Minor Horror #1: Actually Happened! Most Terrifying Psychic Phenomena. Psychic Research Team Report. Relived.

This is the first in a series of fifteen pieces on “minor” horror films that I’m going to be publishing on here throughout October. For more information, please see this post.

Actually Happened! Most Terrifying Psychic Phenomena. Psychic Research Team Report. Relived. (Jun Tsugita, 2004)

I’ve watched more horror movies than I have any other recognized cinematic genre, by a wide margin. If I were to isolate the single trait which compels me to return to it again and again, the thing that keeps me digging deeper and deeper into its obscure and malign corners, having long since exhausted the canonical works, the scant few dozen titles which film culture’s ever-shrinking, increasingly-deprofessionalized critical class seems to have decided is an acceptable shorthand for the work of hundreds of directors across more than a century, it would be the genre’s consistent willingness to engage with narrative forms and aesthetic modes otherwise all but absent from “the cinema” as a popular art, forms and modes normally confined to gallery work, “experimental” cinema, or, on occasion, that other classic “bodily” genre, hardcore pornography. This is why I’ve always preferred Devil’s Experiment (1985), the first Guinea Pig movie, over its more theatrical, absurd, and all-around “movie-like” followup, Flowers of Flesh and Blood (also 1985). Devil’s Experiment resembles an industrial training video more than anything, a functional, process-oriented demonstration of a series of procedures, shot with simple camera setups, clear demarcations between segments, and minimal extraneous information; that the procedures in question constitute the methodical torture and murder of a bound woman is beside the point – its structure would be entirely appropriate for the demonstration of an exercise regime, or instructions for maintaining and operating a particular model of tractor. Flowers of Flesh and Blood is pretty minimalistic too, of course, but it’s recognizably a movie for an audience; it cares, somewhat, about entertaining you, and for this reason I think it is a lesser work. I don’t think a woman being tortured to death is “entertainment” – if there’s a value to watching such a thing, in fact, it’s in its very distance from such a concept.

Anyway. I’m not trying to talk about the Guinea Pig movies today, really. I bring them up to help clarify why I would find a film like Actually Happened! Most Terrifying Psychic Phenomena. Psychic Research Team Report. Relived. interesting and worth watching. This is not to say these are similar works: like all of the Guinea Pig movies, it’s a “V-Cinema” title, which is to say made for the Japanese straight-to-video market, and it’s a horror movie, but this is more or less the extent of their similarities. Actually Happened! is a completely bloodless film made decades later than the gore-choked Guinea Pigs, and it consists mostly of some guy wandering around a modest residential home at night with the lights off, filming everything with a couple cheap digital cameras. The premise is monumentally simple: following a fire next door, an unidentified man (face blurred, voice altered) has come to believe his house is being haunted by some malevolent force, which has been so severely deleterious to his mental health he’s decided he has no choice but to simply move out. Before he does, he calls a “Psychic Research Team”, who decide to send a guy over a few nights later, after he’s moved out and the house is empty, just to see if he can turn anything up. Obviously, he does. What he discovers, exactly, is much harder to say.

In the most dryly technical sense, this is a film about things that go bump in the night, but it doesn’t really feel like that. There are very few bumps to be heard, and the “investigation”, from arrival at the house to the cameras clicking permanently off, must constitute less than an hour of real-time. What it feels like is sustained, inscrutable anxiety. The film can be cleanly divided into three parts: first, the meeting with the occupant of the house, in broad daylight, where we are shown the bedroom closet, now plastered with Shinto charms, where he saw a man hanging from the neck; the middle is the aforementioned “investigation”; the last is an interview with the gaunt-eyed, nearly-catatonic “investigator” some time later, holed up in an apartment with all the lights off and all the windows covered over, where the footage from the middle section is played for him while a man off-screen tries, increasingly aggressively, to get him to explain what’s happening, and why he does what he does. Then something happens.

This is, you might notice, a plot structure which only vaguely resembles a “movie”. There’s a strong, strong commitment to verisimilitude, which is to say a commitment to including long stretches of awkward, grainy footage of nothing in particular happening. We watch the “investigator” go up to the bedroom closet and take down all the charms. We don’t know why; he’s alone, so it’s not like he has a reason to explain what he’s doing. We watch him try to make a call and fail, then go out into the vestibule, leaving the camera where it is. We hear the doorbell once, twice, many times. We can’t tell who’s ringing it, or why. Later, he goes out into the back garden and shines a flashlight around. What he’s looking for is unclear. We see… something peering down from above a doorframe, and then it disappears when the phone buzzes. We never get much indication of what it is. We’re given to understand all this is related to the house next door somehow. We’re told the fire was ruled an arson, and that an old couple died in it. What this means, what the connection is, what the particulars of this supernatural malevolence are, is beyond us. There’s not enough here to even speculate, really, except in the vaguest possible terms. The movie is far more concerned with showing us a flashlight beam playing on empty walls, the work of setting up and taking down battery-powered lights, the moment when a night vision camera pointed at an empty closet suddenly clicks off.

This is not how you’re “supposed” to make a movie. Certainly not a horror movie. It is totally anti-cinematic, an hour or so spent staring at nothing on the premise that something might be there. But then, of course, it is the place of horror cinema to be anti-cinematic – its promise is that it will do something beyond itself, something which is impossible: that it will show us something real, that is too horrible to really exist. The difficulty of this is that the dramatic feature, like the novel, has long been established as a place where “anything can happen” – which is to say, a place where nothing is impossible. The only way to reintroduce impossibility, then, is to break the form, to be boring, ugly, crude, stupid, cheap, so warped and malformed as to be rendered unrecognizable (Hunchback ’88 by Christopher Norris is an exceedingly strong literary example of this) – Actually Happened!, with its suffocating, too-perfect verisimilitude and radically boring, impenetrable “horror”, achieves this. When something happens, it feels impossible. Which is not enough, on its own, to make this a great film – it’s merely a quite good one – but it is enough to make it the sort of film that I watch horror movies to discover. This is what it’s all about.