Virality and infection are potent wellsprings of horror for director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. But rather than dealing with biological disease, his films explore transmissions of other types. In Pulse (2001), the source of contamination is the internet. In Creepy (2016), it is a mysterious drug administered by a seemingly nondescript man to his neighbours which makes them do terrible things. And in Cure (1997), the most perfect of the three, the sickness spreads by way of something which shouldn’t even be named, because to name it would be to spoil it, and some movies really shouldn’t be spoiled.
A young man in a long coat walks aimlessly along the beach, looking like he’s been blown in on an evil wind… But even that is saying too much.
A detective’s wife forgets to load the wet clothes in the dryer before she runs it… But even that is saying too much.
The detective eats his meals alone at a diner… But even that is saying too much.
"...the sickness spreads by way of something which shouldn’t even be named, because to name it would be to spoil it, and some movies really shouldn’t be spoiled."
Now, one way to talk about the film concretely yet without giving it away is to talk structurally. I don’t think I’ll ruin anyone’s surprise by describing Cure, in the parlance of horror-theorist Noël Carroll, as a movie with a long Onset, a procedural-style Discovery, a quick and confused Confirmation, and a similarly speedy Confrontation.
Carroll, in his book The Philosophy of Horror (Routledge, 1990), says that most works of horror track along an arc of Onset, Discovery, Confirmation, and Confrontation. Onset events would be early phenomena, in which the audience sees things that are unexplained. Think of the opening section of Halloween (1978). We see a gruesome stabbing through the murderer’s eyes before we realize that they belong to a young child named Michael Myers.
Discovery is the stage when we begin to learn about the monster, although its existence is still somewhat in doubt. In Halloween, this happens when Dr. Loomis shows up in Haddonfield and makes the sheriff go with him to the old Myers house. They find the door has been smashed and inside, the corpse of a dog. This evidence points towards the existence of Michael Myers, and tells us something about his nature. Yet, while the sheriff agrees that it’s odd, he’s still not convinced (those who have seen the movie know that this disbelief will have disastrous consequences for the sheriff).
Fantastical things are by their very nature hard to believe. So, Horror plots often require the stage of Confirmation, in which the evidence first presented in Discovery slowly becomes irrefutable. Think how long it takes for the reality of the alien in The Thing (1982) to be accepted by the group. Kurt Russell’s character, R.J. MacReady has to threaten his co-workers with a flamethrower, tie them all down, and make them watch as he tests their blood one by one until the infected blood irrupts in a spasm of alien violence. This is Confirmation, and it’s crucial because it plays into the question of knowing—having certainty, confirmation of belief—which is one of the foundational pleasures of fiction. Then, after we have confirmed the identity of the monster — once we know its strengths and hopefully its weaknesses — we can chase it through a subterranean tunnel system with dynamite in a climactic Confrontation.
I enjoy Carroll’s framework and find it useful for understanding the structure of horror plots. But, of course, there are as many variations as there are works of horror. Some, for example, go right from Onset to Confrontation, skipping over Discovery almost entirely. Alien is such a film, wherein the crew of the spaceship Nostromo learns about the existence of the alien at pretty much the same time as it bursts out of Ian Holm’s stomach. Immediately, they begin fighting it. There’s no quibbling about the existence of the monster; there is no recalcitrant sheriff here who needs to be convinced.
Cure is notable for being a film structured around a weak Confirmation. Information remains unclear. It’s not certain who has the right theory. Before watching Cure, I never really understood the power of Confirmation in the Carrollian sense. But take Confirmation out of a story and its absence creates havoc in the mind. We know there is a mystery and we are itching to solve it. One secondary effect of watching Cure, which parcels out its information so sparingly, is to become aware of just how much other films spoon-feed us all the solutions to their riddles.
Cure plays it so close to the chest that even its title remains uncertain. What is the disease? What is the cure? The itch grows more intense, but the film won’t say. By withholding so much, by denying certainty and promoting ambiguity, it gives us something better: the gift of dread, an emotion at once dubious, potent, and delightful. In Cure’s case, the effect is so strong you’ll practically break out in a rash.
