Eko Eko Azarak

A teenage witch confronts the forces of evil and the burden of loneliness that her powers bring. Sounds like a straight lift from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But things are not so simple.  This film series is actually based on a popular manga (sadly unavailable in the west) from the 1970s, penned by Koga Shinichi (in the  manga, Misa Kuroi is very different from the films. She is less the adolescent ingenue coming to terms with approaching adulthood and powers that she is as yet unaccustomed to, and more of a timeless, vengeful elemental spirit ). Both fictional universes have some very major things in common—the lead character is a female, chosen to protect the world. She's in high school and must deal with balancing a normal life with her sacred duty, and each possesses some superhuman (or in Misa Kuroi's case, supernatural) abilities. 

The Eko Eko Azarak films are quite different from the supernaturally charged angry ghost stories of more mainstream films like Hideo Nakata's Ringu or Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On. Instead, the Eko films have more in common with American “teens-in-peril” films.  However, instead of knife wielding slashers, the menaces come in the form of black magic. 

The first film in the Misa Kuroi canon is Wizard of Darkness--an atmospheric and intriguing little movie that works far better than one would expect. Director Shimako Sato demonstrates she has a keen understanding of horror cinema aesthetics, weaving in just the right amounts of mood, gore, sex, and violence while never allowing her characters to become human spam.  Kimika Yoshino, the star of the film, is an intense and haunting young actress who has a captivating screen presence. For her screen debut, the performance is impressive—Misa Kuroi is a multifaceted character, one who conveys a great deal of emotion through her eyes. We've no doubt Misa has seen some amazing and terrifying things—her haunted gaze only drives that point home. Yoshino would again play Misa Kuroi in the 1996 sequel, Birth of the Wizard. 

This installment finds our heroine entering a new high school. where supernatural dealings are afoot. Several murders have been committed in the city.  Connecting the murder sits on a map forms a gigantic pentagram with the school as the center. The purpose of the murders and the pentagram configuration are to raise Lucifer—the most powerful act any wizard can perform.  Things come to a head when a group students are kept after class to retake a test. After hours of waiting for their teacher to return, they decide to leave on their own—only to find the geography of the school has changed, and every corridor leads them back to their classroom.  And then there’s the mysterious numbers appearing on the classroom blackboard.  

Birth of the Wizard, the sequel (in fact a prequel) begins in Meiji-era Japan, in a village of witches and wizards. Moving forward  to the present day, an archaeologist discovers a mummy from the village. Blissfully unaware that the mummy is, in fact, possessed by an evil spirit (naturally), he runs off, leaving his assistant alone. The mummy comes to life, kills her, and the evil spirit takes over her body.  This evil spirit is now searching for Misa, who is protected by Kyle Reese, who goes by the name of Saiga in this film. It is Misa's destiny to defeat this evil spirit, but she needs Saiga's help to do it. Again, the story isn't original, but it is entertaining. Similar stylish and gory horror, a nice fast pace, and some good special effects.   

 Misa the Dark Angel marks the first time that Hinako Saeki would play the role of Misa Kuroi.  While the film certainly has an intriguing premise, the execution falls flat in most instances. After an exciting opening, the movie spends the next forty-minutes going nowhere, as a seemingly shell-shocked and out of place Misa befriends a group of girls, rehearses the school play, and wanders lost through the proceedings.   What she’s doing there, what she hopes to accomplish, and what’s really going on is never fully explained, but as the girls visit a resort as part of a school trip, the action moves into another dimension, where things get really weird.  Director Ueno Katsuhito is a great diappointment after the relatively stylish and professional word of Shimako Sato, and the entire film seems amateurish.   

 The fourth movie, Awakening, was released in 1999. Following the events of the second movie, Misa (this time played by TOEI poster child and Battle Royale II starlette, Natsuki Kato) discovers, along with the rest of Japan, the strength of her newly acquired powers when she and her friends are attacked in the woods.