1. Ju-on: The Grudge (2002)

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A mysterious and vengeful spirit marks and pursues anybody who dares enter the house in which it resides. In Japan, when the volunteer social assistant Rika Nishina is assigned to visit a family, she is cursed and chased by two revengeful fiends: Kayako, a Woman brutally murdered by her husband and her son Toshio. Each person that lives in or visits the haunted house is murdered or disappears.

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2. Ringu (1998)

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A reporter and her ex-husband investigate a cursed videotape that is rumored to kill the viewer seven days after watching it. Reiko Asakawa is researching into a ‘Cursed Video’ interviewing teenagers about it. When her niece Tomoko dies of ‘sudden heart failure’ with an unnaturally horrified expression on her face, Reiko investigates. She finds out that some of Tomoko’s friends, who had been on a holiday with Tomoko the week before, had died on exactly the same night at the exact same time in the exact same way. Reiko goes to the cabin where the teens had stayed and find an ‘unlabeled’ videotape. Reiko watched the tape to discover to her horror it is, in fact, the ‘cursed videotape’. Ex-Husband Ryuji helps Reiko solve the mystery, Reiko makes him a copy for further investigation. Things become tenser when their son Yoichi watches the tape saying Tomoko had told him to. Their discovery takes them to a volcanic island where they discover that the video has a connection to a psychic who died 30 years ago, and her child Sadako.

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3. Suicide Club (2001)

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A detective is trying to find the cause of a string of suicides.54 high school girls throw themselves in front of a subway train. This appears to be only the beginning of a string of suicides around the country. Does the new all-girl group Desert have anything to do with it? Detective Kuroda tries to find the answer, which isn’t as simple as one could hope.

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4. Dark Water(2002)

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This movie was remade in Hollywood in 2005 with the same name.

A mother and her 6-year-old daughter move into a creepy apartment whose every surface is permeated by water. After winning a custody battle for her daughter, Yoshimi tries to make a new start. The apartment she moves into seems perfect at first. Soon though, strange things begin happening. Huge water stains appear on the ceiling and drip constantly, more liquid oozing into the rooms every day. She calls the landlord in but he refuses to do anything about it. A child’s red bag shows up in odd places and soon the child herself starts appearing. Yoshimi then discovers the origin of the ghost.

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5. Kairo (2001) or Pulse

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Two groups of people discover evidence that suggests spirits may be trying to invade the human world through the Internet.After one of their friends commits suicide, strange things begin happening to a group of young Tokyo residents. One of them sees visions of his dead friend in the shadows on the wall, while another’s computer keeps showing strange, ghostly images. Is their friend trying to contact them from beyond the grave, or is there something much more sinister going on?

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6. Auditon(1999)

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A widower takes an offer to screen girls at a special audition, arranged for him by a friend to find him a new wife. The one he fancies is not who she appears to be after all. In Tokyo, Shigeharu Aoyama is a widower that grieves the loss of his wife and raises his son Shigehiko Aoyama alone. Seven years later, the teenage Shigehiko asks why his middle-aged father does not remarry and Shigeharu meets his friend Yasuhisa Yoshikawa, who is a film producer and tells his intention. However, Shigeharu has difficulties to approach available women to date and Yasuhisa decide to organize a sham audition for casting the lead actress for the fake movie. They receive several portfolios of candidates and Shigeharu becomes obsessed by the gorgeous Asami Yamazaki. Despite the advice of the experienced Yasuhisa, Shigeharu calls Asami to date and he falls for her. But who is the mysterious Asami?

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7. One Missed Call (2003)

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People mysteriously start receiving voicemail messages from their future selves, in the form of the sound of them reacting to their own violent deaths, along with the exact date and time of their future death, listed on the message log. The plot thickens as the surviving characters pursue the answers to this mystery which could save their lives.

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8. Kwaidan (1964)

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A collection of four Japanese folk tales with supernatural themes.This film contains four distinct, separate stories. “Black Hair”: A poor samurai who divorces his true love to marry for money, but finds the marriage disastrous and returns to his old wife, only to discover something eerie about her. “The Woman in the Snow”: Stranded in a snowstorm, a woodcutter meets an icy spirit in the form of a woman spares his life on the condition that he never tells anyone about her. A decade later he forgets his promise. “Hoichi the Earless”: Hoichi is a blind musician, living in a monastery who sings so well that a ghostly imperial court commands him to perform the epic ballad of their death battle for them. But the ghosts are draining away his life, and the monks set out to protect him by writing a holy mantra over his body to make him invisible to the ghosts. But they’ve forgotten something. “In a Cup of Tea”: a writer tells the story of a man who keeps seeing a mysterious face reflected in his cup of tea.

