A Frightening Look Into The Human Soul

Why Kyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cure” Is The Scariest Film Ever Made

Where Fear Lies

Think about the scariest movie you’ve ever seen. Since the dawn of horror cinema, the majority of horror films — from “Halloween” to “Barbarian,” and “The Exorcist” to “Saw” — have all revolved around some sort of external evil which has come to wreak havoc on a group of people, and their survival depends on defeating it.

This threat taps into a primal human instinct: the desire for survival, which motivates all of our daily activities — working, eating, avoid a dark alley while walking home at night — but when we truly think about it, how often do we as people actually think about survival on a daily basis. Having an evil murderous being threatening our existence is of course something that can trigger our most primal fear, but can’t horror be pushed past that? Are there not things that we are more afraid of than death? Things that we are forced to confront more often? Things that make us question our life purpose, morality, world?

This is where Psychological horror comes in.

Psychological horror’s main difference from traditional horror is where its threat lies. Instead of having a large external threat like traditional horror films, psychological horror internalizes fear and often has its threat come from within the main character, either as a manifestation of a character’s fears, or the result of a character’s deteriorated mental state.

The benefit of a film like this, where the fear comes from within the character in addition to without, is that writers and directors are left with a bigger opening to explore what really makes people afraid, further than just death. Psychological horror forces us to confront claims about the human mind and soul, and at times, it forces us to confront the possibility that we ourselves — not some external monster — are the true source of danger.

Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) and Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) interrogating Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) for the first time. Still from “Cure” (1997), © Daiei Film / Courtesy of Kadokawa Pictures.

The Mystery of “Cure”

1997’s “Cure,” directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is a Japanese psychological horror film that follows a detective named Takabe as he investigates a series of mysterious and gruesome murders with seemingly no motive. Each victim is found with an “X” carved into their neck or body, and each suspect admits to committing the murder, but none of them are ever able to give a good reason why they did it… they simply just know that they’re guilty. Eventually, Takabe is able to track down someone with connections to the murders: a mysterious drifter named Mamiya.

Mamiya is “Cure’s” basic threat. He serves as the catalyst of the film’s murders, and the main antagonist, but what’s interesting about “Cure” is that the main problem in the film is not simply stopping Mamiya, but rather trying to figure out how he is causing people to kill at all.

In the film, near the halfway point when Takabe is suggested that Mamiya may be using hypnosis to cause the murders, we’re also told a key limitation of hypnosis: that it can’t make someone kill another person unless they already have some sort of underlying motive.

This small detail transforms “Cure’s” main mystery into something far more unsettling. We’re forced to ask ourselves why a man would kill a random prostitute, a police officer his partner, a female doctor a random male passerby? Why would a husband kill the wife whom he loves?

This shift in the films mystery — from who is responsible to why is this possible at all — is the question that is meant to haunt both the audience, and Takabe himself… and it’s exactly what drives Takabe mad.

Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) interrogating Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) again, begging for answers. Still from “Cure” (1997), © Daiei Film / Courtesy of Kadokawa Pictures.

The Answer

Throughout “Cure’s” runtime, Kurosawa is silently feeding us a second story. A much darker story than an aimless drifter hypnotizing people to murder without motive, but rather, a story that explains these murders, and ends with a terrible murder of its own.

We know Takabe as a good man. He’s a humble detective, a man fighting for justice, and most pertinently, is a man who’s very loving to and patient with his ill wife… or so we think. As the ties of the movie begin to move forward further and further, we begin to see hints of Takabe’s tiredness with his wife, and eventually, we come to one of “Cure’s” most terrifying scenes: Takabe coming home to find his wife hanging from their kitchen ceiling fan.

Takabe is visually distraught, brought to a silent scream, until suddenly the image breaks and Takabe’s wife is standing right there, perfectly alive, confused by her husband’s terror. Takabe had hallucianted it all.

This is one of the first scenes where we start to see some unreliability in Takabe’s perspective, and it leaves us wondering, has Mamiya’s hypnosis gotten to him, or is there something darker at play? Is there something darker within Takabe?

As the film continues to move forward, it is eventually revealed Kurosawa’s main claim in “Cure” — that all human beings have suppressed anger and resentment towards certain people, and if our inhibitions were taken away, we could take that anger out on people through unprecedented ways. This includes the most brutal of all possibilities, murder.

We think back to the man who killed the prostitute, possibly out of his resentment toward women and his own isolation. We think of the female doctor who killed a random male passerby, possibly out of resentment toward men not treating her as an equal or with respect. And out of the many other murders, we are given most terrifyingly a last example, the ambiguous death of Takabe’s wife.

At the end of the film, Takabe’s wife is wheeled down a dark mental hospital hall, revealing her body to be contorted and bloody, dead. It’s unclear to us if Takabe had any part in his wife’s death, or if his wife really is dead (is it just another one of Takabe’s visions, brought on by some final hypnosis?), but that’s not the point of Kurosawa including this. Kurosawa shows us through his film that Takabe is a good man, a man who is patient and loving toward his wife, faithful toward his career and world — a person just as good as the rest of us believe we are — yet even he has that reserved anger and resentment within him, and even he is capable of murder.

Kurosawa suggests that even the most moral of men, with the cleanest of spirit, is not free from darker impulses.

This ending death leaves us with a simple, yet terrifying question: Is Mamiya the monster forcing others to kill, or are we the monsters, harboring a concealed and subtle hatred, that makes us just as dangerous as Mamiya himself?

Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) with wife Fumie Takabe (Anna Nakagawa). Still from “Cure” (1997), © Daiei Film / Courtesy of Kadokawa Pictures.

Conclusion

Kurosawa’s claim about the human psyche and soul in “Cure” is a dark and pessimistic one at best, and although I don’t necessarily agree with it myself (and maybe even Kurosawa himself doesn’t either), it is still a thought provoking and chilling claim.

Unlike other horror movies, “Cure” pushes psychological horror to its extremes, and takes the use of an external threat that so many horror films have, and flips it upside down (or more accurately: “inside-out”). Instead of Mamiya being the evil threat, “Cure” forces us to look within and ask ourselves if we are the evil ones? If we have as pure of morals and feelings as we believe? It asks us if we are more terrified of death, or what monstrous acts we are all capable of committing?

Instead of exploiting our natural fear of death, Kurosawa takes advantage of the goodness we hold dear to our hearts, and the goodness we presume other people have in theirs, and asks us how good we truly are, pushing his film past the limits of traditional horror, and making one of the scariest films ever made.

Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) speaking to Dr. Miyajima (Yoriko Doguchi) before her hypnosis. Still from “Cure” (1997), © Daiei Film / Courtesy of Kadokawa Pictures.

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