Here is a strange way to be remembered: direct the sequel to one of the most famous horror films ever made, release it the same day as the original, and then watch the studio quietly delete your film from the series and shoot a different sequel to take its place. That is the George Iida story in one sentence — but it is only half the story, because the same man also created a psychic-brothers franchise that ran for three decades and was still generating new work in 2021.
George Iida (飯田 譲治, Iida Jōji) is the Japanese director who made Rasen, the original sequel to Ring. He is also a screenwriter, a manga author and a novelist, and he has worked across film, television and anime since 1980, mostly in horror and science fiction. You will also find him credited as Jōji Iida or Joji Iida — same man, same filmography; the name shifts, the career doesn’t. If you know his name at all, it is probably attached to the words “forgotten sequel.” Stick around — the filmography is stranger and better than the footnote suggests.
Quick Specs
- Born: 1 March 1959, Japan
- Occupation: Film and television director, screenwriter, manga author, novelist
- Known for: Creating Night Head; writing and directing Rasen (Spiral, 1998)
- Years active: 1980–present
An 8mm short and an open door
Iida was discovered the way a lot of Japanese genre filmmakers of his generation were: through the PIA Film Festival, the great talent sieve of the independent scene. His 8mm short Intermission (Kyūkei), a ten-minute film, screened at the festival in 1980 — the year he turned twenty-one — on a programme that also included Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Vertigo College. Not bad company for a first impression.
What followed was the unglamorous apprenticeship. Reference accounts of those years have him alternating between writing scripts for pink films and working as an assistant director on other people’s productions. What is certain is the outcome: by 1987 he had his first directing project, the straight-to-video Cyclops, and in 1989 came his theatrical feature debut, Battle Heater.
Battle Heater deserves its sentence of glory: it is a horror comedy about a man-eating kotatsu — a heated table, the cosiest piece of furniture in a Japanese home — terrorising the tenants of a rundown apartment block after two electronics repairmen haul it out of a junkyard and strip off its protective seal. A killer kotatsu. It even went out under the gloriously unwieldy release title Bafuko Slump in Battle Heater, named for the punk band that appears in the film. Iida was thirty, and he opened his theatrical career with a haunted household appliance. Some catalogues list the film as 1990, but the November 1989 Japanese release date is the one the record supports. Either way, the tone was set early: this was a director happy to take an absurd premise completely seriously.
Night Head: the franchise he actually built
If Rasen is the credit history handed him, Night Head is the one he built for himself. Iida created the live-action supernatural drama for Fuji TV, where it ran from October 1992 to March 1993 across 21 episodes. The Kirihara brothers, Naoto and Naoya, have psychic powers strong enough that they were imprisoned in a laboratory for fifteen years; the series begins with their escape. It aired late at night and became a surprise hit — especially with women viewers — building the kind of devoted audience that keeps a title alive for decades.
The franchise grew while the series was still warm: a side-story television special, Night Head: The Other Side, aired mid-run, and the brothers jumped formats almost immediately. Alive is the right word.
A Night Head film followed in 1994, extending the story past the series — listed by some as a TV movie, by others as a theatrical release that November. Manga and book versions spread the franchise further. Then, in 2006, came the anime adaptation Night Head Genesis, 24 episodes — and be careful with the credit, because it is the one people get wrong: Iida returned to help draft the overall story, but Genesis was directed by Yoshi Takeuchi, with character designs by You Higuri, not by Iida.
The real proof of the franchise’s legs arrived in 2021. Night Head 2041, a new anime built on the 1992 drama, ran on Fuji TV’s +Ultra block from July to September 2021, twelve episodes, with Iida himself writing — original creator, series composition and scripts. He was sixty-two, and the series he had launched at thirty-three was on television again, accompanied by a manga and a two-volume novel he co-wrote with Kawato Azusa, with a stage play following in 2022. Directors who get written out of one franchise do not usually have a second one still breathing thirty years later. Iida does.
Rasen: the sequel that got un-happened
Now the centrepiece. Iida’s connection to the Ring story did not begin with the famous films: in 1995 he wrote the television film Ring, adapting Koji Suzuki’s novel for TV — which makes him one of the very few people who bookend the franchise’s screen history, there at its first adaptation and again at its strangest turn.
