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: 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?

Nippon Horrors: Ghost Cat Mansion (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1958)

Before he embarked upon his attempt to make the ‘ultimate horror movie’ in the form of 1960’s startling ‘Jigoku’ (‘Hell’) – a film so ambitious that many claim it played a significant role in bankrupting the financially fragile Shintoho studios – director Nobuo Nakagawa had already made a name for himself as an important contributor to the rather marginal field of Japanese horror cinema, shooting a series of low budget programmers during the years 1957-59 that arguably represent the first conscious attempts to incorporate more modern (eg, Western) horror tropes into the highly formalised tradition of classical Japanese ghost stories.

Nakagawa’s films ran the gamut of popular horror themes, both Japanese (‘Yotsuya Kaidan’, 1959) and foreign (‘Lady Vampire’, also 1959), but today we’re going to be looking at his take on the ubiquitous bakeneko / ghost cat mythos, ‘Bôrei Kaibyô Yashiki’, variously tanslated as ‘Mansion of the Ghost Cat’, ‘Black Cat Mansion’, or my preferred combination of the two options, ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’.

As has previously been discussed on this blog in reference to Yoshihiro Ishikawa’s Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (1960), variations on such stories seem to have exercised a persistent hold over Japanese filmmakers and audiences, with a history of bakeneko titles stretching back to the silent era, and, more pertinently to the film at hand, those who have read that review will also recall that, prior to making his solo debut with ‘..Otama Pond’, Ishikawa had previously worked as Nakagawa’s assistant on most of his pre-‘Jigoku’ horror films.

Whilst the ‘master & protégée’ relationship between the two men must be thus acknowledged, the sad truth is that my prior viewing of ‘..Otama Pond’ lowered my subsequent enjoyment of ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’, simply due to the fact that, for a sensation hungry modern viewer at least, Ishikawa’s film is basically much better – a wilder, stranger, more ambitious and visually splendid take on the ghost-cat formula than that achieved by his sensei a few years earlier, even as it covers about 75% of the same ground, stylistically speaking.

This is not to imply that ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’ is anything less than a perfect satisfactory (and indeed somewhat innovative) example of bakeneko cinema of course. In fact, its deficiencies in comparison to the later film likely stem mainly from its more obvious origins as a rushed, cash-strapped b-movie, rather than from any lack of ambition on the part of its makers, and as such, it’s probably best if I nix the unfair comparison between the two films for now and allow ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’ stand on its own not-inconsiderable merits.

It certainly gets off to wonderfully atmospheric start, that’s for sure. Subjective POV torch beams prowl the darkened corridors of a deserted Tokyo hospital, taking us eventually to the skeleton and specimen jar filled lab of a doctor who is apparently pulling an all-nighter. Who could that be on the stairs, he wonders, as the heavy footfalls of whoever we were following with the torch creak the floorboards outside. This, the doctor muses to himself, reminds him of certain events that transpired six years ago, and, like some doomed noir protagonist awaiting a terrible fate, he calmly sits down and lights a cigarette, awaiting the arrival of his sinister visitor.

Cue flashback to six years earlier. The doc’s wife is suffering from TB, and, to aid her recovery, the couple have left Tokyo and moved back to her familial home on the Southern island of Kyushu. For reasons that never really become clear, the doctor’s brother-in-law has secured them lodgings in, uh - a shunned, clifftop haunted house in which no one has lived for over a century. (That his brother-in-law might be somewhat of a jerk is a possibility the doctor may wish to consider, but it is not something the filmmakers choose to dwell upon here.)

As you might well have expected, upon moving into their new home, the couple and their household almost immediately experience all manner of spooky goings-on, and in particular, they become subject to frequent visitations from a particularly persistent and terrible variation on the inevitable kaidan white-haired-old-lady ghost. Not even so much a ghost in this case in fact, but a full-blown monster of apparently palpable form, this bastard hag proceeds in short order to kill the family dog and terrify the nurse who is helping the doctor establish a new clinic, before repeatedly utilising prank phone calls and disguised voices to gain entry to the house, on each occasion making a bee-line straight for the long-suffering wife, whom she proceeds to strangle to the point of near-death, only to disappear when interrupted at the last moment.

Understandably unnerved by all this grim incident, the doctor temporarily puts his rationalist principles on hold and pays a visit to a venerable local Buddhist priest, who promptly makes with the old “ah yes, I remember the dark legends connected to that dreadful old house..” routine, prompting (as per the formula of every other bakeneko movie I’ve seen to date) another flashback within the flashback, this time taking us back to (I assume) the Edo Period – a change accompanied by a corresponding shift to colour photography.

Up to this point, it must be said that ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’ has been directed with great skill. The opening creep though the hospital and the couple’s initial investigation of the haunted house both utilise the inherently terrifying combination of smooth, slow camera movements and wide, empty spaces that would later be perfected by Masaki Kobayashi in his epic ‘Kwaidan’ (1964), and even minor incidents such as a moment when the couple’s car is run off the road by a stray cat are conveyed using jarring, Hitchcock-esque mini-montages that further add to the somewhat ‘Carnival of Souls’-esque sense of icy, detached unease.If, as I’ve always thought, the key to creating a genuinely scary story is to present a world that seems sinister and somehow off-balance even before anything spooky happens, then it’s safe to say that Nakagawa succeeds here with aplomb.

