Abstract This article makes the case that horror cinema is undergoing a fundamental shift which depicts the dissolution of the emotion of horror itself. This change in the genre is anticipated by the Japanese film Cure (1997), directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Cure focuses on a series of murders committed by people who have fallen under the power of a hypnotist. The film’s protagonist, a detective, discovers that the murders constitute the performance of a ritual by a cult from the 19th century. The detective’s fragile mental condition, however, makes him vulnerable to the suggestions of the drifter who has been hypnotizing various individuals to commit murder. The investigation derails into the detective’s initiation into a cult that has the apparent objective of destroying society by mass murder. To achieve this goal, the hypnotist eliminates in his victims their reflex and feeling of horror at the idea of killing other human beings. This plot element enables Cure to turn the genre against itself by evoking a perspective in which one no longer experiences horror at committing murder and butchery. The loss of the emotion of horror in Cure anticipates recent trends in horror cinema that point to the dissolution of horror itself as a genre. Keywords: Cure, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, hypnosis, mass murder, genre, horror, initiation, social disintegration he Death of Horror: On Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure Peter Y. Paik (University of Wisconsin) Situations 9.2 (2016): 67–81 ISSN: 2288–7822