J-Horror
'Ring' (1998) was the turning point. Its prehistory is on video. From 1991, Norio Tsuruta had been making original-video ghost stories based on 'true' accounts, developing a style where the ghost moves in right next to daily life. Hideo Nakata has explained it this way: Japanese horror is about ghosts entering the everyday. Audiences go home, and the fear keeps going in the elevator, in the bath. Nothing is shown directly. The ghost's appearance — white robes, long black hair, feet hidden — descends from 'Yotsuya Kaidan.' Here, a pattern this map keeps returning to shows up again. The name 'J-horror' wasn't coined in Japan. The oldest citation the English dictionaries list is a 2002 American film magazine. Japan only started using the banner 'J-Horror Theater' from 2004 — later in the sequence. It happened the same way with noir, the New Wave, the blockbuster, the documentary, the period film. This makes seven times. And the channel ran both ways. 'The Ring' (2002) earned close to $250 million worldwide, and in 2004 'Ju-on' got an English-language version, 'The Grudge.' It was directed by Takashi Shimizu — the same director who made the original. Sam Raimi is said to have chosen him personally. He remade his own film, with his own hands, in another language. Nothing else on this map does that.
The distance itself is the shape of this node. Ju-on came out in 2000 as a direct-to-video release from Toei. It was shot in about nine days, did poorly at the time, and built its reputation by word of mouth. It became a theatrical film in 2002, and by 2004 it had taken $110 million in North America. The soil was video. Toei opened the V-Cinema market in 1989, and films began appearing at one a month, then two. With neither budget nor days, a way of frightening people without showing them anything grew up there. What was missing became the method — a story this map has told in several other places.
One more thing. One person walked out of this node in a different direction: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes for Tokyo Sonata in 2008, the Best Director prize in the same section for Journey to the Shore in 2015, and the Silver Lion for direction at Venice for Wife of a Spy in 2020. While Hideo Nakata and Takashi Shimizu were valued inside the genre, Kurosawa also took a seat outside it. And the film Ari Aster called arguably the greatest ever made is his: Cure.
What happened after 2010 is, honestly, disputed. One reading is that the form hardened and lost momentum; another is that it changed shape and carried on, through Koji Shiraishi's found-footage work and films like Howling Village. This map does not round that off to one answer. The disagreement stays visible.