Nippon Horrors: Girl Divers of Spook Mansion [Ama no Bakemono Yashiki] (Morihei Magatani, 1959)

After hitting on the idea that making films about the female Ama divers of Japan’s remote coastal communities could prove a great way to get red-blooded males into cinemas, Shintoho studios must have found themselves wondering just what the hell kind of stories they could actually tell about these plucky maidens of the deep. So, in a sense, the idea of the splicing this nascent sub-genre with the series of interesting, low budget horror films the studio was also making at around the same time [also see: Ghost Cat Mansion, The Lady Vampire] must have been a bit of a no-brainer.

Which brings us to ‘Girl Divers of Spook Mansion’, the first in a brief flurry of ‘spooky Ama’ movies which also produced such unforgettable transliterated titles as ‘Ghost of the Girl Diver’ and my personal favourite, ‘Girl Diver Trembles in Fear’ (both 1960).

In real life of course, Ama divers were famed for setting out to sea in nothing more than loincloths, but in deference to standards of cinematic decency circa 1959, our divers here naturally all wear neat little halter-tops, big white bloomers and head-scarves. Pervs in the audience may be reassured though that, once they get down to sub-aquatic business, there's a whole lot of transparency goin’ on (all very tastefully done, mind).

(Those still protesting a lack of realism meanwhile may wish to reflect on the fact that, given the extreme physical duress of open sea diving and the level of expertise needed to carry it out effectively, the majority of real life Ama were liable to have been muscular, weather-beaten, mature women, in stark contrast to the happy-go-lucky gaggle of aspiring models and actresses seen strutting their stuff here; accuracy on this point however has never, so far as I’m aware, been demanded by these movies’ audiences.)

Whilst on the subject of the more exploitational aspects of these movies’ conception, Japanese genre film historians (hi, guys) may likewise wish to consider the scene early in ‘Girl Divers of Spook Mansion’ depicting a beach-side cat-fight between the leaders of two rival Ama factions, which plays out pretty much exactly like the equivalent stock scene from any given Toei ‘Pinky Violence’ movie a decade later. Indeed, lead diver Reiko Seto has a hard-boiled attitude and venomous stare that could have could have seen her managing quite nicely on the mean streets of early ‘70s Shinjuku.

Meanwhile, on the horror side of things, viewers expecting a lightweight, ‘Beach Party’ style affair are liable to be taken aback by the film’s unsettling credits sequence, which depicts members of the female cast frozen in various kinds of sinister/monstrous activity, mirroring the kind of tableaux traditionally seen in Japanese ‘ghost houses’ during the late summer Oban season.

Further to this, there is indeed some fairly strong kaidan-via-gothic type stuff to enjoy during the first half of the film, as the more central storyline sees a woman named Kyoko (future Toei star Yôko Mihara) arriving in the Ama village from Tokyo, after receiving a letter from her friend Waka (Kuniko Yamamura).

Waka appears to be living alone in a gigantic, Western-style mansion filled with an entire museum's-worth of dusty old statuary and antique knick-knacks from around the globe - seriously, the set-dressers just went crazy decking out this place - assisted, as as standard in such situations, by staff including a cackling hunchback and a sinister, stink-eye dispensing housekeeper who is often seen carrying a cat (rarely a good omen in these kind of things).

Waka claims she is being haunted by (I think) the ghost of her missing sister, who was last seen running toward the ocean after her husband was lost at sea, and indeed, some wonderfully spooky imagery and a few beautifully executed jump scares ensue. (Seriously, if jump scares were competitively-rated ala ice-skating, I’d hold up a “9” for these - just perfectly done.)

Disappointingly of course, it eventually becomes clear that the supernatural elements of this haunting are all phony, as Waka is actually being gas lighted by a gaggle of pleasingly maniacal villains who are looking to steal the family treasure, which it transpires is hidden in an underwater cave (and they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling pearl divers!)

Once the penny drops, there's still plenty to enjoy in the film’s more light-hearted, action/adventure-orientated second half however, including heavy Nikkatsu vibes as local youngsters groove to what sounds very much like Hawaiian music in the tiki-style beachside bar, and the wonderfully overplayed antics of the aforementioned villains (who include a corrupt, kimono-clad local politician and a lecherous, cigar-chomping fake marine scientist).

As is almost always the case with Japanese films of this era, the scope photography is splendid throughout, with the stuff in the shadowy, snake-haunted cave during the final act standing out as particularly atmospheric, even as it leads up to a great, LOL-worthy demise for the main villain. Perhaps best of all though, we get to enjoy the presence of a young Bunta Sugawara, making only his fifth credited screen appearance here as Mihara’s cop boyfriend. Spending much of his screen-time strutting around, Tarzan-style, in a pair of swimming trunks he appears to have stolen from a small child(!), Bunta makes for an engaging and off-beat presence here, as well as offering ‘a little something for the ladies’ in the midst of all the diving girls.

In closing, I should probably point out that I watched ‘Girl Divers of Spook Mansion’ without the benefit of subtitles, hoping that a rudimentary knowledge of basic Japanese vocab and a general familiarity with b-movie plotlines would see me through. As a result, I fear there were probably a number of story elements and sub-plots going on here which completely passed me by, and even the basics I've outlined above should be taken as a ‘best guess’. But nonetheless, I enjoyed the film a great deal.

Irrespective of the language barrier, the mixture of elegant, spook-house atmos, wistful seaside nostalgia, pulpy serial plotting and strangely wholesome titillation on offer here has much to recommend it, and viewers with a yen for the, uh, gentler side of Asian horror shouldn’t hesitate to dive in (sorry, couldn’t help myself) without delay.

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Poster image borrowed from the ever-wonderful Pulp International.

Nippon Horrors / Horror Express 2020 #10: Kaidan Hebi-Onna /‘Snake Woman's Curse’ (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1968)

 A decade or so after he turned out a series of fairly wacky horror pictures like Ghost Cat Mansion and The Lady Vampire for Shintoho, Nobuo Nakagawa - who had largely retired from directing after directly contributing to the bankruptcy of the aforementioned studio with his 1960 epic ‘Jigoku’ [‘Hell’] - returned to the fray for this considerably more conventional kaidan effort, produced under the unlikely auspices of Toei.

I say ‘unlikely’, because, although they soon would soon go on to cut a bloody swathe across the early ‘70s with some of the most grotesquely violent and OTT genre movies ever made, supernatural horror was never really Toei’s ‘thing’, leaving Kaidan Hebi-Onna [‘Snake Woman’s Curse’] feeling like a bit of a curious one-off.

