Sightlines · reception

How It Comes was received

2018 · Tetsuya Nakashima · It Comes on Sightlines

The arc

Divided Japanese audiences and critics on its December 2018 release — too loud, too fractured for slow-burn J-horror expectations — but international horror fans embraced it as it travelled, and it's now a prized deep cut among genre heads.

What’s debated

The perennial fight: is Nakashima's maximalist, protagonist-swapping chaos a stroke of genius or a gorgeous mess that buries its own ghost story?

Its footprint

Its climactic nationwide mass-exorcism — shamans, salt trucks, blood sprinklers, the works — is the scene fans endlessly screenshot and crown 'the greatest exorcism sequence ever filmed,' with Takako Matsu's white-clad super-medium Kotoko as the film's indelible image.

Where it stands

A cult object in Letterboxd horror circles — the 'trust me, you haven't seen anything like this' recommendation of 2010s J-horror.

Did you know? It's adapted from Ichi Sawamura's debut novel Bogiwan ga, Kuru, which won the grand prize at the 22nd Japan Horror Fiction Awards — a top prize the jury had withheld for years before Sawamura's manuscript arrived.