Loft

A twisty horror from the hands of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I had it booked as one of my favorites of his, but watching it again it didn't quite hold up. It's still a solid, very moody, and atmospheric film, but there's not quite enough there to separate it from a bunch of similar-looking Japanese horror films.

Reiko is a young writer working on her latest novel. She moves houses and ends up in a rather fancy loft. An abandoned building across her new house doesn't appear all that abandoned when she notices a shady figure roaming around at night. It turns out to be a professor who discovered a 1000-year-old mummy in the nearby swamps.

The music is the big star here. It adds oodles of atmosphere, but that alone isn't enough to make a creepy horror film. The scares are a bit expected, the cinematography a little too dim, and the plot starts to dominate the mood near the end of the film. It's still a worthy film, well worth watching if you're looking for some prime horror filler, but a true favorite it is not.