That turn was Rasen — released in English as Spiral — which Iida wrote and directed from Suzuki’s second Ring novel. Toho released it in Japan on 31 January 1998, the same day as Hideo Nakata’s Ring. The two films were made concurrently, with different directors and writers but shared producers and some shared cast, as a deliberate double-release strategy: one story, told twice, back to back, to boost the take. We have the whole experiment laid out on our Spiral (1998) page.
Iida’s film follows pathologist Mitsuo Andō, a man still numb with grief for his drowned son, who performs the autopsy on his friend Ryūji Takayama — dead a week after watching a certain videotape. Inside the body Andō finds a smallpox-like tumour and a coded message. Working with Ryūji’s student Mai Takano, he follows the trail to its conclusion: Sadako’s curse behaves like a virus with an agenda, and she has an offer — cooperate, and Andō’s son comes back. It is a colder, more clinical film than Ring, closer in spirit to Suzuki’s science-fiction instincts, and audiences in January 1998 wanted the ghost story. Ring became an enormous hit. Rasen floundered, and quickly acquired the label it still carries: the forgotten sequel.
Then the studio did something close to unprecedented. In 1999, Nakata directed Ring 2, which replaced Rasen as the sequel to Ring, ignores its story entirely, and is not based on any Suzuki novel. Iida’s film was not just outshone; it was retconned out of the series it had continued. One correction worth making in permanent marker, because a stray rental listing still gets it wrong: Iida did not direct Ring 2. That film is Nakata’s, from Hiroshi Takahashi’s script. Iida’s sequel is the other one — the one that was there first.
History, though, has a sense of humour. The later Sadako 3D (2012) and Sadako 3D 2 (2013) follow Spiral’s continuity, not Ring 2’s — so the erased sequel was quietly un-erased in a side branch of its own franchise. English-speaking viewers met the film in pieces: North America got it on direct-to-video in 2005 under the title Rasen, the UK, Ireland and the Philippines as The Spiral, and later home-video editions under Spiral. Even its running time refuses to be pinned down — listings argue between 97 and 98 minutes, and nobody has settled it. A fittingly slippery afterlife for a film about a curse that rewrites itself to survive.
The rest of the map
Between the two franchises, Iida kept moving. He directed Tokyo Babylon 1999 (1993), a live-action feature adapting the CLAMP manga. In 2000 came Another Heaven, a police-procedural horror film based on one of his own books; it also spun off a television series, Another Heaven: Eclipse. The same period brought Sci-Fi Harry (2000–2001), an anime based on the manga Iida created with Asami Tohjoh, and in 2002 he contributed the segment “Cold Sleep” to the anthology Jam Films.
His most recent theatrical production as director — and that qualifier matters — was Dragon Head (2003), his adaptation of Minetaro Mochizuki’s post-apocalyptic manga, released in Japan in August 2003. A school-trip train derails in a tunnel after an earthquake, and survivors Teru Aoki, Nobuo and Ako face being buried alive; it starred Satoshi Tsumabuki and Sayaka Kanda. You will sometimes see 2003 treated as the end of Iida’s career. It is not. It is the end of his theatrical directing; the writing and story work in television and anime ran on for nearly two more decades, through Black Belt (2007, as writer) and all the way to Night Head 2041.
Listings credit him with writing the storyline for a 1995 3DO game, Iida Joji Nightmare Interactive: Moon Cradle. And filmography listings carry later television work into the 2010s and beyond — titles like Strangers 6 and Vision – The Woman Who Can See Murder (both 2012), Iron Grandma (2015) and The Emperor’s Gift (2020). The headline, though, is not in pencil: the man never stopped.
Where he stands
George Iida is sixty-seven, with a career that runs unbroken from an 8mm festival screening in 1980 to a Fuji TV anime in 2021. The standard account of him — the director of the sequel that failed — is true and completely inadequate. He wrote the first screen Ring, directed its original sequel under a release strategy that would have sunk almost anyone, and then, instead of disappearing, spent thirty years tending a franchise of his own until it came back around to him. The forgotten sequel has outlived its erasure; the Sadako 3D films saw to that. Somewhere in all of this is a lesson about horror franchises: they bury things, and the things do not always stay buried. Ask Sadako. Or ask the man who directed her second film — he is in our Horror Directors index, where he belongs.