This Halloween, London’s East End becomes a portal into Japan’s most haunting nightmares. From Friday 31 October to Sunday 2 November 2025, the Japanese Film Club brings J-Horror Halloween to Rich Mix Cinema, at 35 to 47 Bethnal Green Road, Shoreditch (E1 6LA).
Off the back of their hugely successful launch party following Yokimono, which featured a screening of Tampopo, Japanese Film Club now returns with a three-night arc of horror: Takashi Miike’s Audition, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, and Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead.
Each screening begins at 20:30, combining psychological disquiet, cinematic precision, and one final night of laughter-through-terror.
Overview
- Address
- 35 to 47 Bethnal Green Road, Shoreditch, E1 6LA
- Admission
- £10 to £20
- Starts
- October 31, 2025, 8:30 PM
- Ends
- November 2, 2025 10:30 PM
Friday 31 October: Audition (1999)
The weekend opens with Audition, perhaps the most notorious J-horror film ever made. Takashi Miike, the genre’s restless provocateur, starts with tenderness and ends in unflinching dread.
Aoyama, a lonely widower, is persuaded by a producer friend to hold fake auditions in search of a new wife. His chosen candidate, Asami (Eihi Shiina), appears perfect, until hints of something darker emerge. Her background doesn’t check out; her flat harbours a groaning burlap sack that shouldn’t move.
Miike slowly dismantles our sense of safety, fusing romance and psychological torment into a finale so excruciatingly precise that it’s whispered about in horror circles to this day. Audition remains not only a horror landmark, but also a study in loneliness, fantasy, and the dangers of projection.
Book tickets for Audition at Rich Mix
Saturday 1 November: Cure (1997)
Saturday’s screening turns inward, exploring the rot beneath modern life. Cure, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is a slow, hallucinatory investigation of violence and identity.
Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho), stretched thin by his wife’s mental decline, investigates a string of murders, each committed by a seemingly ordinary person who carves an “X” into their victim’s neck. The killers all share one thing: complete amnesia.
Enter Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), a drifter obsessed with mesmerism, whose simple question, “Who are you?”, triggers unexplainable aggression. Kurosawa’s camera lingers on empty rooms and damp corridors, letting unease breathe. His hypnotic realism makes Cure feel like a waking dream that never ends.
As Bong Joon-ho once noted, this film profoundly shaped his own storytelling. Watching it on the big screen is a rare chance to see the psychological origins of modern horror cinema.
This screening has now passed.
Sunday 2 November: One Cut of the Dead (2017)
After two nights of terror, Sunday offers relief, though not before some chaos. One Cut of the Dead begins as a single-take zombie film shot in a derelict factory. Director Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu) shouts orders as his crew panics, blood sprays, and the undead lurch into frame.
Then halfway through, everything changes. The film rewinds and shows how this “disaster” was made, transforming its mayhem into a riotous celebration of filmmaking itself. Director Shinichiro Ueda turns low-budget panic into comic brilliance, part satire, part love letter to creative persistence.
It’s a fitting finale to a weekend that begins in pain and ends in laughter. One Cut of the Dead reminds us that behind every scream lies collaboration, chaos, and the joy of getting it right, eventually.
This screening has now passed.
Rich Mix
What to know before the lights go down
A weekend with its own pulse. J-Horror Halloween 2025 unfolds like a cinematic triptych, from emotional torment to existential dread to cathartic comedy. It’s less a set of screenings, more a collective descent and release.
The setting. Rich Mix Cinema in Shoreditch adds character: part arthouse, part community hub, with an audience that thrives on discovery. Arrive early to grab a drink from the bar and catch snippets of nervous laughter before curtain call.
Tickets and access. Each screening starts at 20:30. Doors open from 19:45. Tickets are available directly through Rich Mix’s box office, with reduced rates for members. To unlock discount and early-access tickets, sign up via the Japanese Film Club newsletter: it’s free and includes future screening updates.
Content notes. Audition and Cure contain strong psychological and violent imagery, while One Cut of the Dead offers comic horror and mild gore. The event is suitable for ages 18 and over.
Getting there. Rich Mix is a short walk from Shoreditch High Street (Overground) and Liverpool Street Station (Central, Elizabeth, Circle, and Hammersmith & City lines). Cycle parking is available outside.
Post-screening conversations. Expect audience Q&As, casual chats in the café, and possibly some impromptu theorising about Miike’s narrative cruelty or Kurosawa’s hypnosis scenes. It’s horror as community, unnerving, but oddly connective.
Ready to test your nerves?
Join the Japanese Film Club for three nights of horror, philosophy, and cinematic mischief at Rich Mix Cinema, from 31 October to 2 November 2025. From Miike’s restrained menace to Ueda’s joyous absurdity, J-Horror Halloween is a rare chance to experience the spectrum of Japanese horror on the big screen, where fear truly belongs.