According to what little background info I can find on the film, the production seems to have originated with writer Fumio Kônami, who apparently told the producers that he would only allow the studio to film his script if Nakagawa (who had not worked in the industry for about five years at this point) was hired to direct. (1)Apparently keen to try to establish a viable kaidan/horror line at the time, Toei acquiesced to the writer’s request, and…. bob’s yr uncle, as we say over on this side of the globe. (2)

Plot-wise, ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ is in most respects a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill kaidan picture - essentially a variation on the old bakeneko (ghost-cat) story, in which a wronged woman returns from the grave with the help of an animal spirit to take her vengeance on the hateful aristocrats who have destroyed her family, only with snakes used as the totem animal this time around instead of cats.

Set (and presumably filmed) somewhere in Japan’s remote far western region, the story opens with an elderly peasant farmer (the ubiquitous Ko Nishimura), practically throwing himself under the wheels of the local landlord’s coach, as he begs for leniency vis-à-vis the repayment of his debts. Needless to say, such mercy is not forthcoming from the venal plutocrat (Seizaburô Kawazu), but, on his death-bed, the farmer is still pleading deliriously for the chance to save his family’s small-holding, uttering the key phrase which will go on to become something of a catch-phrase for the film’s spectral avengers: “even if I have to eat dirt, I will pay you back”.

After the man’s death, the landlord decrees that his homestead will be demolished in order to clear space for the planting of mulberry trees (used in the production of silk), whilst his wife (Chiaki Tsukioka) and adult daughter (Asa, played by Yukiko Kuwahara) are cheerfully informed that they will be taken into service in the landlord’s household, there to ‘work off’ their late patriarch’s debts.

As you might imagine, this is far from an idyllic prospect for the two women. Set to work weaving silk in what basically amounts to a small scale Victorian sweatshop, Asa must work sixteen hour days under the supervision of the landlord’s thuggish, lecherous son (Toei yakuza/action regular and future Roman Porno director Shingo Yamashiro), whilst her mother meanwhile becomes a general domestic dogsbody, bullied and belittled at every turn by the landlord’s sadistic wife (Kurosawa regular and future ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ / ‘Sex & Fury’ legend Akemi Negishi).

Although their fellow servants treat them with kindness, and although Asa still has steadfast fiancée Satematsu (Kunio Murai) waiting for her on the outside, the inhumane treatment doled out to the two women leads them, inevitably, to their sad and undignified deaths. Asa’s mother, significantly, has always made a habit of habit of helping unloved animals (she was nursing a pigeon back to health when the family lost their home), and she is struck down whilst attempting the prevent the killing of a snake which has intruded into the landlord’s house.

As anyone who knows the ‘rules’ of this genre will be well aware by this point, the Big Man and his horrid family had better watch the hell out, as Nakagawa and his crew prepare to get busy with the thunder crashes, gel lighting, stage blood, green-faced living corpses and double-exposed snake effects, for the riotous closing act of vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave.

To Western audiences, these films often play more like ritual re-enactments of familiar folk tales than exercises in contemporary story-telling, which perhaps to some extent accounts for their failure to gain much of an overseas following, as the lack of novelty within their narratives can soon become pretty dispiriting. Once you’ve seen a handful of ‘em, you’ll know exactly how things are going to play out, right from the outset. The only interest comes from seeing how efficiently the filmmakers will accomplish their task, in technical and dramatic terms.

For domestic audiences however, we must assume this would not have been so much of a problem. More accepting of the traditions behind the bakeneko form, and more able to appreciate the more subtle cultural resonances within it, one hopes they would have been able to view each addition to the cycle with fresh eyes. 

(By way of comparison, we can perhaps imagine how a viewer largely unfamiliar with American culture would feel after being sat down and told to watch 25 early ‘80s slasher films. We might love them all for their minor eccentricities and variation on the theme, but to the uninitiated, aren’t they all kind of the same, more or less?)

In some ways, ‘Snake Woman’s Curse’ feels like a case in point in this regard. As eye-rollingly over-familiar as the basic storyline may be, look deeper and some very specific points of departure from the norm begin to emerge. For a start, the film is set during the Meiji era (1868-1912), a time of dramatic change and modernisation for Japan, immediately differentiating it from the more historically static Edo or Tokugawa eras in which kaidan stories more traditionally take place.

Again, domestic audiences would likely have been keyed into this right from the start, as the landlord is seen roaring through his domain in a Western-style coach, whilst his son sports a bowler hat and other foreign accoutrements. The mechanised ‘sweat-shop’ in which Asa is put to work likewise represents a form of industry unknown in pre-Meiji Japan, but whilst the the adoption of these innovations by the film’s villainous aristocrats would seem to indicate an implicit support for the older, folk-based way of life favoured by the hard-done-by peasants, the approach taken by Kônami’s script is, as usual, a little more nuanced than that.

The ambiguous attitude to modernisation and/or Westernisation so frequently encountered in early ‘70s Japanese genre cinema is perfectly encapsulated here via a memorable one scene cameo from Tetsurô Tanba, playing a regional police chief dispatched to investigate the murderous goings on within the landlord’s domain.

Effectively acting as the very personification of modern, democratic state governance, Tanba reduces the landlord to a fit of spluttering disbelief as he calmly undercuts the local lord’s Shogunate-derived feudal authority, daring to suggest that the police may wish to investigate the death of one of his peasants, and that he might even dare to implicate members of the aristocrat’s own family in the process - an absolutely unthinkable prospect for a man born into the strict caste system of the Tokugawa era, and an amusing demonstration of that the way that, however keen the ruling classes may have been to enrich themselves using technological innovations offered by contact with Western capitalism, their understanding of the social and political implications of such development tended to lack somewhat behind.

As you will no doubt have gathered from the preceding paragraphs, ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ is about as politically conscious a kaidan pictures as you could possibly hope to find, taking the age old fantasy of the rural peasantry exacting revenge against their cruel feudal overlords baked into all bakeneko stories, and hammering it home for strongly than ever, applying it to a more nuanced, more realistic and more historically recent setting in the process.

Some might be apt to suggest that the film’s success as a horror movie suffers as a result of this heavy emphasis on socio-economic angst, and indeed Nakagawa’s pacing here is glacially slow, whilst the atmosphere he builds is painstakingly sombre. The inevitable horror ‘effects’ which dominate the final act meanwhile, whilst inventive and fun, are strictly conventional within the genre.

So, we’re definitely not looking at a Friday night horror banger here I’m afraid, but, if you can approach the film in an appropriately sober, arthouse-y frame of mind, Nakagawa’s execution at least is absolutely top notch. Performances are excellent across the board (in addition to the aforementioned esteemed actors, there are also turns from such Toei notables as Yukie Kagawa and Hideo Murota), whilst Yoshikazu Yamazawa’s photography, highlighting the fertile-yet-foreboding topography of Japan’s mountainous Western coast, is beautiful, radiating an overpowering brown n’ green aura which seems to link the earth where the snakes crawl directly to the hallowed afterlife from whence the spectres emerge.

