After answering a call from a cursed telephone box, Akina (Rinka Otani) and her boyfriend Yuma (Ryota Bando) go through an dark tunnel to “Howling Village” (Inunaki Mura), an abandoned settlement now inhabited by the vengeful ghosts of the former residents. After their desperate escape from the haunted village, Akina begins to suffer a mental breakdown resulting in her death. Meanwhile, Yuma’s sister Kanae (Ayaka Miyoshi), who works as a child psychologist is beginning to see the spectres of departed individuals. After Yuma and younger brother Kota disappear in the mysterious village, Kanae is forced to confront the dark secrets about its history and her own family’s connection with it.
“Howling Village”, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu (Ju-on), is a folkloric horror with elements of ghost and werewolf tales centering on a lost community. The film is comfortably formulaic, with the discovery of a disquieting urban myth, disappearances and encounters with otherworldly forces, a psychologist investigating the paranormal phenomena, and a hidden family connection with the spirits in question. The film’s best scares come in the form of shadowy figures lurking in the background, or half seen, that give the feeling of a world in which ghosts are an ever present force. The monster movie tropes of the latter half in which the inhabitants of the titular village are portrayed as hybrid dog-people is less effective. The film’s plot seems slightly confused as to the exact motivation of its antagonists. The ghosts are understandably upset, but the film wavers between casting them as victims and villains. Of course logic will never play a major role in any story featuring ghosts, but a consistent or comprehensible threat would help engage the audience. The music does a good job of building tension and creating an ominous tone and the film overall is well constructed despite the flimsy script.
The film’s central theme revolves around the destruction of a traditional culture in the face of capitalistic greed, with the electric company’s construction of a dam having led to the village’s erasure. However, any sympathy we might have is undermined on discovery of the village’s more macabre practices. We see numerous examples of ancestors looking over future generations, or children inheriting powers from them. The film often misses the opportunity to explore these things in more depth, being sidetracked into cheap thrills and scares without much thought to how this ties in to the deeper themes present elsewhere. In the end, “Howling Village” is fairly average horror fare that does little to distinguish itself among other films of the genre.