The film contains some truly shocking images. In a sign of the film’s savvy, they are only on screen in brief flashes, yet they’ve stuck with me, and I can still picture them in great detail; a corpse handcuffed to a pipe which the police label a suicide, a psychology lab in the middle of a deserted warehouse, a monkey with its arms crossed, a man languidly flicking his lighter. They come unbidden into my mind at least once a week.
"Sometimes, when I see the images from Cure in my head, I wonder if the film has infected me? And what does that really mean?"
Sometimes, when I see the images from Cure in my head, I wonder if the film has infected me? And what does that really mean? What is the nature of these intrusive film memories, which, in our film-drenched culture, are as common as cable TV? They are a symptom of our contemporary culture, which is now homogenous and national, i.e., any nine-year-old lucky enough to be watching TNT at the right time can see Gwenyth Paltrow’s head in a box at the climax of Se7en. As such they are deeply generic. Yet at the same time, because they touch us in our emotional wellsprings, they are deeply personal. This combination, in which media products become guideposts to our interior emotional landscape is deeply creepy. And like any good virus, the way we feel about it doesn’t really matter because whether they make us nervous or crave more, these intrusive film memories have already been synthesized with our systems.
For me, the one that comes to mind most clearly is the reptilian face of Eric Roberts as he forces a woman to give him fellatio. I saw this scene late at night in a hotel room in upstate New York. I was there working for a junkyard company, the lowest man on a crew that was going to spend five days cutting up scrap metal at a stone quarry. I was rooming with Rick, a small, deeply bitter, highly competent man who liked to sleep with the TV on. I had trouble sleeping on that trip. I’d wake periodically to the light of the screen. Once it happened to be that flash of evil Roberts. I think now that the movie must have been Star 80, about the death of Dorothy Stratten, but I didn’t know that at the time. I only remember the one brief scene.
The camera stays on Eric Roberts’ face as the woman goes down out of frame. We don’t see her, but the implication is clear. He looks off to the side, totally blank, smoking a cigarette, his face capturing some terrible quality of violence that scared me because it felt so true. It spooked me then, and I can still picture it now. I can practically see the silhouette of my feet under the covers as I look down the length of my body at the screen. I never expected to spend so much time thinking about Eric Roberts while cutting with an acetylene torch, but there you have it.
Virality and infection are potent wellsprings of horror for director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. But rather than dealing with biological disease, his films explore transmissions of other types. In Pulse (2001), the source of contamination is the internet. In Creepy (2016), it is a mysterious drug administered by a seemingly nondescript man to his neighbours which makes them do terrible things. And in Cure (1997), the most perfect of the three, the sickness spreads by way of something which shouldn’t even be named, because to name it would be to spoil it, and some movies really shouldn’t be spoiled.
A young man in a long coat walks aimlessly along the beach, looking like he’s been blown in on an evil wind… But even that is saying too much.
A detective’s wife forgets to load the wet clothes in the dryer before she runs it… But even that is saying too much.
The detective eats his meals alone at a diner… But even that is saying too much.
"...the sickness spreads by way of something which shouldn’t even be named, because to name it would be to spoil it, and some movies really shouldn’t be spoiled."
Now, one way to talk about the film concretely yet without giving it away is to talk structurally. I don’t think I’ll ruin anyone’s surprise by describing Cure, in the parlance of horror-theorist Noël Carroll, as a movie with a long Onset, a procedural-style Discovery, a quick and confused Confirmation, and a similarly speedy Confrontation.
Carroll, in his book The Philosophy of Horror (Routledge, 1990), says that most works of horror track along an arc of Onset, Discovery, Confirmation, and Confrontation. Onset events would be early phenomena, in which the audience sees things that are unexplained. Think of the opening section of Halloween (1978). We see a gruesome stabbing through the murderer’s eyes before we realize that they belong to a young child named Michael Myers.
Discovery is the stage when we begin to learn about the monster, although its existence is still somewhat in doubt. In Halloween, this happens when Dr. Loomis shows up in Haddonfield and makes the sheriff go with him to the old Myers house. They find the door has been smashed and inside, the corpse of a dog. This evidence points towards the existence of Michael Myers, and tells us something about his nature. Yet, while the sheriff agrees that it’s odd, he’s still not convinced (those who have seen the movie know that this disbelief will have disastrous consequences for the sheriff).