Shunsuke Kikuchi’s score meanwhile is richly evocative, and the carefully wrought production design includes a wealth of great “folky stuff” (songs, costumes, local festival customs) for Japanophiles to enjoy. Most importantly perhaps, Nakagawa manages to imbue the script’s off-the-peg structure with a handful of genuinely haunting, transcendental images which will live long in the viewer’s memory after viewing.

Born in 1905, the director was sixty-three years old as the time of this film’s production, and it would be all too easy to interpret the slower, more meditative direction Nakagawa takes here as the work of a filmmaker trying to establish himself as a more ‘serious’ voice in cinema during the twilight years of his career, after half a lifetime spent churning out rushed 60 minute programmers and battling the studios for budgets.

Unfortunately for us reviewers’ desperate need to try to impose a narrative onto everything however, Nakagawa rather kicked this idea in the nuts by immediately going on to make a brief but prolific comeback as a commercial director in 1969, directing five action/yakuza pictures for Toei in quick succession before, curiously, adopting the pseudonym “Ise Tsugio” in order to make what I presume to be a series of obscure, independently distributed pinku (erotic) titles (ubiquitous S&M / rope torture guru Oniroku Dan is credited as writer on at least one of them). All of these hit cinemas before the year was out, with the director’s anonymity surely somewhat undermined by the fact that they were all proudly produced by his own ‘Nakagawa Pro’.

So, once again, we return to the idea of ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ seeming like a real one-off - an odd, inexplicable diversion in the paths followed by its director, writer and studio. It is what it is, I suppose - but thankfully for those with an interest in this particular overlooked corner of Japanese culture, what it is is very worthwhile indeed.

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(1) An absolutely pivotal figure in the golden age of Toei exploitation, Kônami (1933-2012) went on to contribute to a huge number of the studio’s best and/or most outrageous films from the early ‘70s, including the entire ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ series, Sonny Chiba’s Yakuza Deka movies, the extraordinary Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope, the horrifying Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs and Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Sympathy for the Underdog’ and ‘Graveyard of Honour’, to name but a few. 

(2) CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE DEPT: All background info on the production of this film is taken directly from Jonathan M. Hall’s well-researched commentary track on the 2007 Synapse DVD release.

Nippon Horrors / October Horrors 2019 # 7: Unbalanced Horror Theatre: A Mummy’s Love (Seijun Suzuki, 1973)

Sometimes, it’s difficult to know where to even start with these things.

So, let’s try this.

The narrative that has developed around the late Seijun Suzuki has tended to suggest that he more or less disappeared into the wilderness following his dramatic dismissal from Nikkatsu studios in 1967, only re-emerging when he helmed his critically acclaimed ‘Taisho trilogy’ in the early 1980s. In reality however, reports of Seijun’s invisibility during the 1970s have been greatly exaggerated. As his fans in Japan will be well aware, the idiosyncratic director actually kept busy and remained to some extent in the public eye throughout these ‘lost years’.

Indeed, viewed in the light of Nikkatsu’s decision to dedicate their resources entirely to the production of low budget ‘roman porno’ features from late 1970 onwards, and the subsequent collapse of the contract-based Japanese studio system as a whole in the mid-to-late ‘70s, it could easily be argued that Suzuki’s early dismissal basically just gave him a head-start in adjusting to the situation that most directors of his generation found themselves facing a few years later – interspersing more low-key, independently-financed films (if they were lucky) with voluminous quantities of TV work and commercials.

Which brings us neatly to ‘Kyôfu Gekijô Umbalance’ [‘Unbalanced Horror Theatre’], a weekly anthology series produced by the legendary Tsuburaya-Pro (home of ‘Ultraman’, etc), thirteen episodes of which were broadcast on Monday nights on the Fuji TV network, beginning in January 1973.

In terms of its creative ambition and production values, this series seems to have represented something akin to a Japanese take on the BBC’s celebrated ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’, and it also seems to have acted as a bit of a ‘life line’ to other struggling Nikkatsu directors, with Suzuki’s erstwhile colleagues Yasuharu Hasebe and Toshiya Fujita also contributing episodes.

Suzuki’s entry in the series however was the first to be broadcast, and is thus far the only one I’ve been able to track down with English subtitles. And, purely on this basis, I’m inclined to think that ‘Unbalanced Horror Theatre’ was pretty aptly named. To not put too fine a point on it, ‘Miira No Koi’ [roughly, ‘A Mummy’s Love’], first broadcast to the nation on 8th January 1973, is absolutely mental.

Frankly, even the series’ opening credits, in which twisting patterns of psychedelic flames are back-projected onto the looming silhouette of a roaming cat, to the accompaniment of shrieking, discordant strings and electronics, were enough to get me jumping out my seat, but once the story proper gets underway, all bets are off.

Suzuki’s reputation as a devil-may-care surrealist is immediately in evidence here, as he begins by cutting in a disorientating fashion between seemingly unrelated shots - close-ups of red warning lights at a railway crossing, and visions of a scraggly-haired skeleton in meditational pose floating toward the viewer – whilst voiceover narration, in a gentle female voice, also competes for our attention.

The woman who is speaking to us, it turns out, is a widowed employee of a publishing house who is travelling to visit an elderly and infirm professor, who has been working on a new translation of a work known as Harusame Monogatari (‘Tales of the Spring Rain’) – a genuine collection of folkloric tales, compiled by the famous writer and scholar Ueda Akinari in the years immediately preceding his death in 1809. The narrator describes this book as a “maddening and terrifying work”, and, on the basis of the story from it we’re treated to here, I’m inclined to take her word for it.

Pausing at the railway crossing, the woman encounters a small family car, driven by a chauffeur in full top-hatted finery, who gets out and doffs his hat to her. Inside the car are a Buddhist monk and a woman in formal, Edo period garb (complete with bakeneko type eye makeup). Our narrator is alarmed by the appearance of the monk, whom she declares conveys an “uncanny impression”, “like a doll”.

Before we realise what’s happening, we cut to a series of expressionistic studio tableau shots, reminiscent of some of the primary coloured effects Suzuki used a decade earlier in his masterpiece Gate of Flesh. We see the woman who has sitting in the car performing some kind of ritual before a bare tree branch, as the narrator’s voice fills us in on the nature of the ‘Nyujo’ Buddhist sect, whose adherents apparently attempted to attain enlightenment by confining themselves in wooden boxes and being buried alive.

Another sudden jump cut takes us back into the top-knotted, Shogunate past, where a studious young man named Shoji lives in a remote village with his mother. Shoji finds himself bothered by the sounds of a bell ringing somewhere in the vicinity of their house during the night, and, determining that these sounds emanate from the bottom of a disused well, he announces that they must belong to a “bodhisattva petitioning to return from the Pure Land”.

So, the young student starts digging, attracting a crowd of local on-lookers in the process. Eventually, the villagers succeed in unearthing a desiccated, mummified ancient sage, who was apparently buried in the lotus position.

