Nippon Horrors: Snake Girl & Silver Haired Witch (Noriaki Yuasa,1968)

Whether by accident or design, 1968 seems to have been a bit of a banner year for Japanese horror films, with such weird delights as The Living Skeleton and Genocide appearing from Shochiku, ‘The Snake Woman’s Curse’ unleashed via Toei, and Kaneto Shindô’s arthouse kaidan classic ‘Kuroneko’ released by Toho. It was the struggling Daiei studios though who seemed to be leading the pack in this mini-boom, not only fighting The Great Yokai War, but also managing to squeeze a whole host of late period kaidan pictures into their ’68 release schedule, including Tokuzô Tanaka’s ‘The Snow Witch’ and Satsuo Yamamoto’s ‘Kaidan Botan Dourou’ (aka ‘Bride from Hades’), amongst others.

A somewhat more off-beat entry on Daiei’s ’68 scorecard however comes in the form of ‘Hebi Musume to Hakuhatsuma’ (literal translation: ‘Snake Girl and Silver-Haired Witch’), an interlinked adaptation of two stories by flamboyant horror manga pioneer Kazuo Umezu, brought to the screen by Noriaki Yuasa, a director best-known for his tireless work on the Gamera series.

Shooting in no frills, regularscope black & white (whether for budgetary or aesthetic reasons who knows, though either explanation is plausible), Yuasa here succeeds in pulling off that rarest of feats: a film that mixes full-on horror with childlike whimsy without betraying either side of that equation, meaning that Umezu’s child-orientated tale of what happens when your attic-dwelling big sister turns out to be a blood-thirsty snake monster emerges as a movie both spine-chilling and delightful in equal measure – a singular piece of fantastic cinema that could appeal equally to viewers of all ages, assuming they’re not too adverse to a good dose of horror-y business.

A pre-credits sequence depicting the murder of a maid in the basement home-lab of natural history specialist Dr. Nanjo sets the tone nicely, as the usual ultra-ominous Japanese horror music accompanies an opening shot of a hairy, clawed hand lifting a snake from its cage, swiftly followed by a graphic death-by-snake that proves extremely creepy, if none too convincing.

This leads us into a wonderfully pulpy credits sequence, the camera drifting across a panorama of dinosaur bones, oversized test tubes and other mad scientist ephemera as lightning flashes, rain hammers the windows and somebody on the soundtrack goes nuts on the theremin. Needless to say, the possibility of my not enjoying this film is already fading fast.

As the story proper gets underway, we are introduced to our heroine Sayuri (Yachie Matsui), daughter of the aforementioned Dr Nanjo, a plucky yet rather somber young girl who finds herself leaving the safety of the convent boarding school she has known for many years and returning to her family home, where, uh, things are not well, to say the least.

Sayuri’s mother, we are told, is very ill following a head injury received in a car accident, and as such, she seems a little distant and disconnected, descending the stairs in the manner of a gothic heroine and apparently regarding everything around her with a great deal of uncertainty. Dad meanwhile seems like a nice chap, irrespective of all the weird stuff he keeps in his basement, but unfortunately he announces shortly after Sayuri’s arrival that he must fly to Africa immediately to study a new species of poisonous snake that has been discovered there. Such is the life of a leading specialist in rare reptiles and creepy-crawlies I suppose.

This leaves the balance of power in the household largely resting with bossy housekeeper Shige, and it doesn’t take long for Sayuri to figure out something a little more tangibly strange is going on here. The mysterious stranger who stares at her through a hole in her bedroom ceiling provides the first clue, and when this unseen interloper progresses to dropping live snakes on her pillow, and her mother responds by ordering her to perform her devotions before a household shrine from which a ghostly, living face stares back…. well I think it’s safe to say we’ve reached the “get the hell out of there straight away!” stage in record time.

During its first half hour, ‘Snake Girl & Silver Haired Witch’ sets out quite a smorgasbord of familiar horror tropes, from the weird doctor father, to the reclusive wife who’s gone a bit mad, the clawed monster killer and the ubiquitous ‘watcher in the attic’ mythos (presumably a direct reference to the famed Edogawa Rampo story of that name). Later on, things open up a little to take in elements of the inevitable “mutant / sub-normal family member secretly locked in the attic” sub-genre, throwing in the ever-present silver-haired witch of kaidan tradition for good measure, and even trying out a few riffs on the old “woman with disfigured face becomes monster” routine. Quite a line-up of thrills and chills there for us to get to grips with, and thankfully the script allows all of these ingredients to percolate for a good long while before we’re eventually given something like the full story.

