10 Underrated Japanese Horror Movies That Escaped An American Remake

While many of the best Japanese horror movies were cursed with subpar American remakes, there are a handful of cult classics that avoided this fate.

While Hollywood was obsessed with remaking Japanese horror movies for a few decades, this did not stop a few cult classics from slipping through the fingers of studio executives. There are a few great Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror movies. For example, director Gore Verbinski's take on The Ring is arguably as strong as Hideo Nakata's original Ringu, and 2004's The Grudge does a solid job of recapturing the appeal of 2002's Ju-On: The Grudge. However, the only reason that these successful remakes are notable is because of how rare they are.

Broadly speaking, Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror movies are disasters. While critics often dismiss horror movies too quickly, the savage reviews received by the likes of 2020's The Grudge, 2008's The Eye, and 2006's Pulse were more than earned. 2008's take on One Missed Call even managed to make a Takashi Miike movie into a predictable slog, which is no small achievement given the visionary horror helmet's uniquely surreal style. Fortunately, not every great Japanese horror movie has been cursed with an execrable English-language remake.

A huge influence on Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II, House is an infamous 1977 horror comedy that would be impossible to replicate. Fortunately, Hollywood hasn't tried. House sees six schoolgirls travel to a remote country house where all hell breaks loose upon their arrival. An absurd affair, House involves a piano eating one of the unfortunate girls, a severed head biting her former friend's rear end, a dance with a skeleton, and sentient firewood attacking one of the heroines. Climaxing with the bizarre, comical, and vaguely creepy image of a cat painting vomiting blood, House has to be seen to be believed.

The Grudge's Takashi Shimizu directed 2004's Marebito, a found footage horror that sees a death-obsessed photographer stumble across a strange mute woman with Lovecraftian origins. While The Blair Witch Project made the found footage format horror famous shortly before the cycle of Japanese horror remakes began, it is still no surprise that Marebito never received a Hollywood reboot. This chilling horror movie slowly reveals that its monster is some sort of vampire, but its ostensible hero might be even an even bigger monster by the movie's ambiguous ending.

A nightmarish fusion of man and machine stars in Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a body horror odyssey worthy of Cronenberg. The story of a disturbed metal fetishist who longs to permanently mechanize his flesh, Shinya Tsukamoto's chilling horror movie takes a turn into revenge movie territory when the apparent protagonist is run over by a businessman. This curses the businessman with the same deleterious obsession, resulting in some horrific scenes of self-mutilation as he attempts to replace his body bit by bit.

Sion Sono's inimitable cult classic Suicide Club opens with a striking sight. 54 schoolgirls line up at a train station and, just as viewers realize what is about to happen, commit suicide en masse. While this might seem like a spin on The Ring franchise's curse, what is happening in Suicide Club is more complex and satirically charged. A deftly written, blackly comedic pop culture satire, Suicide Club uses nightmarish violence and taboo topics to comment on social ills in a story that is immersive, irreverent, and impossible to replicate.

Director Takashi Miike's slow-burn horror Audition is a tense thriller for most of its runtime. However, the ending plunges Audition into full-blown horror with one unforgettable sequence. When a lonely widower holds fake "auditions" to find himself a suitable partner, he thinks he has hit the jackpot with the submissive, sweet Asami. His son isn't so sure, but it is not until over halfway through Audition that viewers discover who to believe. By the climax, even fans of the underrated Stephen King adaptation Misery will be cringing.

Cure is a terrifying serial killer thriller that is often credited with beginning the terrifying Japanese horror trend. Murder victims keep popping up with the same "X" symbol carved into them, but the problem is, each victim has a different killer. What is more, none of the suspected murderers can remember committing their crimes. An atmospheric nightmare, Cure borrows from the likes of Se7en but gives its serial killer story a supernatural edge. It is no surprise that director Kiyoshi Kurosawa went on to make 2001's influential (and regrettably remade) Pulse.

After some truly troubling movies, 2017's One Cut of the Dead is a sweet comedy horror that proves Japanese horror movies aren't always nightmarish endurance tests. This inventive effort is full of surprises and uniquely offbeat humor. The story of One Cut of the Dead documents a film crew's attempts to make a cheap zombie movie, which are inevitably thrown into disarray by the arrival of real zombies. As if that were not enough, One Cut of the Dead continues wrong footing viewers right up until its killer ending.

Despite its title, Evil Dead Trap is not a horror comedy in the vein of Ash William's Evil Dead franchise adventures. Instead, for most of its runtime, Evil Dead Trap is an unusually stylish and gruesome slasher. However, a wild ending makes this a hard movie to forget. As Evil Dead Trap ramps up its gore and surreal imagery, the movie works its way to a climax that is as unbelievable as it is harrowing.

Cold Fish is the second Sion Sono effort on this rundown, and it is another uniquely creepy social satire that never received a Hollywood re-imagining. Cold Fish tells the tale of a dissatisfied salaryman who gains a new lease on life when he meets a more successful, shady store owner. Saying anything more would give away spoilers but, suffice it to say, Cold Fish drew some story inspiration from the tale of two infamous real-life serial killers. Cold Fish is wildly gory, but it is the dark social commentary and blocky comedic satire that make this one a success.

This 2000 adaptation of Junji Ito's infamous manga Uzumaki saw a town become obsessed with spirals in a nightmare that soon unpooled into gruesome body horror. Surprisingly, Uzumaki stops short of bringing the artist's most disturbing images to life, either due to a lack of budget or a fear that the unique manga's horror might not translate to live-action. As a result, viewers get some deeply unsettling proof that Japanese horror movies offer more than gore to genre fans (although there is plenty of that too).