Cure (1997)

"Cure" is an earlier collobration between director Kiyoshi Kurosawa and actor Koji Yakusho. Much like "Retribution", "Cure" is a crime story that focuses on a detective trying to find the connecting theme between murders and their victims. While there isn't a ghost or some other supernatural entity, the movie does deal with mysticism in the form of hypnosis. What makes this film worthy of the horror genre is the fact that the "innocent" murders are unaware and unable to resist the urge to kill. The scene where a hypnotizes murderer is peeling off the scalped face of her victim is pretty horror-genre worthy too!

Detective Takabe, who is trying to solve a string of murders by people who would never want to kill anyone, let alone their victims. Detective Takabe discovers that each of the murders has spent time with a young man with extreme amnesia named Mamiya. Everyone who meets Mamiya ends up killing someone close to them; a wife or a coworker for example. It turns out that his amnesia is just a ploy and a part of how he hypnotizes his victims. When Takabe finally meets Mamiya, Mamiya becomes fascinated that he can not hypnotize the detective. To what ends will Mamiya go to force his will over Detective Takabe?

Retribution (2006)

"Retribution" is a truly unique ghost story, at least when compared to the typical American/British kinds. In this detective story, an older detective is starting to believe that he is a suspect in a series of murders that he's investigating. A missing button is found at the crime scene, the kind that matches his coat, and his finger prints are sound on one of the murder victims. He also begins to see glimpses of a woman in a bright red dress. As the story progresses, more people are killed in the same fashion, by being drowned in salt water, by their loved ones over minor offenses. A father kills his son because the son owes a classmate $4500 and a wife kills her young husband because he was sexually aggressive with her when she wasn't in the mood. The detective soon learns that the first victim was killed by her boyfriend when she broke up with him. Cleared of any suspicion himself, the detective is still haunted by the ghost in red. The one clue connecting all of the killers, and the detective, is that they all rode a ferry daily fifteen years ago, and passed an old asylum where the girl in red was kept and evetanully died. Because none of them tried to help her, she is now causing them to kill. Will the detective solve the ghostly riddle before he kills someone hie loves or is he already too late?