It is a shame then that once the action shifts to the past and the photography switches to a rather drab variety of colour, this carefully wrought atmosphere largely vanishes. Suddenly, Nakagawa’s direction becomes blandly formal, whilst the obviously set-bound backdrops take on an unnatural, theatrical feel and the acting becomes stiff and melodramatic. As with many older Japanese period dramas, it sometimes feels more as if we're watching a local theatre reenactment of a well-known legend than an engaging piece of cinema.

Anyway, the flashback story here chiefly concerns the abuses of power perpetrated by one Lord Shogen, a wealthy local daimyo (and patriarch of the future haunted mansion of course), who is, to put it mildly, a bit of an arsehole.

When we first meet Shogen, he is on the verge of slaughtering his most trusted servant for some minor infringement of protocol (the servant’s life is only spared after Shogen’s upstanding son intervenes), and the Lord’s inordinately aggressive and cowardly behaviour only gets worse from thereon in.

In brief then, dark powers of a vengeful and supernatural nature are eventually evoked to deal with this disagreeable fellow following an incident in which he summons a young samurai and renowned Go master to his chambers to tutor him in the finer points of the game. Unfortunately however, the young man makes the fatal error of playing Shogen in a fair contest, refusing to let the diamyo cheat and replay his moves, with the inevitable result that lord grumpy-pants becomes so irate that he eventually snaps and, grabbing his katana, redecorates his dayroom with the samurai’s blood.

When Shogen subsequently has the audacity to avoid responsibility for the killing by claiming that the young man instantly left for Kyoto to further study Go technique after becoming embarrassed when the Lord defeated him in the game, the samurai’s blind mother – for whom he cared and provided sole financial support – cannily disbelieves him, and, visiting the daimyo to try to discover what actually happened to her son, her suspicions turn to futile rage after the hateful old bastard adds insult to injury by taking the opportunity to rape her.

As she contemplates her sorry state, the blind woman is visited by a ghostly vision of her son, who confirms the truth of her suspicions about what happened to him, and, seeing no way forward, she clutches her beloved pet cat to her bosom and uses a dagger to take her own life, calling on the spirit of her cat to execute her vengeance from beyond the grave. Before her blood has even dried of course, it’s ghost-cat-a-go-go for the folks in the mansion on the hill.

One thing I like about the avenging spirits in these bakeneko stories (and indeed in Asian ghost stories more generally) is how absolutely ruthless they are, in comparison to their more genteel, ‘poetic justice’-inclined Western counterparts. In this case for instance, all of the evil in the story has emanated directly from Lord Shogen himself. His mother, son and servants are all portrayed as sympathetic characters, as much the victims of his cruelty as anyone else - but just try telling the ghost-cat that! The dying woman specifically issued her curse against the bad man plus his entire family, his household and his descendants, and ghost-cat’s not taking any prisoners.

Indeed, the first thing the avenging ghost does is possess the body of the daimyo’s elderly mother, transforming her not only into the image of the wild, white-haired hag seen in the film’s present day section, but into an actual anthropomorphic cat-monster! Regrettably for anyone still taking ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’ seriously by this point, the result of this transformation is frankly hilarious, prompting a ten minute segment in which the film goes absolutely berserk.

“My mother took a carp from the pond and went under the house?!” exclaims the daimyo at one point when a servant relates details of his mother’s disturbing cat-like behaviour, and by the time the cat-mother – her costume complete with pointy, fluffy ears that spring upward when she raises her head – begins busting out the familiar J-horror lady-ghost device of using an invisible fishing rod to draw her victims toward her like a sci-fi tractor beam, even the most determinedly straight-faced viewers will be hard-pressed to suppress a few WTF-ish guffaws.

As the ghost-cat’s rampage reaches its bloody conclusion, Nakagawa utilises prototypes of many of the quasi-psychedelic visual effects later employed by Ishikawa In ‘..Otama Pond’, with everything from double-exposures and giant, looming cat shadows to random, Bava-esque coloured gel lighting wantonly thrown around, to pleasantly psychedelic effect. Though such effects are neither as extensively nor effectively used as in the later film (here for instance, the coloured lighting simply consists of spinning, multi-hued spot-lights that come out of nowhere to assault the tormented Lord Shogen), this is all still jolly good fun, needless to say.

Thankfully, this excessive and unhinged atmosphere is to a certain extent maintained when we return to the black & white ‘present day’, wherein a charm proffered by the priest and the disinterment of the mouldering skeleton of the Go master (who had been bricked up Poe-style within the walls of the house) helps the doctor and his wife return their angry revenant to its resting place, in a wind-swept, lightning-riddled finale that remains very enjoyable – at least until a thoroughly disappointing bummer of a contrived happy ending follows

Flawed though it may be, I don’t believe that ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’s deficiencies are *quite* serious enough to ruin the good feeling generated by its highlights. Although budgetary contraints and tonal inconsistencies mean that no one’s ever likely to single it out as a masterpiece, it is nonetheless a wild and wooly bit of quintessential Japanese b-horror, rich in authentically creepy moments and full-on weirdness that fans of the particular ‘feel’ generated by this kind of thing are liable to cherish.