PEOPLE who haven't seen a horror movie for a while – say, not since Christopher Lee was last flapping over a barmaid from an unspecified east European country – might find some thrills in Shutter, a ghost story that doesn't scare so much as occasionally startle with loud noises. For everyone else, Shutter has a terrible familiarity as a compilation of every Japanese horror cliché of the past five years.

A word of advice: if you ever encounter a Japanese girl with long, black hair obscuring her ghostly pale face, run for your life, or you're likely to lose it.

Japanese threats are vague, faceless and abstract. Its victims are random people whom the universe decides deserve a terrifying death just because they're mortal. Their ghosts are spiteful wraths, dressing up like Yoko Ono to emerge creepily, often to the accompaniment of groaning and creaking.

The emphasis here is on pleasurable, anxious anticipation rather than watching someone's eye being drilled out of their skull. Strictly speaking, Shutter is a Thai film remade by Americans with director Masayuki Ochiai in charge of applying Japanese settings, supporting cast and sensibilities. It is packed with idiot Americans in Tokyo who haven't quite grasped the whole "don't go into that dark creepy place" imperative. Which is strange, because even if they haven't seen any of the Ring films, they must have seen one of the five Amityville Horror movies.

There are other moments when Shutter feels like a Lost In Translation Halloween special. Dawson's Creek's Joshua Jackson and Rachael Taylor are Ben and Jane, a successful photographer and his new wife who go to Japan for a working honeymoon. They have barely shaken the confetti from their luggage before Jane accidentally runs over a young woman on their way to Mount Fuji.

Ben is (far too) keen to forget all about it. Then ghostly images of the girl start appearing in their photographs. Jane believes these are pictures of their hit-and-run victim, and using the photos as clues goes about uncovering the spirit's identity.

Mind you, some clues offer themselves more easily than you might have thought. "My boyfriend works at a spirit photography magazine," says Ben's new assistant to the honeymooning Nancy Drew. Is that even a job? And what are the odds of fate operating in such close proximity?

Fans of J-horror will recognise the influences and clichés in Shutter's snapshot. Japanese horror films are all about ghosts in the machine, and a technophobia that turns communication gadgets in particular into gateways. In The Ring, it's videotape. In One Missed Call, mobile phones leave voicemails with details of your time and date of death. Here it's photographs, with a limping girl fiend haunting the couple and friends foolish enough to share their arty doom-laded snapshots.

Americans doing the Tokyo thing does add a layer of tension to the movie, playing up the cultural dislocation and the day-to-day uncertainty about their environment. Ochiai doesn't ask much of his actors; he simply calls on them to look worried and frightened, and Taylor is particularly good at playing confused-yet-determined when the script calls for it.

Even so, Shutter's cycle of cranked-up tension followed by shock is like watching tennis played by people who aren't very good. It rallies once or twice, then hits the net, and someone has to serve up another reason to go somewhere dark and creepy again. It all trundles on pretty much regardless of character, plot or point.

• On general release from Friday