ノロイ

Noroi: The Curse opens as a documentary-within-a-documentary. Veteran paranormal writer Masafumi Kobayashi disappeared after his house burned to the ground, killing his wife Keiko. The film that follows is presented as his last completed investigation, 'The Curse', recovered from his cameraman's tapes and television archive footage.

The investigation opens with a complaint: a couple in a Tokyo suburb keep hearing animal-like cries and a child weeping from the house next door. Their neighbour, Junko Ishii, lives alone with a strange-eyed young son. When Kobayashi visits, Ishii is hostile and refuses to speak; soon afterward she and the boy vanish from the house entirely.

Kobayashi splices in unrelated television footage. A ten-year-old girl, Kana Yano, demonstrates psychic ability on a variety show — bending spoons, naming hidden drawings, but also speaking, unprompted, of a 'baby' and 'pigeons.' Soon after broadcast Kana begins hearing voices at home and disappears. In another programme, the actress Marika Matsumoto faints during an overnight ghost-hunt at a remote shrine; afterwards she sleepwalks, blacks out, and is once found at the edge of a rooftop, apparently mid-leap.

Through the investigation, Kobayashi keeps crossing paths with Mitsuo Hori, an unstable street psychic who wraps himself in aluminium foil to fend off what he calls 'ectoplasmic worms.' Erratic as he is, Hori senses the same disturbances Kobayashi has been documenting and mutters a name — Kagutaba — without knowing where it comes from.

The thread leads to Shimokage, a village now submerged beneath a reservoir. Archival footage shows that Shimokage practised an annual ritual to bind a demon called Kagutaba; the ceremony was filmed by a TV crew once, decades earlier, and then stopped abruptly after something went wrong. Kobayashi pieces together that Kagutaba was loosed when the village drowned, and that Ishii — who lived near Shimokage — has reassembled a small cult around the demon. The TV broadcasts that exposed Kana and Marika were channels by which Kagutaba reached and used them.

Following the cult to a derelict housing block, Kobayashi finds evidence of ritual killings of children. Hori, on the same site, suffers a violent fit, screaming about worms in his head. The film's framing then catches up to its own opening: Kobayashi returns home to finish his documentary; the house burns, Keiko dies, and he is never found.

Closing text cards list the dead and the missing. Kagutaba's purpose is never explained. The film closes on the implication that the demon spreads through broadcast itself — and that watching this assembled footage extends its reach to whoever is in the room.