That right there is another reason, actually, why White Noise is profoundly unsettling, and still would be, even if it was a load of crud, which it isn't at all. Ouiji boards and psychics and such, all that stuff probably does the same trick, but there's never one about when the idea that talking to the dead might be a bit of a laugh comes into a fellas head, and so the world goes on untroubled by the forces of Evil breaking through and such. A bunch a drunk fuckers in a frat house or an opium-den, though, if they decide to conjure Satan just to see what happens, since lets face it, this fucking crack-ganja is awful, if White Noise is to be trusted, and all those websites that state that, yeah, this is pretty much proven, is what, if that's all correct, then next to no effort is required for to go ahead and do it. They don't have to worry about writing out the alphabet and cutting out the letters and arranging it into a circle and then finding a glass that hasn't been pissed in. They just gotta turn on the telly.

Maybe that's why Channel 4 in the UK shows The Magic Roundabout in the middle of the night. Maybe they hope that when these drunken rapscallions decide to invoke all hell through the telly, they'll find Dougal and shit instead, and be too busy laughing and staring in awe for to think another second about the paranormal.

Just a damn theory, is all The Duke has to offer.

Anyhow, to return to the whole Asian Horror thing from back in the first paragraph.

White Noise is an obvious attempt to make those same techniques work in a Hollywood flick based on an original screenplay, rather than a foreign number some executives saw one night in their hotel suites. The whole thing is unsettlingly cold, clinical even, what folks would have called Kubrickian back in the days before Sadako got flung head-first down a motherfucking well. The shots of the tide ominously lapping the shore, that shit brings Ringu to mind in a second.

Also, there's the whole Evil Technology thing from shit like Kairo or Phone, and the former is evoked more times than enough by the shadowy spirit-type things drifting around the edges of the frame here and there.

And that framing, that framing is wonderful. Things are shot in such a way that characters or props are shoved to the furthest reaches of the screen, leaving a gulf in the middle that a fella can't help but scrutinise for hints of something that shouldn't be there. Like in Ju-On - The Curse, when your eyes trundle timidly around the frame, since the fella is no more than a tiny dot at the bottom, and surely it's framed like that for a motherfucking reason. Sure enough, just as it cuts, you spy a fucking woman looking out from the top bedroom.