Band of the Night (2005)

A video work created with the aim of making a horror film stripped of narrative.

The recurring motif in Japanese horror films of the 1990s was the "loop." Within these films, "curses" and "killings" proceed repeatedly without clear motive. They are meaningless, and the significance of each act appears to dissolve through repetition.

This structure of "repetition" and "looping" captures something essential about cinema that transcends the horror genre itself — because the technical apparatus of cinema is, by nature, a mechanism that mechanically and repeatedly projects a likeness of the world. The reason the ghosts appearing in the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hiroshi Takahashi are terrifying beyond their narrative function is that these "ghosts" capture the inherent uncanniness of cinema itself and the relationship between film and the actual world.

This work is a development of these ideas — an experiment in creating a horror film composed entirely of sequences based on "looping" and "rotation," with narrative eliminated altogether.