General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Exte (エクステ)

Exte (エクステ, also released as Exte: Hair Extensions) is a 2007 Japanese horror film directed by Sion Sono (園子温), in which hair extensions made from the hair of a murdered girl carry her grudge and attack the women who wear them. It was produced by EXTE Film Partners, distributed by Toei, and released in Japan on February 17, 2007.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Japanese title	エクステ (Ekusute); international title Exte: Hair Extensions²
Director and screenwriters	Directed by Sion Sono; screenplay by Sono, Masaki Adachi, and Makoto Sanada²
Release	February 17, 2007, Japan; distributed by Toei¹
Running time	108 minutes per Japanese sources; festival listings give 113 minutes¹^•³
Lead cast	Chiaki Kuriyama as hairdresser Yuko Mizushima; Ren Osugi as the hair-fetishist morgue attendant Yamazaki Gunji²
Genre	Horror with suspense and comedy elements; described by festival programmers as a J-horror parody⁴^•³
Reception	Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 52% from 4 reviews; IMDb rating 6.3/10 from about 3,800 votes⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Premise

The title refers to ekusute, the Japanese abbreviation of "hair extension" (ヘアーエクステンション), the fashion hairpiece.⁷ A huge container arriving at Yokohama port is found filled with an enormous quantity of hair, with the corpse of a young girl buried inside it.¹ According to the Torino Film Festival synopsis, the woman's organs are missing and have been replaced by hair, and suspicion falls on an organization trafficking in internal organs.⁸

Yamazaki Gunji, a strange middle-aged man who manages the police morgue and has an abnormal obsession with beautiful hair, steals the corpse and cuts hair from the dead girl's body to make extensions, which he sells.⁴^•³ In Nippon Connection's summary, the girl's hair strangely keeps growing from her body's orifices and wounds after death.³ The extensions carry the dead girl's grudge: women who wear them die strange deaths, and the hair itself grows wildly and attacks people.¹^•⁴

The story centers on Yuko Mizushima (Chiaki Kuriyama), an aspiring hairdresser who lives with her friend Yuki Morita (Megumi Sato), a would-be dancer, and has taken in her niece Mami (Miku Sato) from an abusive household.⁹^•¹⁰ Yamazaki brings his extensions to the salon where Yuko works, whose stylists praise their beauty, and he later sets his sights on Yuko's own hair.¹¹^•⁸ The climax pits the "black-haired girl" against the hair-fetishist in a room filled with hair.¹²

Production

Sion Sono conceived the film from the question of what the raw material of fashionable hair extensions might be, and wrote the original idea as well as directing.⁷^•¹³ He was born in Aichi Prefecture in 1961, debuted as a poet at 17, began making 8mm films at university, and won the Grand Prize at the 1987 PIA Film Festival for A Man's Flower Road; before Exte he was known internationally for Suicide Club (2001) and Noriko's Dinner Table (2005).³^•¹⁴ The Japan Times reviewer Mark Schilling, a film critic for that newspaper, framed Exte as the third step in a common career path for Japanese directors, after the festival-circuit indie debut and the cult sensation.¹⁵

The crew included cinematographer Hiroo Yanagida, composer Tomoki Hasegawa (with Sono also credited for music), production designer Katsuhiro Fukuzawa, and special effects makeup artist Yoshihiro Nishimura.²^•¹⁶ The film makes heavy use of VFX to show hair attacking people.⁴ Eri Machimoto, who plays Sachi Koda, performed the theme song "Haruka," with music by Zentaro Watanabe and lyrics by Machimoto.⁶

Ren Osugi's performance as Yamazaki drew press attention before release. In interviews he joked that he had "overdone it," described enjoying the gloomy, oddball character with his tulip hat and overalls, and noted that the original song his character hums, chanting "Hair hair hair," stuck in the crew's heads; he had also appeared in Chiaki Kuriyama's film debut, Shikoku.¹²

Genre position and reception

Commentators place the film inside the J-horror tradition while playing against it. Nippon Connection calls it a "bizarre J-horror parody," and a Kyushu University study of J-horror conventions describes it as parodic, noting that it brought comedy to J-horror in a way Sono's earlier Gozu had done.³^•¹⁷ The MUBI-listed critic Veronika Ferdman read the film's scenes of hair growing from victims' eyeballs and fingertips as "weirdly funny" and as an inside joke on the iconic image of the vengeful female ghost with tangled black hair familiar from Ringu and Ju-On.¹⁸ The Taipei Times, reviewing the Taiwan release in October 2007, suggested it could be the next J-horror crossover and noted that it turns hair itself into the weapon of terror, while observing that a child abuse subplot keeps the film from turning camp.¹⁹

Aggregated scores are mixed. Rotten Tomatoes shows a 52% Tomatometer from 4 reviews; among the listed critics, Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe gave 3/4, Joshua Rothkopf of Time Out gave 4/6, and Nick Pinkerton of The Village Voice called it "an erratic J-horror fable."⁵ IMDb lists 6.3/10 from about 3,800 votes, and Japanese users on Filmarks average 2.8 of 5 across more than 4,300 reviews.⁶^•²⁰

The film circulated internationally with festival and home-video support: it was among 11 Japanese films screened at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival from March 27 to April 8, 2008 under a Japan Foundation program, played the 29th Torino Film Festival in Sono's retrospective, and received a German DVD from Rapid Eye Movies.²¹^•⁸^•²² In Japan, Toei Video released it on DVD in August 2007 and reissued it on June 13, 2018 with an audio commentary by Kuriyama, Sono, and producer Makoto Okada.²³^•²⁴ As of 2026 it streams in Japan on services including Hulu and U-NEXT.²⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Comedy horror films › 2000s and 2010s comedy horror films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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