Much like (from what I hear) the English speaking world, Japan is having a bit of a horror “moment.” In print and on the screen, what has always been a pretty solid side-branch of the entertainment mix has begun to blossom into something bigger and more mainstream. We can point to new authors like Uketsu or Nashi, and older ones bringing out new work like Koji Suzuki’s new novel Ubiquitous, as signifiers in the publishing world. On screens, though, I think the most interesting examples are to be found in shorts, like the YouTube creepfest My house walk-through or (hands down my favorite horror shorts) Fake Documentary Q.

I am not a scholar of the cinema or Japanese horror or anything, but I do keep my eyes open, and I stumbled on a collection of horror shorts on Amazon that were apparently all entrants in a biennial competition sponsored by Kadokawa, the Japan Horror Film Competition. I watched, and there were some real bangers in there, including one called みなに幸あれ/Best Wishes to All. Lo and behold, I later saw a full feature length version with the same name—Ah! I realized. The winner of that competition got their short made into a full-length feature film!

And it was well worth doing. Best Wishes to All—which apparently now has an English release—was a creepy, surreal, original, and ambitious movie. Excellent acting, excellent screenplay, the whole shebang. It also presented an approach to horror that stood outside the usual ghosts and curses of “J-horror” with the kind of social edge that makes good horror great.

The story, essentially, is about a young nurse in Tokyo going home to visit her grandparents in the countryside and discovering a dark secret–one that redefines her entire understanding of life and the world. It also touches on how Japan’s young people are almost seen as fodder for older generations’ expanding lifespans, and the sacrifices of some that society demands for happiness for others. And also, it has old people acting like pigs. Pretty wild.

And when I saw that the second contest collection was out, *and* that the winner movie was also coming, I was hopeful indeed! Shorts were clearly fertile ground for original horror, and Kadokawa et al. were throwing money at it, so I was eager for more. The winner of that round, and the film that came from it, was ミッシング・チャイルド・ヴィデオテープ/Missing Child Videotape.

I think I’m not alone in the eagerness I felt for this one. It seemed to combine some of the same ambition and originality that BWtA had with beloved tropes of cursed videos, haunted mountainsides, and family trauma. The short was a quiet, brooding story with a hefty dose of chilling menace.

The feature film, though… Well, that was something else. I should say here that, while I’m not planning to out-and-out spoil the story, I will be looking at elements that might end up ruining the movie for you. So, if you are hoping to watch Missing Child Videotape—or Best Wishes to All, for that matter—save this to read for later. And watch the latter IMMEDIATELY.

So. Just like the short, Missing Child Videotape is about two young friends, Keita (Kyosuke in the shot) and Tsukasa (Hiromu in the short). Keita gets a package from home which includes a VCR tape. It is one he made as a child, when out playing with his younger brother. The two boys stumble on some vaguely industrial looking abandoned building and play hide-and-seek. The younger brother goes to hide, despite his fear, and is never seen again. The child is, well, missing.

Tsukasa is apparently a “spiritual sensitive” and can see ghosts. He reacts strongly to the tape… Oh! It must be cursed.

Soon after, the film truly diverges from the short. They both deal with the emotional trauma of a lost child and brother, but while the short is all about suggestion and menace and dread, the film veers toward folk horror and weird mountain towns and a reporter running from ghosts… With a dose of time loops and places that don’t exist… Well. Lots of stuff. It never goes wacky with it. It always maintains its slow, heavy, almost emotionless tone. But honestly, from a purely plot-based perspective, it shares more with Shiraishi’s Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! series than with its spiritual companion, Best Wishes to All.

Let’s just say, I have problems with the movie version of MCV. It tries to be too many things and fails at most of them. It takes the “unexplained” much too far, such that it becomes almost nonsensical. Individual elements are fascinating and worth exploring, but they are left behind to fade into background noise, and rather than leaving the fear of the unknown, they left me with the dissatisfaction of the seemingly unconnected. I mean, there was this whole story about how the mountain was a garbage heap for kami that basically went unmentioned for the rest of the movie?! Come on! And the reporter was running from some kind of ghost. Why? Who is she, actually? What is she muttering under her breath when she’s scared? Why is she essentially set dressing most of the time?

I can only assume that the demands of turning a twenty-minute short into a 100-minute feature put too much pressure on the story, and the production team struggled to find effective filler. So, the end result feels like they just started throwing things at it to see what stuck.

Meanwhile, Best Wishes to All seems to avoid that pitfall by taking some of the surreality of the short and leaning into it. Even as it sometimes borders on the absurd, it’s an absurdity that remains rooted in the qualities that made the short work so well, creating a kind of incomprehensible view of reality that is as confounding for the protagonist as for the audience. In expanding the short, the filmmakers preserved its essential nature, just writ large.

Anyway, what does all this signify? I think what I’m getting at is, the value of the horror short today is clearly difficult to translate to long form media, but not impossibly so. I just hope that the pressures of making bigger budget, larger-scale works don’t harm get in the way of the vibrance of the smaller scale scene.