Kōji Shiraishi

Kōji Shiraishi (白石 晃士 , Shiraishi Kōji , born June 1, 1973) is a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and occasional actor. He is primarily known for directing Japanese horror films, including Noroi: The Curse (2005), Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007), Occult, Teketeke (both 2009), Cult (2013), and Sadako vs. Kayako (2016).

Kōji Shiraishi was born and raised in Fukuoka, Japan. After making his first video film in his second year of high school, Shiraishi entered the Department of Fine Arts in the Faculty of Art and Design at Kyushu Sangyo University with the intention of pursuing a career in filmmaking. Although he was expelled from the university in his second year for non-payment of tuition, he continued to participate in the Film Studies Society and was involved in film production. Later, while working as a crew member on films such as August in the Water directed by Sōgo Ishii, he also made his own independent films: Violent Men (1997), co-directed with Akihiro Kasai, won the Screenplay Award and the Cinematography Award at the Hiroshima Film Exhibition '98, and The Wind Shall Blow (1998), co-directed with Futoshi Kondo, won the Runner-up Grand Prix at the Pia Film Festival '99.

In the early 2000s, he became involved in the production of horror films, and from 2002 to 2003, he directed several videos in the Honto ni Atta! Noroi no Video series. The following year, he made his feature film directorial debut with Jurei THE MOVIE Kuro-Jurei. From the mid-2010s, he began directing commercial films with decent budgets, such as Sadako vs. Kayako (2016), Funouhan (2018), and Hell Girl (2019), while he has directed a number of fake documentaries from the beginning of his career to the present, including Noroi (2005), Occult (2009), Cult (2013), A Record of Sweet Murder (2014), Welcome to the Occult Forest (2022), and Aishiteru! (2022), among others.

Shiraishi's domestic popularity, along with films such as Noroi, Occult, and Cult, was enhanced by the Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! series, which began as a video project in 2012. This series, while taking the format of a psychic documentary like Honto ni Atta! Noroi no Video, is clearly made as fiction, characterized by strong characterization, physical violence, and SF horror like worldview (The series is said to have been influenced by the works of Daijiro Morohoshi), as opposed to the stereotypical characteristics of J-horror. The popularity of the series, and of Shiraishi himself, has grown especially on Niconico, which periodically broadcasts the series and his other works, and the fan base has expanded.

In 2016, he published a book Textbook of Fake Documentaries which details his own methods for creating fake documentary works.

Shiraishi cites Gakuryū Ishii as his favorite Japanese director, and Ishii's 1980 Crazy Thunder Road as his favorite film. Other directors he admires include John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, Abbas Kiarostami, and Sam Raimi, and films he enjoy include the original Dawn of the Dead (1978), The Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987), The Thing (1982), and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).