Opening Night Gala with Necronomidol and Chiaki J. Konaka
Join us for the big festival opening! A short musical performance by the Lovecraft-themed all-female Japanese band NECRONOMIDOL will be followed by a short keynote with Guest of Honor Chiaki J. Konaka, on the influence of the Cthulhu Mythos in Japanese horror and TV, including clips from Ultraman episodes penned by Konaka.
Short Film Block 1 will begin immediately after this presentation.
Formed in 2014 NECRONOMIDOL are the dark heroines of Japan's independent idol world. Playing songs in such diverse genres as darkwave, black metal and NWOBHM and featuring strong influence from the author H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, NECRONOMIDOL boasts legions of devoted fans around the world. Based in Tokyo but playing shows in Taiwan, Thailand, New Caledonia, England, Italy, France and the US, NECRONOMIDOL plans to further their quest of world domination in the name of the Great Old Ones to even more far-flung corners of the globe in 2018!
We are extremely pleased to introduce our Guest of Honor for 2018!
Chiaki J. Konaka was born in Tokyo in 1961. At an early age, he began making independent movies. In 1989, he became the screenwriter for the original video movie Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (which means "Evil Spirit"). This work was one of the first films in the "J Horror" movement, and influenced Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Shimizu, and others. Chiaki continued to write horror screenplays (Scary True Stories: Ten Haunting Tales from the Japanese Underground, Evil Dead Trap 2, and more) and published several books, including two about J Horror 's methodology - Charmed by Fear: Fundamental Rules of Horror Films (2003), Etiquette of Fear: Horror Cinema Technology. His novel, Marebito, was adapted to screen in 2004. Konaka wrote the screenplay and the film was directed by Takashi Shimizu.
Since then, he has written more than 200 scripts encompassing horror, SF series, movies, TV dramas, and animation. He is well known as screenwriter for "Ultraman Gaia", "serial experiments lain", "TEXHNOLYZE", "Devil Lady", "Bubble Gum Crisis Tokyo 2040", "Ghost Hound", and "Mononoke". Konaka is a well known to fans for putting Lovecraftian and Mythos elements in many of his works (notably "Ultraman Tiga", "Digimon Adventure 02", "Digimon Tamers", "THE Big-O", "MAREBITO", "GR Giant Robo"). In 1992, he worked on the a Japanese film adaptation of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". In 2002, he wrote the mythos novel Terror Rate, which was translated to English in the anthology Inverted Kingdom, edited by Ken Asamatsu. His vampire novella will be translated into English in 2019.