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 / 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?

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.

Nippon Horrors: Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (Yoshihiro Ishikawa, 1960)

Thus far in this ‘Nippon Horrors’ strand, we’ve been looking at movies that are either modern style, Western-influenced horror films, or else just lunatic one-offs of one kind or another, but it is of course impossible to gain an understanding of Japanese horror without examining the more traditional k(w)aidan tales that comprised by far the most prolific category within the genre prior to 1970. And if we’re talking kaidan, then before long, we’ll be talking kaibyo, aka bakeneko, aka GHOST-CATS - a subject that the movie-going public in Japan apparently couldn’t get enough of, with a catalogue of titles stretching right back to the dawn of cinema.

If I started trying to run down the folkloric roots of these ‘ghost-cat’ stories, we’d be here all day, but needless to say, specific ghost-cat legends pertaining to such locales as Okazaki, Arima and (most pertinently in this case, perhaps) Kasane Swamp go back at least a few hundred years, and formed a cornerstone of the canon of supernatural kabuki plays, woodcuts and novels that fed straight into the earliest Japanese fantastic films.

Although most of Japan’s silent-era films are now lost, surviving records indicate that the Okazaki ghost-cat legend alone was filmed three times prior to 1917, once by the esteemed “father of Japanese cinema” Shozo Makino no less, whilst the first example of the ‘cursed wall’ variant, which appears to incorporate elements taken from Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ into the mix, appeared as early as 1918.

I have heard Kiyohiko Ushihara’s 1938 production ‘Ghost Cat: Haunted Shamisen’ referred to as the earliest surviving Japanese film to include fantastical elements, and, after the war, the 1950s seem to have heralded an unprecedented boom in ghost-cat pictures, with a few representative examples including ‘Ghost Cat: Cursed Wall’ (Kenji Misumi, 1958), ‘Cat Monster of Ouma Cross’ (Bin Kato, 1954) and ‘Ghost Cat of Yonaki Swamp’ (Katsukiko Tazaka, 1957), as picked from a list comprising many, many more titles.

Given all this, it is slightly ironic that by far the best-known ghost-cat movie in the West is Kaneto Shindô’s arthouse-horror classic ‘Kuroneko’ (‘Black Cat’, 1968), a film that domestic audiences must have seen as a nostalgic summation of a set of clichés endlessly reiterated over the course of the preceding fifty years, rather than the wild novelty it may have appeared to foreign viewers.

So, the Japanese like their ghost-cats – this much we know. Insofar as I can tell from online reading, the plots of these movies seem standardised to the point of complete uniformity, but I probably shouldn’t draw too many generalisations until I’ve at least seen a few more of them. So as such, let’s jump in entirely at random with ‘Ghost Cat of Otama Pond’, selected for no other reason than that I happen to have a copy, and watched it last week.

A relatively late entry in the ghost-cat cycle, this 1960 Shintoho production was the directorial debut of one Yoshihiro Ishikawa, striking out on his own for the first time after a lengthy spell working as assistant and co-writer to horror specialist Nobuo Nakagawa, on such films as ‘Black Cat Mansion’ (1958), ‘The Woman Vampire’ (1959) and ‘The Ghost of Yotsuya’ (1959) (hopefully we’ll get around to those here at some point). Like Nakagawa’s films, ‘..Otama Pond’ seems notable for combining a traditional kaidan storyline with techniques borrowed from contemporary Western horror films, and, unusually for a 1960 genre picture from the cash-strapped Shintoho, it makes great use of colour photography too.*

Things begin in the present day, where we join a neatly-attired couple in western dress who are in the process of getting lost amid a network of narrow, woodland paths in an area we later learn is “known for its thick fog”. They are en route to the man’s parental home, to seek his father’s blessing prior to their marriage, but unknown forces seem to be endlessly drawing them back to the same swampy-looking pond. “If we arrive after dark, my father won’t let us marry”, the man says. A curious notion, but, well.. let’s move on.

Right from the outset here, the atmosphere is incredibly spooky, with massively ominous, droning music (composed by Chumei Watanabe) and authentically muddy-looking, claustrophobic sets used to represent the woodland locale. It is difficult to pin-point quite how the film succeeds so well in creating a genuinely unnerving effect from such stock elements, but nonetheless, it does. Even the thunder-claps seem scary, and when was the last time you felt that whilst watching a horror film?