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9. Onibaba (1964)

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Two women kill samurai and sell their belongings for a living. While one of them is having an affair with their neighbor, the other woman meets a mysterious samurai wearing a bizarre mask.In the Fourteenth Century, during a civil war in Japan, a middle-aged woman and her daughter-in-law survive in a hut in a field of reed killing warriors and soldiers to trade their possessions for food. When their neighbor Hachi defects from the war and returns home, they learn that their son and husband Kichi died while stealing supplies from farmers. Soon Hachi seduces the young widow and she sneaks out of her hut every night to have sex with him. When the older woman finds the affair of her daughter-in-law, she pleads with Hachi to leave the young woman with her since she would not be able to kill the warriors without her help. However, Hachi ignores her request and continues to meet the young woman. When a samurai wearing a demon mask stumbles upon the older woman at her hut asking her to guide him out of the field, she lures him and he falls in the pit where she drops the bodies of her victims. She climbs down the hole to take his possessions and his mask, and she finds?

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10. House (1977)

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A schoolgirl and six of her classmates travel to her aunt’s country home, which tries to devour the girls in bizarre ways. Oshare (Gorgeous) is excited about spending summer vacation with her father until she finds out that his beautiful, freakishly serene girlfriend Ryouko would be going as well. Oshare decides she will be going to her aunt’s house in the country instead. She brings with her her friends from school – Fanta (who likes to take pictures, and daydreams a lot), KunFuu (who has very good reflexes), Gari/Prof (who is a major nerd), Sweet (who likes to clean), Mac (who eats a lot), and Melody (a musician). However, the girls are unaware that Oshare’s aunt is actually dead and the house is actually haunted. When they arrive at the house, crazy events take place and the girls disappear one by one while slowly discovering the secret behind all the madness.

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11. Tetsuo, the Iron Man (1989)

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A businessman accidentally kills The Metal Fetishist, who gets his revenge by slowly turning the man into a grotesque hybrid of flesh and rusty metal.A strange man known only as the “metal fetishist”, who seems to have an insane compulsion to stick scrap metal into his body, is hit and possibly killed by a Japanese “salaryman”, out for a drive with his girlfriend. The salaryman then notices that he is being slowly overtaken by some kind of disease that is turning his body into scrap metal, and that his nemesis is not, in fact, dead but is somehow masterminding and guiding his rage and frustration-fueled transformation.

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12. Ichi the Killer (2001)

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As sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer Kakihara searches for his missing boss he comes across Ichi, a repressed and psychotic killer who may be able to inflict levels of pain that Kakihara has only dreamed of.When a Yakuza boss named Anjo disappears with 300 million yen, his chief henchman, a sadomasochistic man named Kakihara, and the rest of his mob goons go looking for him. After capturing and torturing a rival Yakuza member looking for answers, they soon realize they have the wrong man and begin looking for the man named Jijii who tipped them off in the first place. Soon enough Kakihara and his men encounter Ichi, a psychotic, sexually-repressed young man with amazing martial arts abilities and blades that come out of his shoes. One by one Ichi takes out members of the Yakuza and all the while Kakihara intensifies his pursuit of Ichi and Ichi’s controller Jijii. What will happen as the final showdown happens between the tortured and ultra-violent Ichi and the pain-craving Kakihara?

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13. Reincarnation (2005)

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A Japanese actress begins having strange visions and experiences after landing a role in a horror film about a real-life murder spree that took place over forty years ago. Nagisa Sugiura (Yuka) is a young Japanese actress who comes face to face with a slew of ghosts. These restless spirits begin to appear when she signs on to star in a horror film which tells the true story about a crazed, local professor whose murderous rampage at a hotel left 11 guests dead, including his young son and daughter. The movie is being filmed at the very site where the killings took place.

