Tales From the Dead: You Just Crossed Into the J-Zone

by Patricia Lamkin
Special to Asia

Jason Cuadrado may call his first film, Tales From the Dead, a J-Horror homage, but it gives a big nod to his other fascination, The Twilight Zone. “It was so great!” Cuadrado said. “Bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. J-Horror works with the same themes, so they seem like a natural match.”

Filmed in Japanese with an all-Japanese cast, “Tales” is an anthology of four ghost stories: Home Sweet Home, Chalk, The Dirty Business of Time and Shoko the Widow. The stories are introduced by the character Tamika, (Leni Ito), a young medium who can hear and see the dead. As the film opens, a disgruntled wife named Shoko (Nikki Takei) goes out to get away from her disappointing husband Jiro (Hiro Abe). Tamika picks up the hitchhiking Shoko who has become stranded in a remote wooded area due to a flat tire. As they drive in the night to the next town, Tamika tells each of the tales, based on her personal involvement, or what the spirits have told her.

A spine tingling, and engrossing drama, Tales happily foregoes the gratuitous gore and violence of low budget horror films today. “I didn’t personally approach this as a horror movie, or character,” said actress Leni Ito. Nikki Takei agreed. “What I liked about this script was in growing up in Japan, ghost stories are always a dark spirit with a grudge, ” she said, “but this is more about Karma.”

In the first tale, "Home Sweet Home," Tamika and her sister Manami (Kiyoko Kamai), investigate a haunting at the home of a couple (Eiji Inoue, Masami). The couple has been celebrating the return of their troubled runaway son Kenji (Daisuke Tomita), found mysteriously paralyzed in a hospital, unable to even speak. As Tamika walks through the house, she “sees” that the previous owners were murdered there, and are connected to the new residents by an ironic twist of fate. With J-Horror, “you always walk in, and it seems like a detached haunting,” Cuadrado explained. “Then as the story progresses, you realize there are people attached to the haunting, and the ghost is trying to say something, or get back at the person who caused it,” he said.

But Tales can be as much about complex characters as it is about ghosts. For example, in "Shoko the Widow" a woman is pressured by a "Widow’s club” to kill her husband. “My character wanted to step up in her life to marry someone who is successful and it didn’t happen,” said Takei. “So she’s not vicious, or evil, but she’s frustrated.”

The four tales resemble the short narrative format of “Zone,” but the hallmark feature is the framing story (Tamika and Shoko driving) shot in black and white, while the stories remain in color. Like Rod Serling, Tamika narrates with a resonating detachment, which Ito conveys disarmingly well, with a creepiness that defies her youth.

In the Faustian tale, "The Dirty Business of Time," a suicidal man named Yoshi (Yutaka Takeuchi) meets a stranger who offers to buy moments of his time for large sums of money. “Almost all of 'Dirty Business' was shot as if it were on stage,” Cuadrado said, emulating the Zone's fifties studio format. The classic story is balanced with gritty film noir acting from Takeuchi and Mark Ofuji as Ebisu, the Devil.

It's not just the innovative "J-Zone” blend, or A-film performances that make Tales From the Dead rise above the nihilistic chop and shock low-budget screamers that inundate audiences today. It's the character-driven, well-woven tales that are as much film noir thriller as they are horror. And they actually have a message. “The dead speak,” says the films tagline. I strongly suggest giving the dead of Tales a good listen.