Of course, frequent cutaway shots to a mewling black cat lurking in the trees help, and when the couple eventually take shelter in a derelict house, despairing of finding their way out of this nightmare before morning, the woman drifts off into a tormented fever after encountering a terrifying vision of a white-haired witch archetype who will need no introduction to those familiar with Kurosawa’s heavily kaidan-inspired ‘Throne of Blood’. (The shot in which the witch appears to ‘reel in’ her fainting victim in slow motion is wonderfully sinister.)

Extensive use is made here of anti-naturalistic, Bava-esque gel lighting, with inexplicable green and red glows lurking around every corner, and indeed, just like the protagonists of a Western gothic horror film, this couple – their clothes and behavior coding them as ‘modern’ and ‘rational’ – seem to have found themselves trapped in a world that is entirely ruled by the more macabre elements of antiquity. (Even the doctor they track down the next morning immediately starts rabbiting on about ancient curses, and chooses to treat the lady’s fever by means of an elaborate Buddhist exorcism.)

Also recalling a Western gothic, it is our characters’ previously obscure family history that eventually proves responsible for subjecting them to such a weird fate… as gradually becomes clear when the doctor begins narrating the story which, via flashback, will comprise the majority of the movie’s remaining run-time.

Back to the days of the Shogunate then, where we find a pretty standard star-crossed lovers vengeance story unfolding, played out in a rigidly formal yet beguilingly beautiful manner. The lovers’ final meeting is a particular highlight in this regard, taking place against a nigh-on apocalyptic sunset in a desolate wasteland, creating a suitably expressionistic backdrop to their doomed farewell.

Interestingly, the in-fighting between the lovers’ rival clans here adds a slight twist of populist politics to the mix – something that seems to be a reoccurring theme within ‘ghost-cat’ stories. Viewers of ‘Kuroneko’ will recall that that film incorporates a pretty strident critique of those who propagate conflict to line their own pockets, and here, the catalyst for the destruction of the benevolent family comes when their patriarch publically speaks out against unfair taxes leveled by the corrupt local magistrate - thus prompting said magistrate and his evil brood of cronies to do away with him and his family in as disproportionately violent and generally dastardly a fashion as can be imagined.

As soon as the good family’s martially gifted son (the male portion of the star-crossed lovers) departs to pursue a career in Edo, the vultures descend, and, as is standard procedure in these supernatural vengeance stories, the family home is set ablaze and the patriarch and elderly grandmother cruelly murdered, whilst the noble daughter/sister chooses to kill herself with a hairpin (that ever-useful accessory of the virtuous Japanese maiden) when kidnapped and threatened with rape by the intruders.**

All of this is already somewhat grimmer business than you’d be liable to see in a Western film from 1960 not entitled ‘Black Sunday’, and, when the noble son returns home to learn of the destruction of his family, he meets his downfall by way of an unusually intense and sinister sword-fighting set-piece, full of bloody wounds, bulging eyes and jagged, kabuki-like choreography.

With ominous, post-massacre shots of blood red skies (echoing both the house-fire and the blood spreading across the waters of the pond where the bodies are dumped), and unspeakably eerie, metal-scraping fiddle music, the combined consequences of all of this villainy amount to strong stuff indeed, designed to have us almost crying out for the ghostly retribution we know is on its way.

And thankfully, it’s not wasting any time getting here, either. Following their crimes, the clan of baddies is almost immediately subjected to such a tirade of hair-raising supernatural phenomena, it’s a wonder they don't immediately go insane and flee straight for the nearest fortified town. Nocturnal visits from reanimated corpses, bleeding walls, ghostly tolling bells, sake turning to blood, giant cat silhouettes and unearthly red glows projected against screen-doors, sleep-walking possessed daughters, gory-lock shaking Macbeth-like phantoms, and even a floating yokai fireball pitching in for the conclusion.

Of course, we all know from the outset that it’s curtains for the villains, but the filmmakers have a heck of a lot of fun getting us to that point, realizing all of the above with a great deal of ghoulish skill and visual imagination, and even managing to generate some surface level tension, despite the fateful inevitability of the scenario now in play.

