The first trailer for ‘When You Open the Door’ is out. Eriko Katagiri makes her directing debut with a creature feature in a corner of Asian horror that has few of them.
An architect wakes up with a vague memory of being bitten by a wolf. That is the whole setup for the new Japanese werewolf filmWhen You Open the Door (とびらをあけたら), and the first official trailer has just landed.
The film opens in Japan on January 8, 2027. It has already played genre festivals in North America, including Fantasia earlier this year, where an English write-up is on the festival’s website. There is now an official Japanese-language site too.
Why a werewolf matters here
Asian horror has a deep bench of ghosts, curses and vengeful spirits. Werewolves are another matter. Genre newsletter Horror Historian, which tracks new releases across the continent, says werewolf films are rare in Asia. The writer couldn’t name a single one for 2026. That scarcity is a large part of why this one stands out.
Serena Motola stars as a 27-year-old who works at an architecture firm. She wakes up half-remembering that wolf bite, and the film goes from there. It’s a small, ordinary-looking premise, which tends to be where the unsettling stuff starts.
A first-time director with a horror résumé
This is the directorial debut of Eriko Katagiri. She isn’t new to the genre, though. She wrote the horror film Ice Blood (氷血), which came out earlier this year. She has also won an award for a short film at the Japan Horror Film Awards.
That prize has a good track record. Past winners include Yuta Shimotzu, who went on to direct Best Wishes to All and New Group, and Ryota Kondo, who made Missing Child Videotape. Horror Historian’s verdict on the lineage: “Great company!”
So the pattern is a short-film prize, then a feature, and for Katagiri the feature is a werewolf story. If the awards’ history is any guide, she is worth watching.
How to watch the trailer
The trailer’s on-screen text is in Japanese. It lists the release date, the director and the lead actress. If you don’t read Japanese, turn on the CC button and choose the auto-generated English subtitles.
While you’re in the Asian horror queue
Shimotzu’s New Group arrives on Shudder on November 6. Horror Historian believes it will be available in all Shudder regions. It’s the one set at a high school where the students enjoy building human pyramids. A dialogue-free teaser is out for it.
Elsewhere, the genre is mixing tones with some enthusiasm. Indonesia’s Beneran Horor, due December 31, is a comedy about a director shooting a horror film on a remote island. The cast and crew land on the wrong island and discover that the people they took for extras are something else entirely. India’s Thaytha, a directorial debut from actor Laya Kokila, is said to blend romance, comedy and survival horror. In Taiwan, The Evil Inside stars Joan Chen as a former showbiz icon trapped in a retirement home where bets are placed on how long terminal patients have left.
Indonesia has more on the way. Hajatan Setan, which means “the devil’s feast,” opens December 3. A woman returns to her village after years away, and strange events follow. The trailer hints at a cult and perhaps politics, with election posters on the walls of local businesses. Its English subtitles raise the odds that viewers outside Indonesia will get to see it someday. Fatima, directed by Ginanti Rona, claims to be Indonesia’s first female exorcist movie. It opens in Saudi Arabia in early December and in Indonesia on January 21, 2027.
Against that backdrop, a werewolf film from a debut director doesn’t look like an outlier. It looks like part of a wider run of horror that is trying new things. We’ll see on January 8 whether Katagiri’s version bites.