Suzuki marks this discovery by suddenly cutting to a shot of an explosion taking place in some kind of thatched building, and a freeze-frame of the young student leaping in the air in front of it, after which the villagers begin hysterically laughing and bickering, kicking the polystyrene mummy prop around as if it were a football and cursing the unearthed monk for his apparent uselessness. Vaseline or something similar appears to have been smeared all over the lens for these shots, giving everything a woozy, unclear feeling, as if viewed through cataracts. (I’d also bet money that none of this was in the script.)

As the student and his mother set about resuscitating and caring for the revived ancient, whom the villagers have nicknamed ‘Nyoju no Josuke’ [very roughly, “guy in a trance”], it turns out that the predictions of his uselessness were entirely justified.

One of the monk’s first actions upon regaining consciousness is to attempt to molest a local woman (he is discovered in the rafters of a barn, making bird noises after she flees in terror), and, much to the villagers’ chagrin, he subsequently turns out to be a mute, drooling simpleton who displays no evidence of his apparent enlightenment.

Indeed, in stark contrast to the asceticism one would expect of such a high level sage, his sole interests in life seem to be stuffing his face, leering at women and giggling like a creep. This sends the young student who unearthed him into an existential rage, as he angrily questions the very basis of his nation’s Buddhist beliefs.

Before long, Josuke - who, hilariously, is played by none other than cult writer/director Atsushi Yamatoya, who worked with Suzuki on the script for ‘Branded To Kill’ and helmed a series of notable avant garde pink films, including 1967’s ‘Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands’ - has become a kind of despised village idiot figure, bumbling around in a dirty nappy and performing simple chores for the villagers.

Josuke’s antics, it should be noted, are accompanied by an incredibly strange music cue, which appears to blend digeridoo-like devotional chanting of Buddhist sutras with a light jazz/funk drum beat, effectively complementing the story’s crudely heretical themes, and cementing the surreal / comic mood. [IMDB credits this episode’s music to famed analogue synth maestro Isao Tomita, but I’m guessing he probably just provided the series theme tune, leaving the authorship of this weird music a mystery.]

When Josuke is discovered hiding in a haystack by a fornicating couple upon whom he is spying, they proceed to taunt him, with the woman suggesting he’d have more luck with the ladies if he were reborn as a kabuki actor – prompting our drooling bodhisattva to take on an even more grotesque appearance, plastering his face with theatrical make up, and wearing a handkerchief on his bonce in imitation of a kabuki head-dress.

Thus far, the portrayal of Josuke seems to have been inspired to some extent by the classic Karloff ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ archetype. Abandoned by his creator (or, uh, resurrector I suppose in this case) and shunned for his ugliness and inability to communicate, he gazes at his reflection in the river and so forth, inviting our sympathy. But, Karloff’s creature was never characterised as a goon-ish, slovenly sex fiend, and Frankensteinian mythos certainly offers us no analogue for what happens next, as Josuke’s new look unexpectedly succeeds in attracting the attentions of an impoverished young widow, to whom he is promptly married, or so the narrator (who has now become an elderly, croaking male voice, incidentally) informs us.

The narrator further relates that “Josuke had held within him an appetite for women for hundreds of years”, as a result of which, the couple make love continuously for seven days and seven nights. On the eighth day, they take a quick breather, and the woman collapses in pain, screaming that she is about to give birth. The frantic ringing of Josuke’s bell attracts the attention of the villagers, who, upon arrival, find clouds of bright pink smoke billowing from the widow’s house.

When the men, led by Shoji, break into the house, they find the woman dead, and, well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but… she appears to have given birth to dozens of tiny, gold-skinned Buddha people, who are crawling around all over her corpse like little human worms, ringing their miniature bells.

Understandably maddened by this terrible sight, the young student pretty much loses his mind, and begins crushing and stomping the little people, who collapse into dust at his touch. “What is a Buddha? What is resurrection? What have we been praying to all this time? Kill them all!” he cries as he tramples the tiny golden monks, encouraging the other villagers to join him in the destruction, kicking up clouds of Buddha-dust which soon cover them all.

Josuke meanwhile flees the scene with an angry mob in hot pursuit, commandeering a hay cart whose under-cranked progress drives him straight over the edge of a nearby cliff-face to his doom.

At some point subsequent to these awful events, Shoji takes a bride, but as soon as the young student and his partner attempts to consummate their marriage, they are interrupted by the tolling bell of the feral Nyoju no Josuke, who lurks cackling outside in the shadows.

Wondering the land in a daze, looking increasingly filthy and unhinged, the young man begins obsessively digging up the ground in the various locations where this story has taken place, in search of the ringing bell which plagues him. “From that point on, Shoji never touched a woman again,” the narrator tells us. THE END.

Still reeling, we cut back to the 20th century, where the woman whom we were following at the start of all this has arrived at the home of the professor who was working on the Harusame Monogatari, and has been transcribing his recitation of the tale outlined above.

The professor seems to pretty much at death’s door, far gone with some kind of consumptive illness, and his rooms are cramped, messy and seedy. Despite his illness however, the prof’s manner is intense and unnerving. He rambles on weirdly about the story of the resurrected monk as if it were verified truth, insisting that such things have actually occurred, and he further upsets his visitor – a former student of his - by unexpectedly producing a photograph of her late husband, who died as a young officer in the Pacific War.

Amid his ravings, the professor tells the widow he believes her husband is still alive, “like Nyoju no Josuke,” and that he has seen him walking around the era. He then becomes lecherous and grabby, attempting to assault the widow, who promptly leaves the house, suitably unnerved by her experience.

These scenes are sweaty and claustrophobic, with Suzuki slowly tracing his camera back and forth across the characters’ prone bodies, cutting between extreme close-ups of their eyes, as if it were some twisted Jess Franco sex scene, emphasizing the feeble desperation of the professor and the crushing loneliness of the widow, culminating in an intensely uncomfortable moment in which the professor’s sinister nurse attends to his needs with an incontinence bottle, whilst the sound of an air raid siren is heard on the soundtrack.

On her journey home through the stormy night, a shortcut takes the widow to the ruins of the air-raid shelter where her husband died. Some of the photography here is hauntingly beautiful, employing rich primary colours, deep blacks and chaotic compositions which again momentarily remind me of ‘Gate of Flesh’ – notably I think, another work which sought to exorcise the trauma of war through a kind of melancholic, sexualised desperation.

In order to leave the reader with at least some surprises should they seek out this TV show, I will break off my synopsis at this point and leave the story’s conclusion a mystery, but needless to say – it’s unpleasant, horribly ambiguous yet perversely beautiful -- and a final smug, Rod Serling-like farewell from series host (and future mayor of Tokyo) Yukio Aoshima does little to ease our frazzled senses or let us tie the threads of our conflicted emotions after all this startling business concludes.

