Plotline to Noroi (2005)
The movie begins in a video editing room, where a voiceover narrator briefly describes Masafumi Kobayashi, a paranormal expert who produced a series of books and movies on supernatural activity around Japan. The movie then explains that he disappeared in the process of making his greatest and most disturbing film yet, The Curse, and the aforementioned movie begins to play.
The movie begins with Kobayashi's investigation of a woman named Junko Ishii and her unnamed son, brought about when Kobayashi was contacted by her next-door neighbour. Soon after Kobayashi makes his first visit, however, Ishii moves out of the apartment, and the neighbours that contacted Kobayashi die in a freak car accident. Ishii is not seen or mentioned until the film's denoument.
The first half of the movie then depicts a steadily unfurling series of seemingly unrelated events, including the disappearance of a psychic child, a Television personality making complex loops of string in her sleep, a mass suicide where the participants hang by similarly knotted string, and many more equally bizarre occurrences.
The multitude of events do not seem to have any commonality to one another, until the second part of the movie begins. Here, it becomes apparent that all of the events relate to a mysterious entity known only as Kagutaba.
Kobayashi's quest to find the truth brings him to a regional area of Nagano, where many years prior a very religious town once stood. The town performed an annual ritual to contain Kagutaba, until it was demolished to construct a dam.
As the movie comes to a close, each character's relationship with Kagutaba becomes apparent, and the many individual stories and narrative threads draw to a single climactic conclusion.