Of all the commercial genres to have proliferated in modern Japanese cinema, none has achieved the international success and visibility of the horror film. Horror films have long constituted a vital feature of this country's cinema, but since the late 1990s they have become arguably the face of Japanese filmmaking, and furthermore the prevalent image of an increasingly transnational paradigm. There are several key and interrelated means of conceiving of the importance of J-horror. Most saliently it seizes on the recent past as a site of tension and anxiety, a textual shadow or even doppelganger of the present that haunts modernity as a spectral repressed or foreclosed. Moreover, as this latter point implies, psychoanalytical imperatives have been writ large – a veritable matrix of concerns with subject formation and problems therein – as a national adjunct to which it is interesting to note the extent to which several films’ technical methodology, their means of production, becomes a site of narrative discourse and/or semantic signification. Angela Ndalianis (2010) has analysed in detail the horror genre's influence on associative media, on the extent to which its emotional affectivity lends itself to cultural products such as theme park rides, whilst more significantly Mark Cousins (2004, pp. 475–7) has talked of so-called J-horror (which does technically refer to the Japanese horror canon but seems more often to designate its supernatural cinema, thanks largely to producer Ichise Takashige) as one of the key cinematic genres at the close of the twentieth century, precisely because it proliferated at a time when an apparently global pre-millennial fear, even paranoia, became apparent at the same time as traditional celluloid was beginning to give way to digital forms of cinematic expression and projection. There was a sense in some quarters that authentic film was a dying art (Willis, 2005, p. 1), as though cinema's traditional mechanical means, as well as its capacity to designate or extol a specific, phenomenological dimension, a relationship with a perceived real that offers a potentially verisimilar transparency, was disturbed by this ghost of the machine, and as such that individual horror films themselves are in some way working through problems and tensions that are beyond their supernatural narrative concerns.