Though I’ve drawn some comparison to Suzuki’s earlier work above, viewers familiar with Japanese genre cinema will inevitably emerge from ‘Miira No Koi’ with the name of ero-guro specialist Teruo Ishii on their lips. Indeed, this episode’s unsettling mixture of goon-ish comedy, twisted sexuality and malign visionary surrealism feels very much of a piece with the extraordinary series of “torture” films Ishii produced for Toei in the late 1960s, whilst the tiny, gold-skinned Buddhas seem to have been drawn straight from the same well of imagery as Ishii’s controversial Horrors of Malformed Men. Even Yamatoya’s performance as Nyoju no Josuke seems, when he initially appears, to echo the style of Iishi’s most distinctive collaborator, the pioneering Butoh choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata.

Going further, you could even make the case that there are moments here which recall the mad, performative psycho-analytical freak-out feel of Alexandro Jodorowsky, but really, such comparisons count for little. Ultimately, the clammy, unsettling feeling ‘Miira No Koi’ leaves us with is unique, even within Suzuki’s work.

In its own crazy way, this story seems determined to push the envelope in directions viewers tuning in for a more traditional ghost story would never have anticipated, interrogating themes that Japanese audiences in particular are liable to find deeply disturbing to this day. Not only do Suzuki (and writers Fumiko Enji and Yôzô Tanaka) treat the Buddhist traditions of resurrection and reincarnation which underpin much of their nation’s shared culture with nigh-on blasphemous scorn, they go one step further in suggesting that these received metaphysical notions have been chronically warped and devalued by the abusive lusts of a patriarchal social order, whilst simultaneously evoking harrowing memories of the personal loss and grief embodied in the mass death of the Second World War (still, lest we forget, well within the living memory of many viewers in 1973).

Digging into some deep, sticky psychic wounds, the goat-ish humour of this initially frivolous and absurd tale gradually gives way to some far more disturbing; safe to say, it must have left an impression difficult to shake off in minds of its initial viewers.

Nippon Horrors / October Horrors #9: Ghost Stories of the Seven Wonders of Honjo (Gorô Kadono, 1957)

Original title: 怪談本所七不思議 / 'Kaidan Honjo Nanafushigi'

The introduction to this Shintoho b-feature could prove a bit perplexing for us many of us gaijin, as voiceover narration tells us about a Tanuki (Japanese ‘racoon-dog’) who lives in a certain area (is it Honjo?), and seems to have especially noteworthy magical powers, but the narrator never really gives us the full low-down on this, because it seems to be assumed that everybody already knows all about it..?

Well, no problem – such are the pleasures of watching films whose makers would never have dreamed that people on the other side of the world would be assessing their efforts sixty years later.

Anyway, both the film’s title and this intro (in which forthcoming events are briefly ‘previewed’ via super-imposed shots of assorted characters we have yet to meet) would tend to suggest that we’re in for an anthology film -- an extremely cut price ‘Kwaidan’, perhaps? What fun! Actually though, once things get going, it soon becomes clear that the film (which clocks in at a sprightly 54 minutes) intends to concentrate on just a single ghost story, and an achingly over-familiar one at that. But, like most of these Shintoho ghost pictures, it’s an enjoyable business nonetheless, and not without its own quirks and surprises along the way.

Initially for instance, we meet a pair of fishermen, who, eager to get to their favourite drinking place before they run afoul of that aforementioned Tanuki, run instead into a brace of Yokai, including such ten carat spooks as a faceless woman (Yokai ID currently undetermined), a big guy with the eye in his forehead (an Ao Bōzu variant, perhaps?), the ever popular hopping umbrella thing (Karakasa-kozō), the big head dude (Abura-sumashi), and even a brief appearance by everybody’s favourite, the long-necked Rokurokubi.

The effects here are actually pretty great – easily the match of those seen in Daei’s Yokai films from the ‘60s – and, though brief, it’s all lots of eerie fun. (I particularly liked the bit in which, in an odd reverse Charles Fort kinda thing, the fishermen’s catch begins to levitate, and floats off into the sky.)

The next thing we know, the aggrieved fishermen and a bunch of their friends seem to have caught the mischievous Tanuki, whom they hold responsible for sicing the spooks upon them. Before they can turn it into soup however (for such is their stated intention), the animal is rescued by an elderly samurai patriarch (Hiroshi Hayashi) who happens to be passing. Fresh from visiting the grave of his first wife, he takes pity on the poor creature, and feels an urge to save it from the brutish treatment the fishermen no doubt have in mind.

Back home however, the old man has plenty of troubles, not least the fact that his rogueish nephew (the splendidly seedy Shigeru Amachi, whom you’ll recall from The Lady Vampire and several Zatoichi instalments) is trying to scam money off him whilst simultaneously making time with his much younger second wife (Akiko Yamashita), with whom the debauched young samurai had a fling at some point in the past. (1)

Fear not though, as the grateful Tanuki spirit appears to the old man in the form of a charming young girl (Michiko Tachibana) and her accompanying folk dancing troupe. The Tanuki pledges to protect the elder’s interests in return for his saving her life, so… what could possibly go wrong, right?

It’s rare to see a Japanese period film in which the aristocratic patrician guy turns out to be the aggrieved victim of the inevitable crimes and betrayals rather than perpetrator, but Amachi and Yamashita are such a convincingly vile pair of ne’erdowells that, as soon as they’ve teamed up in an adulterous union and started plotting to dispose of the old geezer, our sympathies are firmly nailed down, and we basically know where this is all heading.

Happily though, the film soon breaks away from the formal, ‘staged folk tale’ feel common to many earlier Japanese ghost films, allowing this standard issue tale of supernatural vengeance to become a simple, yet gripping and sensationalistic, b-movie melodrama, dynamically directed by the little-known Gorô Kadono, and played out with theatrical vigour by the cast.

Considering the year of production, a surprising amount of sexual impropriety follows the inevitable violent demise of the patriarch, as the leery Amachi has his wicked way with the bride of his morally upstanding cousin and Yamashita engages in some heavy-duty flirting with craven servant Gosuke (Saburô Sawai). Meanwhile, the lightning flashes and the winds howls outside the noble family’s now thoroughly profaned residence, and we all know that a bad end for the murderous adulterers will soon be on the way.

Justice soon marches in the corporeal form of the deceased patriarch’s aforementioned chivalrous son, who has returned from an extended stay in Edo upon hearing of his father’s death (I like the fact that this good samurai helpfully wears a white kimono, whilst Amachi of course favours black), whilst our mischievous Tanuki meanwhile is of course cooking up a right old storm in the spirit realm.

It may seem a bit disingenuous to claim that a film derived (at some level of remove, admittedly) from Japanese folklore was influenced by ‘Macbeth’, but, given that Kurosawa’s ‘Throne of Blood’ had premiered seven months before this film saw release in July 1957 (just in time for the Obon season, perhaps?), the possibility of a bit of hand-me-down influence doesn’t seem entirely out of the question.

