When Found Footage Should Have Stayed Lost
If The Blair Witch Project taught us that fear lies in what we don’t see, then Cult (2013) proves that showing everything—including your film crew, your lack of budget, and your creative bankruptcy—can be far scarier for the wrong reasons.
Kōji Shiraishi’s Cult is a found-footage horror film about a TV crew investigating a haunted house. The premise sounds promising—actors playing themselves, a cursed family, and exorcisms gone wrong. Unfortunately, what we get feels less like a horror movie and more like an awkward behind-the-scenes featurette for a paranormal reality show that should’ve been cancelled halfway through filming.
The result? A cinematic séance where everyone, including the audience, wishes they’d never summoned this movie in the first place.
The Plot: Found Footage, Lost Patience
It starts with a housewife, Tomoe Kaneda, and her teenage daughter, Miho, moving into a home that is apparently being haunted by an evil spirit—or possibly bad acting. After their doorbell camera catches some spooky activity, a paranormal TV show decides to send a few young actresses to “investigate.”
The actresses—Yu Abiru, Mayuko Iwasa, and Mari Iriki—play themselves, which sounds meta and edgy until you realize they bring the same amount of believability as someone pretending to be scared of a spider in a commercial for bug spray.
They’re joined by Unsui, a Buddhist priest whose main skill seems to be failing at exorcisms. He chants, waves some beads, and looks vaguely uncomfortable while ghostly gusts of wind blow everyone’s hair around. Eventually, Miho gets possessed and kills the family dog—a moment that’s supposed to be shocking but lands somewhere between “mildly upsetting” and “accidentally hilarious.”
A week later, the team returns with a senior priest named Ryugen, who promptly gets ghost-slapped into oblivion. Both priests end up dead, proving that holy men in Japanese horror movies have about the same survival rate as redshirts in Star Trek.
Enter Neo—because apparently we needed The Matrix energy now. He’s a rogue exorcist in a leather jacket, and his name alone tells you exactly how subtle this movie is. He deduces that the neighbors cursed the house because of—wait for it—a spiritual cult that kidnapped Miho years earlier to use her as a vessel for their god.
If you just rolled your eyes hard enough to see your own brain, congratulations: you’ve experienced Cult the way it was meant to be experienced.
The Found Footage Problem: Camera Operators From Hell
One of the joys of found footage horror is its ability to make things feel immediate and authentic. Cult, however, uses its shaky cam not for tension but for distraction. Every scene looks like it was filmed during an earthquake by a cameraman with caffeine withdrawal.
Half the time, the camera points at a wall or someone’s shoulder, and the other half it’s zooming in on a face that looks like it’s rehearsing for a toothpaste commercial. The result is dizzying, not terrifying.
By the time something genuinely creepy happens—like a door slamming shut or a shadow moving—it’s buried under enough nausea-inducing editing to make you wish the ghost would just kill the cameraman and put us all out of our misery.
The Characters: Professional Victims Anonymous
Let’s take a look at our cast of terrified professionals:
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Yu Abiru plays herself as the kind of actress who clearly regrets signing the contract halfway through filming. She’s supposed to be skeptical, but mostly she looks bored, as if she’s just realized her paycheck doesn’t include hazard pay for fake hauntings.
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Mayuko Iwasa spends most of her screen time asking obvious questions (“What was that noise?” “Is something behind me?”) before promptly screaming at the answers.
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Mari Iriki, on the other hand, has the most entertaining arc—she gets possessed, kills her boss with telekinesis, and declares her god is coming. It’s the one moment of genuine campy joy in a film otherwise allergic to entertainment.
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Unsui and Ryugen, our priests, provide the spiritual muscle of the group. Unfortunately, both have the energy of two men trying to remember the Wi-Fi password during an exorcism. They chant, they sweat, they die.
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Neo, our “freelance exorcist,” is meant to be mysterious and cool. Instead, he comes off like a guy who sells essential oils on Facebook and insists they can cure demonic possession.
By the end, you’re not rooting for any of them—you’re rooting for the evil spirit to hurry up and finish the job.
The Horror: Jump Scares by PowerPoint
Shiraishi has made some great horror (Noroi: The Curse is a classic). Unfortunately, Cult feels like a lazy rerun of his better work. The scares are predictable, the ghosts look like they’re auditioning for a Halloween store ad, and every tense moment is followed by awkward silence and someone saying, “Did you see that?”
Yes, we did. We just wish we hadn’t.
The exorcism scenes are particularly bad—filled with melodramatic chanting, glowing lights, and the kind of digital effects that look like they were created on a Windows 98 computer. When Unsui gets attacked by an invisible force, the camera shakes, he screams, and then everyone stares in confusion for a full minute, as if they’re waiting for the director to yell “cut.”
Even the big twist—that Miho’s mother isn’t really her mother, but part of a doomsday cult—lands with all the impact of a soggy fortune cookie.
The Atmosphere: IKEA Haunting
The house itself looks suspiciously well-lit and cozy, like the ghost of an interior designer was haunting it before anyone else moved in. There’s no oppressive dread, no real tension—just a lot of beige walls and bad lighting.
Even when the demonic stuff starts happening, the film never commits to its mood. You can practically hear the producer saying, “Let’s keep it PG-13 scary so we can sell it to Netflix someday.”
The Ending: Apocalypse by Way of Shrug
By the time the final act rolls around, the movie is sprinting toward the finish line like a marathon runner who forgot to stretch. Neo’s big showdown with the cult’s god involves a lot of yelling, some smoke, and special effects that would embarrass a Power Rangers episode.
Tomoe escapes, everyone else dies, and Mari shows up again like a ghostly motivational speaker to announce that humanity’s doomed. The world’s ending, the god is coming, and honestly, good. Maybe he can fix the pacing.
The Message: Organized Religion, But Make It Boring
If Cult has any deeper meaning (and that’s a big “if”), it’s buried under layers of cheap spectacle and disorganized storytelling. The film seems to want to critique fanaticism, superstition, and the commodification of spirituality—but mostly it just ends up making you wish you’d joined a cult instead of watching one.
At least cults offer free snacks and matching robes.
The Verdict: A Sermon in Bad Filmmaking
Kōji Shiraishi is a talented director, but Cult feels like the work of someone who filmed it over a long weekend after binge-watching Ghost Hunters. The scares are weak, the characters thinner than origami, and the story collapses under its own ambition.
There’s a good movie buried somewhere inside Cult—a sharp meta-horror about celebrity, faith, and fear—but it’s lost beneath endless shaky cam, overacting, and the faint sound of viewers dozing off.
If you’ve ever wanted to see a found-footage film that manages to make both demons and actresses look tired, Cultdelivers. Unfortunately, it’s delivering boredom, not terror.
Verdict: ★★☆☆☆
A movie about evil spirits that somehow manages to have no spirit at all. Cult proves that when it comes to horror, sometimes it’s better to lose the footage entirely.