Style-wise, Yuasa matches this surfeit of narrative elements with a wealth of gleefully executed horror imagery. From the threatening shadows and staring, lizard-like eyes of the snake-sister in the attic to the flashes of lightning throwing shadows on wall-partitions in classic kaidan style, the rich chiaroscuro lighting and gothic, western-style furnishings of the Nanjo house and the gratuitous close-ups of snakes and scorpions in Dad’s basement, the atmosphere here is laid on thick enough to slice up and serve for supper.

Whilst the make up and visual effects here are sometimes crude, they are never less than imaginative, and Yuasa proves a capable ring-master for the film’s numerous monstrous goings-on, deploying what we can assume was a fairly limited effects budget for maximum audience impact. In particular, the first full reveal of the snake girl, briefly glimpsed as Sayuri sees her sneaking through the dark of her bedroom at night, is absolutely fucking terrifying. A bit too slow and sinister to really count as a ‘jump scare’ maybe, but I’d still defy any viewer to not be thoroughly shaken up by it – a classic horror movie moment, perfectly executed.

Such shock moments serve to highlight just how resilient our young heroine is in the face of mind-bending horror, as Sayuri seems to retain her composure through a succession of sights and sounds that would send most adults screaming in terror. I mean, when was the last time you saw a horror movie in which a protagonist calmly accepts the notion that she will henceforth share a bed with the were-creature she has previously seen stalking around in the dead of night sporting glowing eyes and reptilian fangs? Nothing seems to phase Sayuri, and her quiet reticence, capable manner and determination to rebuilding a loving family life against all the odds certainly makes her one of the more likeable child protagonists in horror movie history.

Opting to use a child as the central character is of course one of the main things that leads ‘Snake Girl..’ toward its unconventional mixture of kid’s movie whimsy and grown up horror, and, if we’ve mainly been discussing the latter here so far, the former element really comes into its own during a series of absolutely spectacular, kaleidoscopic dream sequences, during which the filmmakers really go all out to try to replicate the oneiric / psychedelic drift and scratchy visual overload of Umezu’s groundbreaking manga artwork.

Accompanied by a delicious soundtrack of ‘Carnival of Souls’-esque wurlitzer unease, these dream sequences really come out of nowhere, stretching the movie’s sense of reality to breaking point. Once they get going, they really throw the kitchen sink at us too, as poor Sayuri’s sleeping spirit is subjected to a cavalcade of spinning hypno-wheels, floating kabuki masks, slo-mo dream flights through tunnels of pulsing light, leering white-haired hags with detachable floating werewolf hands, a doll-like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ dream avatar, further snake-related hullaballoo and even a somewhat unconvincing rubber spider attack - all employed by the movie’s malign forces in an attempt to freak out unflappable heroine yet further, treating us to some of the most delightfully unhinged in-camera special effects ever seen in Japanese cinema in the process. Really way-out stuff, these sequences will prove obvious highlights for any dedicated weird world movie fans in the audience, and you won’t be surprised to learn that most of the screen-grabs I’ve posted at the top of this review are harvested from them.

Running parallel to all this though, ‘Snake Girl..’ also functions to some extent as a decidedly grown up dysfunctional family drama, following the secret sister / snake girl’s introduction to the story in the solid, ostensibly non-supernatural shape of Tamami (Mayumi Takahashi).

Confined to the attic and kept out of sight of both her father and the world at large on the dubious logic that she’s a bit grumpy and “can’t learn a thing in school” (hey, don’t look at me, that’s the only explanation the fan-subbed dialogue gives us), Tamami’s in her non-snake incarnation is revealed to be a petulant, bullying older sister with heavy self-esteem issues, and the rather uncomfortable intimations of child abuse relating to her confinement are quickly swept aside as the film begins to focus instead on Sayuri’s valiant attempts to befriend her troubled sister, and upon the hidden power that the aggressive Tamami seems to wield over the more fragile adult women of the household.