Certainly, the echoes here of Shakespeare’s immortal yarn will be plainly obvious to Western viewers, and the film definitely succeeds in evoking what I can only describe as a ‘Macbeth-type atmosphere’, as what initially seemed like a light-hearted, fairy tale type film is gradually transformed into a doom-laden supernatural revenge tragedy, culminating, inevitably, in a rain-soaked, chanbara blood-bath in which the villainous Amachi gets what’s coming to him via his cousin’s shining blade.

It’s nothing we’ve not seen many times before, but I for one am happy to see it again, and, with all this blood-curdling incident compressed into less than an hour, the story certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome. Despite the miniscule budget, the kaidan atmosphere here is thick as a bowl of fermented miso, and all the stuff with the Yokai and sundry other ghostly manifestations is a lot of fun.

There’s also a great bit with a gravel-voiced Buddhist exorcist doing his thing, until his ritual is curtailed by a rain of poisonous snakes (!), and, whilst I won't spoil the details of the fate the Tanuki and her multitudinous ‘friends’ contrive for the bad guys, but it’s rather delirious and wonderful, in the best tradition of these kind of b-kaidan pictures.

Strangely enough, the most disappointing aspect of ‘..Seven Wonders of Honjo’ is probably the music, which consists of lazy/random needle drops that often undermine the painstakingly rendered atmos to a certain extent, particularly during the finale, in which the highly charged sword battle is sound-tracked by what sounds like a jaunty, brass band marching theme that sounds like it was pulled off some dusty old disc left behind by the U.S. occupying forces.

I can’t for the life of me imagine why the film’s producers chose to lay this down over the action in preference to some more appropriate and evocative Japanese music (which must surely have been available to them), but, given the extreme haste with which films like this one were presumably knocked out, I doubt anyone had time to quibble over such details in post-production. Visually, this scene is excellent, so it's a real shame that the music makes such a mess of it, but what can you do?

That aside though, whilst this marginal and rather eccentric item may not exactly be the best place to start with vintage Japanese ghost films, it’s a delightful surprise for those us of who already have a taste for them.

I’m still none the wiser regarding “the Seven Wonders of Honjo”, but I’m sure they can wait for another day.

(My profound thanks to the heroic souls who recently fan-subbed this film and stuck it up on the interweb, incidentally.)

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(1) An actress who seems to have worked almost exclusively in the milieu of Shintoho ghost movies, Yamashita can also boast appearances in in ‘Girl Divers at Spook Mansion’ (1959), Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (1960), and an apparently Western-inclined vampire movie whose existence I was previously unaware of, 1960’s ‘Vampire Bride’ [‘Hanayome Kyûketsuma’].

Nippon Horrors: The Lady Vampire (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1959)

Whilst we’ve already seen some pretty curious mash-ups of Eastern and Western horror tropes in this ‘Nippon horrors’ review thread, you’d be hard-pressed I think to find a more determinedly oddball example of the phenomenon than ‘Onna Kyûketsuki’ (‘The Lady Vampire’), another low budget quickie produced for Shintoho studios by J-horror pioneer Nobuo Nakagawa.

Whilst Nakagawa often used techniques and special effects inspired by Western horror in his films (which included Ghost Cat Mansion, ‘The Ghost of Yotsuya’ (1960) and the epic ‘Jigoku’ (‘Hell’, 1960)), the actual subject matter of his work tended to remain firmly grounded in traditional Japanese culture… which perhaps goes some way toward explaining how he got himself into such a muddle with ‘Lady Vampire’, a loopy little number that, to my delight, completely refuses to adhere to the rules of any particular horror sub-genre, or indeed any kind of narrative logic whatsoever.

From the eerie, low key atmosphere of the film’s opening reel, one might speculate that Nakagawa had Val Lewton’s 1940s RKO productions in mind, as we meet Tamio-san (Takashi Wada), a young reporter who works in one of those great movie newspaper offices where a bunch of hip cats hang around with their feet on the desks waiting for someone to phone in with a story. (“What’s that, a murder? I’ll be right there..”, etc.)

Finishing work late one evening, Tamio is driving to the family home of his fiancée Itsuko Matsumura (Junko Ikeuchi), to attend her birthday party. Temporarily distracted, Tamio accidentally runs into the shambling figure of a disheveled, long-haired woman. Stopping to help her, he finds that the woman has vanished, but, after shrugging off the incident and continuing to his destination, he suddenly sees her again, creeping around the garden of his fiancée’s home. Quite an unnerving occurrence one might imagine, but he doesn’t let it worry him too much, because hey – birthday cake!

Itsuko’s father and the family retainer however seem very worried indeed by these events, and, leaving the young folks to celebrate downstairs, they advance to the attic of the grandly appointed Western-style mansion (there’s a suit of armour and everything), where they find that the mysterious female glimpsed in the garden has broken in through a window and lies unconscious on a bed. Furthermore, the father immediately recognizes her – it is his wife (Itsuko’s mother), who hasn’t been seen since she mysteriously disappeared twenty years earlier, during a visit to the Southern island of Kyushu. Not only that, but get this - she looks exactly the same as she did the day she disappeared, having apparently not aged at all in the interim!

Unlikely explanations involving rare medical conditions and “bodily changes resulting from shock” are soon being thrown around, but, as the woman (played by Yôko Mihara) recuperates under the supervision of the family doctor, the plot soon thickens further. (1)

Attempting to escape the uncomfortable atmosphere at home, Tamio and Itsuko visit the “Ueno International Art Expo”, where they discover that the winner of the festival’s jury prize (which, in the grand tradition of paintings in horror films, looks like it would struggle to get a passing grade in a night school life-drawing class) features an exact likeness of Itsuko’s mother, painted as a reclining nude. Immediately inquiring as to the authorship of the painting, the couple learn that it was submitted to the expo by an individual named “Shiro Sofue” whom no one has been able to contact or track down.

By the time we’ve returned to the gallery by night to witness the painting in question being stolen by a dwarf with a distinctive two-tone hair-do (I wish I could credit this actor, he’s great) and his ‘master’, a tall, suave gentleman in a trilby, mirror shades and white driving gloves (Shigeru Amachi), and by the time we have subsequently seen the stolen painting delivered to the Matsumara residence care of (who else?) “Shiro Sofue”, suffice to say, the plot has assumed the consistency of a particularly lumpy gravy. (2)

By this point, ‘Lady Vampire’s combination of intriguing mystery plotting, flamboyantly grotesque evil-doers and an elegant, highly Westernised urban Japanese setting all seems to recall the distinctive atmosphere of Edogawa Rampo’s ero-guro stories, and that atmosphere is indeed captured quite well.

