Is Noroi: The Curse Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot

The tape starts with pigeons

Masafumi Kobayashi writes books and makes documentaries about the supernatural in Japan. While he was making one called The Curse, his house burned down, he vanished, and the ruins held the body of his wife Keiko. The film then plays, mostly as footage shot by his cameraman, Miyajima. Eighteen months before that, Kobayashi checks on Junko Ishii and her son, because a neighbor heard babies crying inside their house. She moves out, and when Kobayashi and Miyajima go back they find dead pigeons in the yard. The neighbor and her daughter die in a car crash five days later. Around then Kana Yano, a girl who shows strong psychic abilities on a TV variety show, goes missing. Her parents say a psychic named Mitsuo Hori came to see her, and Hori claims that ectoplasmic worms took her. His vague directions lead the crew to Osawa, who carries pigeons into his apartment, and Osawa is later reported missing.

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Marika takes up yarn in her sleep

After a shoot at a shrine, the actress Marika Matsumoto hears a strange voice and collapses, screaming. Afterward she keeps finding that she has been twisting yarn and wire into linked loops in her sleep. Kobayashi leaves a camera running overnight and it records a deep voice saying kagutaba. A local historian explains that Kagutaba is a demon. The people of Shimokage, a village in Nagano Prefecture, once called it up and then locked it away for ignoring their orders. They held a yearly ritual to keep it calm until the village was emptied in 1978 to make room for a dam. The last ritual was filmed. A priest and his daughter performed it, and at the end the daughter fell into hysterics, which the villagers took for possession by Kagutaba. Kobayashi works out that the daughter is Ishii, who later worked at a nursing school, where she assisted with illegal late-term abortions and took the fetuses.

A day trip to the dam

Marika tells the crew that her neighbor Midori has hanged herself. Midori was one of seven people, Osawa among them, who hanged themselves in a park from nooses that look like Marika's loops. Marika, Kobayashi, Miyajima and Hori go to the Shimokage dam to perform the calming ritual, hoping it will free her. Afterward Hori panics and runs into the forest, and Kobayashi goes after him while Marika, who shows signs of possession, runs off too. This is the scene people dread most, so here is what it contains. Kobayashi and Hori come across the villagers' dogs, which have been slaughtered near a hidden shrine. Nothing is shown of how they died, only the bodies afterward. Kobayashi's camera then catches a vision of Kana under a torii gate with writhing fetuses all around her. Marika suddenly recovers.

Adopting the boy is a bad idea

Kobayashi takes Marika and Hori to a hospital, then he and Miyajima force their way into the home where Ishii now lives, which is covered in looped rope. Inside they find that Ishii has hanged herself, and her young son is cradling the body of Kana. The boy turns out not to be her biological child, and Kobayashi and his wife adopt him. Kobayashi goes back to the historian, who unrolls a scroll about the first time Kagutaba was summoned: a priestess who served as its medium was given dead baby monkeys to eat. Ishii tried to repeat it by giving the fetuses she had taken to Kana. Marika is well again. Hori is committed to a mental institution, escapes, and is later found dead, forced into a duct. That happens three days after Kobayashi's house burns.