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as far as Japanese movies go, the Kurosawas (Akira and Kiyoshi) are the best. Akira Kurosawa is far, far better IMO, but Kiyoshi Kurosawa does the best of the Japanese Horror (Kaïro has a pretty good spot on my top 50 list). Takashi Miike is good, too, but at times he goes too much for being weird or artsy or just 'out there' and not enough for entertainment. He's effective either way, Visitor Q did a good job of making me uncomfortable in a couple spots, but it wasn't entertaining. His best work was, again IMO, Ichi the Killer. Ringu is great, too. It is, like Paradise Lost, a placeholder for my top movie list (it was at 25, then 50. It's not on the list now, but if I took a movie off somewhere for whatever reason, it would temporarily get that spot). There are some great movies that I don't consider horror, but are close, too. Battle Royale is great, one of the best movies I've ever seen, and Versus, which could easily be called horror but has a kind of ingenious way of defying categorization, is almost the anti-Miike, in that it seems to aim completely away from being artsy or taking its self seriously at all, and goes straight to being awesome. A lot of movies are like that, but I've yet to see one do it as well as Versus.
Man, I just went all over the place there. Try and sort all that out if you want. There's a lot of BAAAD Japanese horror movies out there, too, but I chose to ignore them for now.
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