Despite the unavoidable predominance of flat, standing-around-talking type footage, Nakagawa nonetheless manages to employ some of the same clever focus effects and eerie sweeps through empty rooms that stood out in the opening segment of ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’, whilst Hisashi Iuchi’s heavy-handed but nonetheless rather likeable score goes big on the old singing saw / staccato strings / wordless female ululations combo.

Much like the earlier Lewton comparison however, the parallels with Rampo’s work are also ditched pretty quickly, as ‘Lady Vampire’ swiftly rambles on toward dafter and more unhinged realms than Rampo’s eminently logical approach to macabre storytelling would have countenanced.

As the more astute reader will no doubt already have guessed, that chap with the pet dwarf is Shiro Sofue, and furthermore, he is also a vampire. When we next see him, he is in his hotel room, freaking out with his head in his hands as shafts of light creep through gaps in the curtains. Acceptable vampire behavior you might think, but hang on a minute – the sky is dark. It’s clearly supposed to be night time.

“The moon, the dreadful moonlight..”, Shiro groans, before a maid enters the room and inadvisably throws open the curtains, at which point he undergoes a transformation into a sweaty, befanged beast with Nosferatu claws, and attacks her like a ravenous animal, leaving her bloodied body on a couch in the hotel lobby.

Yes, folks – what we have here is a vampire who behaves like a werewolf! Though a bit of a mind-blower for those of us who grew up in the West, with the “rules” governing the classic monsters set in stone, it’s worth remembering that things were probably a bit different in Japan in 1959. It’s all too easy to imagine Nakagawa and his collaborators sitting around, hazily trying to recall half-forgotten screenings of the Universal horror cycle; “ok, anyone remember how those Dracula guys work again?”, “Yeah, they’re the ones with the full moon, right?”, etc. I can only speak for myself, but as far as examples of cultural dissonance go, I found this monster’s apparent identity crisis absolutely delightful.

And, if our heads weren’t already reeling after that, the next thing ‘Lady Vampire’ hits us with is an unexpected history lesson. This is prompted by Mr Matsumura (Akira Nakamura), who begins lamenting “..the curse of those with Amakusa blood” – that being what apparently runs in his wife’s veins – and proceeds to ask Tamio and Itsuko how much they recall of the story of Shiro Amakusa.

Shiro Amakusa, it turns out, was the leader of the Shimbara Rebellion, which took place in Southern Japan in 1638 by the Western calendar. A significant uprising against feudal rule, this rebellion was spearheaded by an alliance of Catholic Christian converts who, under Amakusa’s command, took up arms against the Tokugawa Shogunate, and were soon violently massacred for their trouble.(3)

Amakusa himself was executed along with no less than 40,000 of his followers after the Shogun’s forces stormed their last remaining stronghold at Hara Castle near Nagasaki, and his head is said to have been displayed on a pike outside the castle gates. Subsequently, a legend has sprung up regarding Amakusa’s last words, which are reputed to have comprised a promise that he would return from the grave and seek vengeance one hundred years hence. As a result, Amakusa is often portrayed in Japanese culture as something of a supernatural or demonic figure– a “restless spirit” or wondering ghost of some kind.

Interestingly, this is not the first time we have seen the Shimbara Rebellion referenced in the context of a Japanese vampire movie. It was also mentioned in both Michio Yamamoto’s Lake of Dracula (1971) and that film’s follow-up, The Bloodthirsty Roses (aka ‘Evil of Dracula’, 1974), with the latter going so far as to include an elaborate historical flashback concerning the fate of a European missionary who inadvertently introduced vampirism to Japan after he escaped into the wilderness following the rebellion.

Whether or not there is any actual folkloric basis for this connection between vampirism and the spread and subsequent persecution of Christianity in Southern Japan in the 17th century, I’m unsure, but to be honest, I kind of doubt it. Basically, the thin thread of logic shared by all of these films seems to be that the vampire is an inherently Christian monster, and as such he must naturally have landed on Japanese shores alongside the European missionaries who arrived to propagate that religion.

Shiro Amakusa’s reputation as a ‘cursed’ figure certainly adds a bit of local colour to this assumption, providing a flimsy basis for an interesting, peculiarly Japanese twist on the vampire mythos, in which vampirism is understood less as a force that exists in *opposition* to Christian morality, and more as a kind of parasitic virus that inevitably accompanies it, reflecting to some extent the underlying suspicion of Christianity that persists in Japan to this day.

In ‘The Lady Vampire’ therefore, it is implied that Shiro Amakusa, in addition to being an evangelical Christian convert, was himself also a vampire (best not think too hard on the practicalities of that one), and that he has passed this curse down through his bloodline to his daughter, Princess Katsu. In a flashback outlining Shiro Sofue’s back-story (imaginatively portrayed via the use of a black-curtained soundstage, a few period props and some scratchy stock footage from an old samurai movie), we discover that he was originally the lover and loyal servant of the Princess (who, needless to say, is also played by Yôko Mihara). As the walls of the Princess’s castle crumble under the bombardment of the Shogunate forces, we see the two lovers embrace upon a Christian altar, as the Princess grants Shiro the gift of vampiric eternal life before being buried beneath the falling rubble.

That Shiro Sofue subsequently spends the next three hundred years lurking in a cave seeking out and imprisoning women who look exactly like his deceased love is somewhat of a no-brainer given that we’re dealing here with a low-budget horror movie rather than a historical epic, and, as Itsuko’s mother turns out to be both an exact doppelganger of the dead Princess and a direct Amakusa descendent to boot, well – that’s the rough outline of yr plot right there, pretty much.

All this is made clear to us – in a manner of speaking - when the mother, Miwako, finally wakes up, and recounts (via flashback) what she’s been up to for the past twenty years.

Wondering happily through a breathtakingly picturesque Kyushu locale having temporarily taken leave of her husband during that holiday all those years ago, Miwako encounters Shiro Sofue, who, elegantly attired as ever, is busy at his easel, working on a landscape.

After some suitably pungent banter (“I’ve been waiting for you for centuries..”, etc), he plies her with a knockout drop scented rose. When she awakens, she finds herself in the vampire’s lair, where Shiro stands over her, now sporting a full opera cape and shades ensemble, wielding a cobweb-coated candelabra with which he subsequently begins beating her chest (using the non-candle end, I hasten to add).

For the purposes of this lengthy flashback sequence, the vampire’s ‘cave’ is created on a blacked out soundstage, creating the impression of a kind of horizonless dreamland in which people and objects emerge from a featureless void – an inspired visual idea that, as well as presumably playing well from a budgetary point of view, helps to convey the dazed perception of the recently drugged Miwako very well, as well as allowing us to enjoy a veritable feast of the kind of tripped out, proto-psychedelic visuals that seem to have been an essential ingredient of Japanese horror filmmaking in the ‘50s and ‘60s.




