Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the Horror Director Whose Biggest Hit Has No Ghosts

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Photo: John Sears / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 19, 1955 Kobe, Hyogo, Japan
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Cure, Pulse, Tokyo Sonata
Awards	Silver Lion · Un Certain Regard Prize · Un Certain Regard Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival · FIPRESCI Prize, Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival · Medal with Purple Ribbon · Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres · Asian Filmmaker of the Year, Busan International Film Festival

Ask a horror fan to name the most frightening Japanese film of the past three decades and the answer is often a Kiyoshi Kurosawa title. It might be Cure, in which a detective trails a drifter who seems able to talk strangers into murder, or Pulse, in which the dead seep into Tokyo through the internet. Bong Joon-ho put Cure on his list of the ten greatest films; Ari Aster has called it a candidate for the best film ever made. Yet the picture that finally turned Kurosawa into a box-office name has no ghosts in it. The Samurai and the Prisoner, a murder mystery locked inside a castle under siege, became the first film of his career to earn more than a billion yen in Japanese cinemas. The director filed under J-horror has spent most of his career trying to get out of the file.

He shares a surname with Akira Kurosawa and nothing else; there is no family tie. Kiyoshi Kurosawa grew up in Kobe, and he was already shooting films about his own life in high school. At Rikkyo University in Tokyo he made small-gauge amateur shorts with a student film circle and sat in on the film lectures of the critic Shigehiko Hasumi, the teacher through whom he absorbed Jean-Luc Godard. Alfred Hitchcock and Yasujirō Ozu are the names he cites himself.

In 1981 his 8mm film Vertigo College was selected for the PIA Film Festival, long the door into the industry for Japanese amateurs. The professional apprenticeship was fast and rough. Kurosawa, born on 19 July 1955, had worked while still a student as a production assistant on Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s The Man Who Stole the Sun. After graduating in 1980 he assisted Shinji Sōmai on Sailor Suit and Machine Gun and helped found the Director’s Company, a production house run by directors. His first feature, in 1983, was a pink film, Kandagawa Pervert Wars. The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl followed in 1985, and then a commission that should have been his break: Sweet Home, a 1989 haunted-house film produced by the director Juzo Itami.

Sweet Home taught him the price of working inside someone else’s machine. Capcom’s tie-in video game later became the basis for Resident Evil. The film went another way. Itami re-shot and re-edited parts of it for the home-video and television releases; Kurosawa, furious, sued him and his company, and lost. The original theatrical version remains unavailable. For much of the 1990s he took what work came: a Sundance Institute scholarship for his screenplay Charisma, the low-budget The Guard from Underground in 1992, and a run of straight-to-video V-Cinema yakuza comedies shot on schedules that left no room for fuss.

Cure ended that period in 1997. It premiered in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival, where Koji Yakusho won the best actor prize for his detective, and it became one of the founding films of the Japanese horror wave that Ring and Ju-On would carry worldwide. Yakusho became his recurring lead. The next six years brought License to Live, Charisma, Pulse, which won the FIPRESCI critics’ prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section in 2001, and Bright Future, a youth film about two factory workers and a poisonous pet jellyfish.

The label that made him also misdescribes him. His films are slow and withholding, built from long takes, empty rooms and curtains that move when nothing should move them, and some of the American critics who first met Pulse found it too long and too slow. An American remake of Pulse arrived in 2006 to poor reviews. More telling is Tokyo Sonata, his 2008 family drama about a salaryman, played by Teruyuki Kagawa, who loses his job to cheaper overseas labour and hides it from his wife and sons. It has no supernatural element whatsoever. It won the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard, and the critic Tom Mes called it the most terrifying film Kurosawa had made. The horror was never in the ghosts.

The 2010s confirmed the range. Journey to the Shore, in which Eri Fukatsu travels across Japan with the ghost of her missing husband, played by Tadanobu Asano, won him the Un Certain Regard prize for best director in 2015. Creepy, with Hidetoshi Nishijima as a former detective, became his biggest domestic success at ¥630 million. He shot Daguerrotype in France, in French, with Tahar Rahim, and told an alien invasion through a broken marriage in Before We Vanish. From 2005 to 2023 he also taught at the graduate film school of Tokyo University of the Arts, where Ryusuke Hamaguchi studied with him. Hamaguchi later co-wrote Wife of a Spy, set in Kobe in 1940, with Yū Aoi as a woman who discovers her husband holds evidence of biological experiments on civilians in Manchuria. It was first broadcast by NHK and then won the Silver Lion for best director at Venice in 2020.

Approaching seventy, he sped up: 2024 brought three new films. Chime, a 45-minute horror piece about a cooking teacher and a sound that drives people to violence, premiered at the Berlinale and was sold online as resellable digital tickets through the platform Roadstead. Serpent’s Path remade his own 1998 revenge thriller in French, with Ko Shibasaki as a psychiatrist and Damien Bonnard and Mathieu Amalric among the cast, and competed at San Sebastián. Cloud, starring Masaki Suda as an online reseller whose petty grift comes back for him, played Venice out of competition and was chosen as Japan’s entry for the international feature Oscar. That year he was named Asian Filmmaker of the Year in Busan and made an officer of France’s Order of Arts and Letters.

The Samurai and the Prisoner, his first period film, adapts Honobu Yonezawa’s Naoki Prize-winning novel Kokurojo. During the 1579 siege of Arioka Castle the warlord Araki Murashige, played by Masahiro Motoki, rebels against Oda Nobunaga and, as mysteries unsettle the castle, turns for help to the strategist Kuroda Kanbei, played by Masaki Suda, whom he keeps in his dungeon. The film premiered in the Cannes Première section on 19 May 2026 and opened in Japan through Shochiku on 19 June. By 20 July it had taken more than ¥1 billion, overtaking Creepy as the highest-grossing film of his career. Janus Films picked it up for the United States.

Kurosawa has not announced what comes next. A second American remake of Pulse is in the works with Dave Boyle attached to direct, so the old horror films keep their own afterlife. The man who made them, at seventy-one, has just shown that a samurai mystery with a cast of feudal lords can draw the audience his ghosts never did.