And where, you might ask, does the noble Dr. Nanjo fit into all this? Well, curiously enough, Sayuri’s father is treated throughout as a compassionate, nigh on saint-like figure, with the film inviting us to believe that he is completely ignorant of all these malicious goings-on in his household, even as viewers familiar with the perhaps more cynical logic of Western horror films will no doubt be left screaming at such an eminently questionable loose end in the plotting. (I mean, reclusive scientist father with a basement full of caged snakes and over-sized chemistry equipment + daughter who seems to transform into a snake monster at night = you do the math!)

At a push, the combination of this saintly father figure and the equally estimable ‘big brother’ character (a happy-go-lucky young guy who works at the Convent school and turns up at irregular intervals to offer Sayuri nuggets of upbeat life advice) could seem to push ‘Snake Girl..’ (presumably accidentally) into that weirdly misogynistic realm of socially conservative melodrama that will sadly be all too familiar to viewers of vintage Asian and Indian films. (Y’know the kind of thing – where the men in a family remain lofty, noble figures, unaware of the conflicts and machinations of the weak and/or scheming women stirring up trouble beneath them, and so forth.)

After the movie takes this turn toward more domestic concerns in its second half, the responsibility for providing scariness increasingly shifts to the aforementioned silver-haired witch, whose appearance, cool though it is, eventually sets things up for a regrettably rushed and silly conclusion that very nearly destroys the not inconsiderable wealth of audience goodwill the film has built up by this point, with an inexplicable action showdown on a convenient building site scaffold (anyone else get sick of that particular trope?), and a fairly witless Scooby Doo-esque wrap up that seems to imply that all the preceding events were the work of purely human villainy, irrespective of the numerous instances of blatantly supernatural business we’ve already been shown. All a little suspicious if you ask me, especially with the good Doctor getting off scot-free on his convenient post-showdown return from Africa.

At the end of the day though, such flaws (presumably the fault of either rushed scripting or the difficulties of combining two separate manga stories into a single narrative) are eminently forgivable in the face of ‘Hebi Musume to Hakuhatsuma’s manifest strengths.

Whereas the same studio’s ‘The Great Yokai War’ seemed uneven and confused in its mixture of juvenile and adult impulses, Yuasa’s film skillfully blends them into a cohesive whole whilst also taking on board all of the visual ambition and imagination of the aforementioned film, resulting in a gloriously atmospheric dose of pulpy horror, delivered with a charm and conviction that – prior to its conclusion at least – easily wins it a space alongside such eerie, all-ages classics as Jaromil Jires’s ‘Valerie and her Week of Wonders’ and Richard Blackburn’s ‘Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural’. Splendid viewing in other words, and another great addition to Japan’s oft-neglected legacy of horror/fantasy cinema.

(The poster below advertises a triple feature, combining ‘Hebi Musume to Hakuhatsuma’ with ‘Gamera vs Gaos’ (1967) and ‘Warning From Space’ (1956). Respectfully borrowed from Tokyo Scum Brigade.)

Nippon Horrors: The Great Yokai War / ‘Spook Warfare’ (Yoshiyuki Kuroda, 1968)

It would be interesting, I think, to know precisely when Japan’s legion of Yokai Monsters ceased to be a genuinely frightening presence in the nation’s mythology – boogeyman-esque nasties conjured up by parents to keep their children in line, or to put the wind up them on cold nights sitting around the kotatsu heater – and began to take on the slightly more… whimsical aspect generally assigned to them in post-war popular culture.

A definite turning point in this regard would seem to be emergence of legendary manga artist Shigeru Mizuki in the early 1960s, and in particular, the phenomenal popularity of his character Kitaro. A shaggy-haired, one-eyed ‘monster boy’ whose independently mobile second eye is, rather bizarrely, inhabited by the spirit of his late father, Kitaro represents an ambivalent but generally benevolent supernatural presence – a friend of the Yokai who often acts as a kind of intermediary between humanity and the monsters, using his powers either to punish human greed and egotism, or, more frequently, to combat more malevolent ‘outsider’ monsters who are feeding off the defenceless humans on his patch.