Fantastical things are by their very nature hard to believe. So, Horror plots often require the stage of Confirmation, in which the evidence first presented in Discovery slowly becomes irrefutable. Think how long it takes for the reality of the alien in The Thing (1982) to be accepted by the group. Kurt Russell’s character, R.J. MacReady has to threaten his co-workers with a flamethrower, tie them all down, and make them watch as he tests their blood one by one until the infected blood irrupts in a spasm of alien violence. This is Confirmation, and it’s crucial because it plays into the question of knowing—having certainty, confirmation of belief—which is one of the foundational pleasures of fiction. Then, after we have confirmed the identity of the monster — once we know its strengths and hopefully its weaknesses — we can chase it through a subterranean tunnel system with dynamite in a climactic Confrontation.
I enjoy Carroll’s framework and find it useful for understanding the structure of horror plots. But, of course, there are as many variations as there are works of horror. Some, for example, go right from Onset to Confrontation, skipping over Discovery almost entirely. Alien is such a film, wherein the crew of the spaceship Nostromo learns about the existence of the alien at pretty much the same time as it bursts out of Ian Holm’s stomach. Immediately, they begin fighting it. There’s no quibbling about the existence of the monster; there is no recalcitrant sheriff here who needs to be convinced.
Cure is notable for being a film structured around a weak Confirmation. Information remains unclear. It’s not certain who has the right theory. Before watching Cure, I never really understood the power of Confirmation in the Carrollian sense. But take Confirmation out of a story and its absence creates havoc in the mind. We know there is a mystery and we are itching to solve it. One secondary effect of watching Cure, which parcels out its information so sparingly, is to become aware of just how much other films spoon-feed us all the solutions to their riddles.
Cure plays it so close to the chest that even its title remains uncertain. What is the disease? What is the cure? The itch grows more intense, but the film won’t say. By withholding so much, by denying certainty and promoting ambiguity, it gives us something better: the gift of dread, an emotion at once dubious, potent, and delightful. In Cure’s case, the effect is so strong you’ll practically break out in a rash.
The film contains some truly shocking images. In a sign of the film’s savvy, they are only on screen in brief flashes, yet they’ve stuck with me, and I can still picture them in great detail; a corpse handcuffed to a pipe which the police label a suicide, a psychology lab in the middle of a deserted warehouse, a monkey with its arms crossed, a man languidly flicking his lighter. They come unbidden into my mind at least once a week.
"Sometimes, when I see the images from Cure in my head, I wonder if the film has infected me? And what does that really mean?"
Sometimes, when I see the images from Cure in my head, I wonder if the film has infected me? And what does that really mean? What is the nature of these intrusive film memories, which, in our film-drenched culture, are as common as cable TV? They are a symptom of our contemporary culture, which is now homogenous and national, i.e., any nine-year-old lucky enough to be watching TNT at the right time can see Gwenyth Paltrow’s head in a box at the climax of Se7en. As such they are deeply generic. Yet at the same time, because they touch us in our emotional wellsprings, they are deeply personal. This combination, in which media products become guideposts to our interior emotional landscape is deeply creepy. And like any good virus, the way we feel about it doesn’t really matter because whether they make us nervous or crave more, these intrusive film memories have already been synthesized with our systems.
For me, the one that comes to mind most clearly is the reptilian face of Eric Roberts as he forces a woman to give him fellatio. I saw this scene late at night in a hotel room in upstate New York. I was there working for a junkyard company, the lowest man on a crew that was going to spend five days cutting up scrap metal at a stone quarry. I was rooming with Rick, a small, deeply bitter, highly competent man who liked to sleep with the TV on. I had trouble sleeping on that trip. I’d wake periodically to the light of the screen. Once it happened to be that flash of evil Roberts. I think now that the movie must have been Star 80, about the death of Dorothy Stratten, but I didn’t know that at the time. I only remember the one brief scene.
The camera stays on Eric Roberts’ face as the woman goes down out of frame. We don’t see her, but the implication is clear. He looks off to the side, totally blank, smoking a cigarette, his face capturing some terrible quality of violence that scared me because it felt so true. It spooked me then, and I can still picture it now. I can practically see the silhouette of my feet under the covers as I look down the length of my body at the screen. I never expected to spend so much time thinking about Eric Roberts while cutting with an acetylene torch, but there you have it.