As Miwako looks around her, a variety of bizarre, capering creatures appear one by one before her eyes, introducing us to the strange bunch who comprise the vampire’s inexplicable retinue of sidekicks. After the dwarf (with whom we’re already familiar), we meet the scary bakeneko lady from ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’ (presumably the Kyushu-set black & white sequences in that film must have been shot simultaneously with this one?), and, most intriguingly, a bald, loincloth-clad heavy whose look seems pitched somewhere between a caveman, a wrestler and a Shaolin monk. (Answers on a postcard please if you have any idea who or what the hell he’s supposed to be.)

After these weirdoes have ceased parading around (and after we’ve enjoyed Shiro’s own flashback-within-a-flashback origin story, as described earlier in this review) the vampire commences work on the portrait of Miwako seen earlier in the film. Haranguing her for failing to smile for his painting, he warns her of the fate she could meet if she fails to co-operate with his artistic aspirations, instigating an elaborate super-imposition shot in which we see multiple, underwear-clad Yôko Miharas emerging from a gilt-edged mirror, frozen like waxy-skinned zombies…. this marking the point, familiar to all devotees of ‘70s Euro-horror, at which we stop even bothering to try following the logic of what’s transpiring on screen, and just go with it.

Happily, the remainder of ‘Lady Vampire’ co-operates with this feeling, comprising as it does a splendid excursion into the realms of pulpy delirium that rarely lets up for long.

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Shiro, his bedtime delayed by the police investigation into the murder in his hotel room, finds himself trapped in a shady Ginza bar, where, as shards of moonlight creep in through a broken window, he enters monster-mode and goes berserk, launching into a lycanthropic rampage that would do Paul Naschy proud.

Being an elegant vampire of course, Shiro only vents his animalistic hunger upon the necks of pretty ladies, and on this occasion he leaves no less than six of them thrown to the ground with blood gushing from their jugulars before the cops arrive and he flees into the night. And before this has even started, I should point out, his dwarf sidekick has already done a pretty good job of wrecking the place, dancing across the bar counter hurling full whisky bottles at the customers heads. The whole thing is just absolute pandemonium, one of the wildest sequences of old fashion b-movie carnage I’ve seen in recent memory.

And to think, on the other side of the world at this point, censorious types were still getting hot and bothered at the thought of Christopher Lee breathing down some young lovely’s neckline…




For the film’s conclusion, the now fully conscious Miwako is recaptured by Shiro, who promptly spirits her away to his lair in Kyushu, with Tamio, Itsuko and assorted police and newspapermen in hot pursuit, with the latter keen to see the perpetrator of the Ginza massacre run to ground.

Led by a fugitive thief who claims to have been assailed by monsters whilst hiding out in a mountain cave, this gang – who comprise the equivalent of the more traditional pitchfork-wielding mob, more or less - converge upon the vampire’s cave, at which point Nakagawa’s film abandons all pretense of seriousness and proceeds to go absolutely bananas, descending (or ascending, depending on your POV) into a Saturday matinee monster rally that recalls the full strength pulp of some of the livelier horror films being made in Mexico at around this time.

Separated amid the dry ice-swathed mountains on their way to the cave, our heroes are beset by attacks from the caveman / monk guy (who shoots at them with a primitive musket) and Shiro himself (who inevitably kidnaps Itsuko).

Eventually arriving at the ‘cave’ set- which we now see in daylight as a series of crumbly, slightly expressionistic hall and corridor sets that look very much like they might have been repurposed from another production – Tamio encounters flappy rubber bats, a moldering skeleton and (of course) a smoking acid pit, before bravely going man to man with Shiro in a life or death fencing foil / candelabra duel.

Meanwhile, everybody else runs around being pursued by the vampire’s ‘monsters’ for what seems like ages, until the slightly Scooby Doo-esque shenanigans eventually draw to a close when the thief manages to dig up with treasure he left in the cave, somehow triggering an avalanche that conveniently sorts everything out, in much the way these things tend to in the closing reel of horror films.

And, in conclusion, well… there is no conclusion. I can honestly think of nothing more to say about ‘The Lady Vampire’, now that I’ve exhaustively described what happens in it. Whilst the film’s nutty ambitions are necessarily confined by the low key, low budget nature of its production, it is nonetheless a bizarrely inventive melting pot of mismatched monster movie tropes that denies all attempts at rational analysis, and I’m confident that any open-minded fans of wild/weird global horror cinema will enjoy it a great deal.

We will close with a few words from Mr Matsumura, inadvertently delivering not only a concise critique of this review, but arguably of my writing style on this blog in general. Good night all, and careful with that dreadful moonlight.

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(1) Though she never really took on any leading roles to my knowledge, Yôko Mihara enjoyed a long and prolific career that should render her a familiar face to any fan of the wilder realms of Japanese cult film. Apparently specialising in pulpy horror roles in the last few years of Shintoho, she also appeared in such choice titles as ‘Girl Diver of Spook Mansion’ and ‘Bloody Sword of the 99th Virgin’ (both 1959, and both now residing on my ‘THAT I GOTTA SEE’ list), before moving to Toei, where roles in several of Hideo Gosha’s revered outlaw samurai films and assorted ninkyo/yakuza titles eventually led to her becoming a regular in the studio’s early ‘70s sexploitation and pinky violence output, appearing in such classics of the genre as ‘Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion’ (1972), Sex & Fury (1973), Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (1974) and ‘School of the Holy Beast’ (1974), not to mention ‘The Lustful Shogun and His 21 Concubines’ (1972), and, my personal favourite title-wise, ‘The Erotomaniac Daimyo’ (1972) – most of the above directed of course by the one and only Norifumi Suzuki.

(2)Top-billed in this movie, and indeed doing a great turn as a pale, aesthete vampire, you may recall Shigeru Amachi for his similarly fine performance as Hirate, the doomed samurai in the first Zatoichi film. Interestingly, he subsequently appeared in a number of other films alongside Yôko Mihara, including Gosha’s ‘Sword of Doom’ (1965), Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Blackmail is My Life’ (1968), and, somewhat less prestigiously, Norifumi Suzuki’s Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack (1971). He later played Edogawa Rampo’s master detective Kogorô Akechi in a 1979 TV movie (a role to which I can imagine he was uniquely suited), and subsequently appeared in Paul Naschy’s ‘The Beast With The Magic Sword’ (1983), thus allowing me to continue my tradition of finding an excuse to mention it at least once in every review of a Japanese film I complete for this blog.

(3) Forcibly curbing the foothold that Christianity had established in Southern Japan up to that point and hastening the Tokugawa decision to isolate Japan from the rest of the world (a state of affairs that famously persisted until the arrival of Commodore Perry’s ‘black ships’ in 1854), the Shimabara Rebellion proved a pivotal event in the history of Japan, with its aftermath playing an important role in shaping the country’s culture and society as we know it today. To learn more about Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate, why not visit your local library?