Earlier in his career, Mizuki had been advised by his editors that his interest in folkloric monsters was too ‘dark’ to be incorporated into a mainstream comic strip, and perhaps this is the reason why, with Kitaro, the artist took a more light-hearted approach to the material, tempering the macabre weirdness of his often extraordinary imaginings with a tone of gentle black humour, somewhat reminiscent of ‘The Addams Family’, presenting Kitaro’s Yokai pals as goofy, somewhat likeable creatures, and making sure that their adventures were always neatly wrapped up with minimal harm done to innocent human by-standers.

As such, there is always a certain conflict between humour and genuine nastiness running through Mizuki’s work, but regardless, he apparently worked this balance well enough to make ‘Kitaro’ a massive hit, pretty much single-handedly reigniting public interest in the culture surrounding the Yokai, and defining their subsequent presentation to such a degree that many Japanese still have trouble differentiating monsters with roots in folklore from those which Mizuki invented from scratch.

With the popularity of Mizuki’s Yokai tales increasing through the 1960s, happily coinciding with the post-Godzilla/Ultraman boom in Japanese monster action, it was perhaps only a matter of time before the spooks got their shot at live action, big screen glory, and thus we come to Daiei’s 1968 production ‘The Great Yokai War’ (released in the USA under the wonderful title ‘Spook Warfare’). Whilst the film is in no way a direct adaptation of Mizuki’s manga, the spirit of his work is very much in evidence in Yoshiyuki Kuroda’s extremely strange motion picture.

For foreign viewers coming to it cold, I can only imagine that ‘The Great Yokai War’ must seem like a colossal WTF from start to finish, and even to those familiar with the ways of the Yokai, it proves a pretty peculiar business. For one thing, you certainly know you’re in for something a bit different when a Japanese movie – a product of surely one of the most inward-looking and culturally specific film industries in the world - opens with a prologue set amid the ruins of ancient Babylon, where a pair of Islamic-looking treasure-hunters are busy defiling the sanctity of some sand-blasted tomb or other.

In doing so, a solemn voiceover informs us, they are about to unleash the spirit of the all-powerful demon who was single-handedly responsible for the downfall of Babylonian civilisation. And indeed, the voiceover doesn’t lie. Lightning blasts! Earthquake! Whirlwind! And as our unfortunate nomads are buried beneath falling debris, a singularly gnarly, winged reptilian man-in-suit monster takes flight! Good grief.

Next, we cut to a narratively pointless but absolutely delightful Ray Harryhausen-esque sequence in which the winged demon descends upon a sailing ship making its way across a storm-tossed sea – a mixture of nautical model shots, back-projected monster-suit action and screaming, piratical crew member close-ups that serves both to demonstrate the kind of ambition this film intends to throw into its special effects, and also to bring a tear of joy to the eye of anyone with even the slightest love of ‘60s monster movies.

We are never given any explanation as to why this being of pure evil should head straight for Japan after being awakened in the middle of the Mesopotamian desert, but nonetheless, that is what he does, hitting shore in a remote coastal district where a respected local magistrate and his daughter are enjoying a quiet fishing trip. (Oh, and this all takes place during the Edo period by the way, so it’s top-knots and kimonos all round - you’d have to wait for Takashi Miike’s 2005 remake of this film to see your favourite Yokai running amok in contemporary Tokyo.)

The demon’s primary MO is soon revealed to be a kind of vampiric body snatching / mind control type operation, as he corners the magistrate in a spooky, cobweb-enshrouded rural shack, disarming him using a mixture of smoke, lightning and magical laser blasts, and bloodily consumes his soul, taking on his likeness and setting out to further extend his hidden influence within the man’s household. Not that our Babylonian antagonist really does a great deal to hide his presence, as the previously mild-mannered patriarch returns home and immediately begins yelling unreasonable commands at his family and servants, slaying the pet dog and violently smashing and burning the assorted shrines and religious icons dotted around his homestead.

Watching the ensuing chaos from a pond in the house’s courtyard is a curious Kappa – one of Japan’s reptilian river monsters, here represented as a kind of lovable, proto-Howard the Duck sort of fellow. As a supernatural creature, the Kappa is able to see the demon in his ‘real’ form, and, suitably startled, bravely sets out to take this scary intruder down with some Kappa kung-fu, getting his ass kicked in short order.