As seen in ‘Kuroneko’, but perhaps not in earlier versions of this story (or so I would imagine), the vengeful ghost-cat actually takes on solid, humanoid form here too, appearing as a werewolf-clawed half-woman, half-cat monster who turns up in one memorable scene to chomp the head off a passing snake and generally put the wind up the surviving characters even further. Curiously though, this furry cat-monster appears only briefly, and fails to return for the film’s finale, so I can only assume that the filmmakers must have decided that the costume just looked too silly, and minimized its use. It IS pretty silly, to be fair, but speaking as a lifelong fan of outlandish horror movie nonsense, I was still disappointed that we were denied any scenes of full-on, Paul Naschy-esque werecat mayhem. Oh well, you can’t have everything I suppose.

Lacking though at may be in furry-clawed grappling however, the conclusion here is certainly anything but underwhelming – in fact it is an desperate maelstrom of blood-letting, cat-hissing, limb-hacking carnage, incorporating strobe speed cutting, all kinds of goofy spook manifestations and howling super-imposed cat-faces. Whilst it may be far more orderly than the equivalent scenes of madness in Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s legendary ‘Hausu’ (1977), we’re definitely somewhere in the same ballpark here, tonally speaking.

I many ways, ‘Ghost Cat of Otama Pond’ seems poised at a transitional moment in the development of Japanese horror. From 1960 onwards, the popularity of kaidan films seemed seems to have plummeted (at least if we can judge from the quantity of films produced in the genre), with only Shindô’s more prestige productions really flying the flag for the form by the second half of the decade, leaving Japanese horror flailing around in a bit of a no man’s land, mainly resulting in the kind of occasional one-offs and stylistic cross-overs that we’ve looked at previously in this review strand.

As such, a film like ‘..Otama Pond’ can perhaps best be viewed as an attempt to keep the kaidan train rolling by adopting something of an east-meets-west approach, grafting Western techniques and aesthetics (lightning flashes, gel lighting, hairy monsters) onto a highly traditional, folkloric narrative. The extravagant use of colour is interesting in this regard, with the concentration on deep reds and luminous greens causing ‘..Otama Pond’ to completely lose the trademark ‘bone-chilling cold’ evoked by many older kaidan films, instead moving toward a kind of sweaty, hot-house fecundity that prefigures the kind of colour horror films that would begin to emerge from Italy just a few years later.

Given its era, I was also surprised how thickly the film lays on the horror business. At a time when many Asian (and indeed European) ghost stories were more inclined to go for the ‘softly, softly’ approach, padding out a few minutes-worth of spooky goings on with acres of convoluted plotting and dialogue, Ishikawa really goes all out for scares, throwing everything at his disposal into trying to freak his audience out, and dedicating probably about two thirds of the eventual run time to supernatural creepery of one kind of another. (Needless to say, I approve.)

The stiff presentation of the story here may feel more like a formalised re-enactment of an ancient legend than an engaging piece of human drama, but nonetheless, the extraordinary variety of macabre visuals and the general sense of marauding, out of control terror help make ‘Ghost Cat of Otama Pond’ a hugely rewarding experience for fans of early ‘60s horror, presenting a cocktail of thrills, weird imagery and atmosphere that matches up to the very best of the Italian gothics. By which I mean, I really liked it. A definite two paws up in the cat-related horror movie sweepstakes.

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* Less than a year after this film was released, Shintoho – a studio initially founded by renegade Toho staff following an industrial dispute, and renowned for the creative freedom it allowed its filmmakers – declared bankruptcy and promptly ceased to exist, the earliest casualty of the slow decline of the Japanese studio system through the ‘60s and ‘70s. Notably, the commercial failure of Nakagawa’s ambitious horror epic ‘Jigoku: The Sinners of Hell’ (1960) is often seen as a key factor in the studio’s demise.

** Whilst it is of no importance to the film’s narrative, those of you who, like me, enjoy shouting “NINJA!” at your TV sets at every opportunity may wish to note that the baddies initially creep up on the good family dressed in traditional ninja outfits. So there ya go. NINJA!