Koji Suzuki died on May 8. He is the man who wrote The Ring, which means he is personally responsible for a thing that happened to a very large number of people in the late 1990s, we developed a complicated relationship with our own televisions. Not as a metaphor. Every television. All the time. For like two years.
If that sentence makes sense to you, you already know why this is a hard week. If it does not, welcome to the part of horror that lives in transmission. Here is where to start.
Ringu (1998)
This one is on Suzuki directly. Hideo Nakata adapted his novel and made Ringu, and the thing that makes it still work in 2026 is that Sadako is not after you specifically. She is not a slasher villain with a grudge. Well, she kind of is, but still. She is what happens when grief has nowhere to go and nobody came. Watching this for the first time in a dark room and then having your phone ring is an experience I recommend to everyone exactly once.
Start here. Obviously.
Dark Water (2002)
Nakata adapted a second Suzuki story, and the one people reach for less often is the better one to sit with after a loss. A divorced mother moves into a run-down apartment with her daughter. The ceiling is leaking and a stain keeps growing. Not weird at all.
Dark Water does not care about your jump scares. It cares about what it costs to hold yourself together when things keep getting worse in small increments, and it builds to an ending that will get you.
Watch this one on a night when you have some emotional margin to spare.
Audition (1999)
Do not look this one up. Do not let anyone tell you anything about it. If someone says “you should watch Audition, it’s really extreme,” what they are actually saying is “I ruined it for myself, and now I’m going to ruin it for you.” Takashi Miike spent the first hour of Audition building something very specific, and it requires that you do not know what it is building toward.
Trust the slow start. Stay with it. It will reward you.
Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)
Takashi Shimizu did not make a ghost story. He made something that operates on its own internal logic about how curses work and who they take, and then he does not explain it to you, and that turns out to be the correct choice. Ju-On has two of the most effective horror figures ever put on screen in Kayako and Toshio, and Shimizu is careful never to give you enough information to make them less frightening. The American remake exists. It is fine. This one is better.
Kairo (2001)
I need you to understand that Kiyoshi Kurosawa made a film about loneliness and the early internet in 2001, and it has gotten more accurate every single year since then. That is not a comfortable fact. Kairo, released in America as Pulse, is about people being slowly consumed by ghosts that arrive through internet connections, and it is also about a generation trying to fill something hollow with something that was never going to fit. It is slow. It is patient.
I have watched this film four times, and it makes me feel worse every time. I keep recommending it.
Uzumaki (2000)
The premise is that spirals are evil. All of them. The spiral in a snail shell, a fingerprint, the smoke off a chimney. Higuchinsky adapted Junji Ito’s manga and made a film that commits to this so completely that arguing with it becomes impossible. This is one of those horror films that is not exactly scary and is not exactly not scary, and where exactly it lands depends entirely on how you feel about spirals by the time the credits roll.
I feel pretty bad about spirals now. Been a while.
Cure (1997)
A detective investigates a string of murders committed by otherwise ordinary people who cannot explain what they did or why. Each killer can be connected to the same quiet drifter, who never directly tells anyone to do anything. Cure runs like a procedural thriller, and it is more unsettling for it. By the time the logic of the film finishes assembling itself, you realize you have been watching something that cannot be put back where it was before you watched it.
Noroi: The Curse (2005)
Found footage has a bad reputation because most found footage films earn it. Noroi is the one you use to argue that the format itself is not the problem. Koji Shiraishi’s film is assembled from documentary footage and TV recordings and interview tapes, following a filmmaker investigating deaths tied to an ancient evil. It gives itself two full hours to build its mythology before it shows you what the mythology actually is.
Horror fans who have seen everything consistently land on this one as the discovery they wish they had made earlier. That reputation is deserved.
One Missed Call (2003)
One Missed Call took the Ring premise, a curse that travels through technology, and applied it to voicemail. In One Missed Call you receive a message from yourself, three days in the future, playing the sound of your own death. The curse spreads to whoever witnesses it.
Worth every minute.
Suicide Club (2001)
Sion Sono opened Suicide Club with 54 schoolgirls jumping in front of a train and then went somewhere more disturbing after that, which is a commitment I respect. It is technically a crime investigation rather than a supernatural horror film. What makes it horror is the slow accumulation of evidence that understanding what is happening is not going to make it stop.
It belongs on this list because it would not exist without the audience Suzuki helped create, and because Suzuki kept returning to the same question Sono asks here. What happens when the terrible thing is already inside the transmission?
Koji Suzuki was 68. The well he built is still full. Start with Ringu if you are new to any of this. Start with Cure if you have seen everything else and want the one that will stay with you the longest.