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14. Over Your Dead Body (2014)

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A star, Miyuki Goto (Ko Shibasaki) plays Oiwa, the protagonist in a new play based on the ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan. She pulls some strings to get her lover, Kosuke Hasegawa (Ebizo Ichikawa) cast in the play, even though he’s a relatively unknown actor. Other performers Rio Asahina (Miho Nakanishi) and Jun Suzuki (Hideaki Ito) lust after Miyuki. Offstage, the cast’s possessive love and obsessions exist as a reality. Trapped between the play and reality, the cast’s feelings for each other are amplified. When it becomes clear that love is not meant to be both on and off stage, love turns into a grudge and crosses the blurred line between reality and fantasy.

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15. Noroi: The Curse (2005)

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A documentary filmmaker explores seemingly unrelated paranormal incidents connected by the legend of an ancient demon called the “Kagutaba.” A documentary filmmaker explores seemingly unrelated paranormal incidents connected by the legend of an ancient demon called the “Kagutaba.”

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16. Marebito (2004)

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A fear-obsessed freelance cameraman (Shinya Tsukamoto) investigates an urban legend involving mysterious spirits that haunt the subways of Tokyo.In Tokyo, the freelance cameraman Takuyoshi Masuoka is obsessed investigating the fear sensation near death. When he photographs a man stabbing himself in the eye in the access to the subway, he seeks what the suicidal man might have seen to experiment the same sense of horror the man felt when he died. He finds a passage to the Tokyo underground where he meets a mysterious naked woman that does not speak, who he calls her F. He brings F to his place and he tries to feed her, until he discovers that she drinks blood. Masuika becomes a serial killer draining the blood of his victims to nurse F.

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17. Battle Royale (2000)

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In the future, the Japanese government captures a class of ninth-grade students and forces them to kill each other under the revolutionary “Battle Royale” act.
Forty-two students, three days, one deserted Island: welcome to Battle Royale. A group of ninth-grade students from a Japanese high school has been forced by legislation to compete in a Battle Royale. The students are each given a bag with a randomly selected weapon and a few rations of food and water and sent off to kill each other in a no-holds-barred (with a few minor rules) game to the death, which means that the students have three days to kill each other until one survives–or they all die. The movie focuses on a few of the students and how they cope. Some decide to play the game like the psychotic Kiriyama or the sexual Mitsuko, while others like the heroes of the movie–Shuya, Noriko, and Kawada–are trying to find a way to get off the Island without violence. However, as the numbers dwell down lower and lower on an hourly basis, is there any way for Shuya and his classmates to survive?

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18. Spiral (2000)

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The inhabitants of a small Japanese town become increasingly obsessed with and tormented by spirals.In a small town in Japan, Kirie comes upon her boyfriend’s father silently videotaping a snail. He seems unaware of her presence and she thinks no more of it. Later, the man’s obsession with spirals becomes more and more bizarre, ending in his suicide in a washing machine which turns his body into a spiral. Soon other inhabitants become possessed with different forms of spirals, one student seems to be mutating into a snail, another’s hair becomes strangely medusa-like. The entire town becomes possessed.

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19. Exte: Hair Extensions (2007)

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What if extensions carried the grudge of the individual to which the hair originally belonged and started attacking people wearing it at random? Customs agents discover a huge amount of human hair used as materials for ‘hair extensions’ along with the dead body of a young girl with a shaved head. With the corpse being soon transported by the police, the results of the autopsy determined that the woman’s internal organs have been harvested. The possibility is pointed out that she was kidnapped in some foreign country and was a victim of black market human organ racketeering ring. A sinister, fearless smirk comes over Yamazaki (Ren Osugi), the morgue night watchman. Yuko (Chiaki Kuriyama) is a young wannabe hair stylist apprenticing at the Gilles de Rais hair salon. After working late each day, after returning home, she tirelessly practices her skills on head mannequins with wigs. One day, her sister, Kiyomi, forcibly entrusts her eight-year-old daughter, Mami, to Yuko.

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20. Kuroneko (1968)

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Two women are raped and killed by samurai soldiers. Soon they reappear as vengeful ghosts who seduce and brutally murder the passing samurai.A woman and her daughter-in-law are raped and murdered by samurais during the time of civil war. Afterward, a series of samurai returning from the war through that area are found mysteriously dead with their throats torn out. The governor calls in a wild and fierce young hero, to quell what is evidently a ghost. He encounters the two beautiful women, in an eerie, beautiful scene. After spiritual purification, he meets the demon in a thrilling fight.

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