Kiyoshi Kurosawa has gained a good deal of worldwide attention in recent years.Thanks largely to his revisionist serial killer movie Cure, the filmmaker is in the vanguard of the new Japanese horror cinema. A genre that has slowly been getting a foothold on these shores, it has found an audience among gorehounds and art house crowds alike. Directors like Kurosawa, bad boy Takashi Miike and of course Shinya Tsukamoto have become regulars of the international film festival circuit, but find as much favour with horror enthusiasts as with highbrow film critics.With video releases of his work sadly lacking in the West, the festival circuit is as yet the only way to catch up with the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The director himself is more than happy to take this route, witnessed by the fact that he accompanied his two latest productions Charisma and Barren Illusion to Hollands Rotterdam Film Festival in early 2000. Both films firmly belong in that area of the genre that Steve Bissette once christened the trance film. Their place is on the very edge of the genre, where horror is far removed from body counts, gore and fx. Yet bleak, hallucinatory and unsettling as they are, these films manage to chill the viewer to the very bone.

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