Eighteen Film Buffs Talk About The Scariest Movies They’ve Ever Seen
Even film critics watch these movies with the lights on.
Cure
Ian Barr, Drum Media
In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, complacency is the deadliest killer, as detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) is assigned to find the connection between a series of seemingly unmotivated murders.
The main suspect is a former medical student with possible hypnotic powers, preying upon the weak-willed and purposeless drones of Tokyo’s populace, potentially including Takabe himself. Kurosawa (no relation to Akira by the way) crafts the film with minimal shock effects, often using long shots in which the horror is unemphatically occurring in the background of the frame, giving each scene a panopticon effect that keeps us alert and in a state of constant dread, in the process – and in accordance with the film’s central theme – shaking us out of our passive viewing habits.