoil and keeps screaming about psychic worms.
Sensing a connection, Kobayashi starts following up leads- Kana's disappearance, pigeons, Marika's unraveling psyche, a recurring word, mysterious deaths plaguing people tangentially involved in the case, and that pesky neighbour back from the first case, who keeps popping up in unexpected places. Sure enough, a pattern begins to appear, one centered around a flooded town and the rituals they performed to contain a malignant entity.
Noroi was made at the tail end of the 'classic' J-horror period, and it has several hallmarks of the sub-genre- most notably the narrative structure, a haunting that spreads like a disease, a creepy kid, and one of my least favorite tropes: an over-reliance on psychics. Other than that it mostly pivots back to a more subdued, traditional Japanese style of horror. I guess we'd call it folk-horror these days, and I'm very happy to report that warlocks do factor into the proceeds.
The mystery does end up making sense, most of the new pieces fitting into the story in a satisfying fashion, and the film is effectively creepy despite some misfires. It also nails the feel of an enthusiast documentary, but that comes with its own problems: mainly that there are no real characters in the piece - they're all completely one-dimensional. It makes sense for the format, but at the same time it makes the film a bit of a chore to get through, especially as it drags towards the two-hour mark.
Again owing to the mockumentary format, it's a pretty ugly-looking movie, all handheld cameras and lossy video - let's call it diegetic cinematography, with a soundtrack added in post. It doesn't do wonders for its watchability, but the realism adds to the film's queasy power. The acting is fine and the (very) limited effects are variable; An early ghostly 'glitch' is laughably cheesy in both conception and execution, but the one good glimpse we get of the big bad is memorably fucked up.
Director/co-writer Kōji Shiraishi is obviously a big fan of the genre; He'd get to make Sadako Vs. Kayako over a decade later with mixed (I'm being kind here) results, and he does a much better job on this one of capturing its appeal. Noroi isn't a lost J-Horror classic or anything like that - I'd recommend Kairo or Dark Water over it in a heartbeat. But it is a pretty effective, well-made attempt to fuse that genre's strengths with the found-footage craze.
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