 

Tail between his legs, the Kappa retreats to an eerie, abandoned cemetery - a wonderful set, looking like it could have been taken straight from one of Mizuki’s drawings, with cluttered, ruinous mise en scene, overgrown weeds and voluminous quantities of gel-lit, multi-coloured Yokai Smoke - and reports his experiences to the local assembly of Yokai.

Everybody’s favourites are represented here, from the stretchy-necked woman Rockuro-kubi to the weird, one-eyed bouncing umbrella creature Karakasa-kozō, and Futa-kuchi-onna, the self-explanatory ‘two-mouthed woman’. Their leader and spokesman is the big-headed, staff-wielding Abura-sumashi, his oversized cranium presumably acting as movie code for “big brains”.(1)

Whilst the Yokai are largely ambivalent about the fate of the local human populace, they are a pretty patriotic bunch it seems, and on hearing the Kappa’s tale, they express concern that the preeminent reputation of Japanese spooks will be tarnished if they let this foreign interloper rampage around unchecked, taking over people’s minds and tearing down the sacred symbols of national tradition. (Do you detect a metaphor in there somewhere, readers? If so, I’m just going to whistle and look the other way.)

So, reccy missions to the magistrate’s house are attempted and plans are hatched, whilst, inevitably, a parallel ‘human’ storyline also emerges, wherein the noble fiancée of the magistrate’s daughter figures out that there is some demonic business going on and sets out to consult his uncle, a venerable Buddhist monk of an evil-fighting persuasion, leading to a couple of rather intense sequences of Asian-style folk magic business that play out like a far less icky version of one of those ‘Black Magic’ type Shaw Bros horror movies.

As neither human nor supernatural counter-attacks appear to have much of an immediate impact on the growing power of the Babylonian interloper though, the Yokai start to put the word out to their brother and sister spooks around the country, gradually assembling a full scale spectral army, as preparations for the Great War of the title start to get underway, building up to one whopper of a mind-bending, monster-bashing climax.

Director Yoshiyuki Kuroda didn’t have a great deal of directorial experience when he went to work on this film, and prior to this assignment I think he was primarily known as an effects guy – a background which certainly makes sense when viewing ‘The Great Yokai War’, in which a rather uncertain tone and underdeveloped narrative is livened up through the application of great art direction and lashings and lashings of outlandish special effects.(2)

In writing about films like this one, I always feel the need to preemptively defend their visual effects against hordes of hypothetical naysayers, pointing out that, sure, ‘The Great Yokai War’s creature designs are neither high-tech nor very convincing… but if you’re watching a movie as crazy as this and expect it to be ‘convincing’, then god knows, I can’t help you. What the effects ARE here is simple, imaginative, a lot of fun to look at and basically just really weird-looking, which I think is basically all you can ask of a barmy ‘60s monster movie.

Although I casually mentioned Harryhausen earlier in this review, that comparison is of course highly misleading. In keeping with the majority of Japanese fantasy cinema from the ‘60s, stop-motion and other ‘in-camera’ means of realising monsters are almost entirely avoided here, with all of the creatures instead created ‘live-on-stage’ style, with full-head masks, life-size suits and the like predominating. As such, it’s clear that Yuroda’s budget and expertise in no way allowed him to replicate the kind of rubbery fantasias exploited by Toho and Tsuburaya in the same period, but watching this film’s crew strive to create extraordinary results from their obviously limited means certainly makes for an enjoyable and – there’s that word again - delightful experience.

Several of the most prominent characters for instance are lumbered with fixed-expression head masks that allow for little facial movement, which immediately gives a bit of a goofy, childish feel to proceedings, but if you honestly find yourself taking offence at the Kappa’s boggle-eyes or the Babylonian demon’s leery fixed-grin, you have a harder heart than I, especially given the kind of exuberant physical acting that both performers employ to make up for such shortcomings.

Beyond his high-school-art-class level mask, the Kappa is basically just a guy in green body-paint and what looks like a few bits of an old ‘jungle lad’/barbarian outfit, but it is the actor’s spirited and strangely elegant capering that really sells the character. A similar approach is taken with Abura-Sumashi, who is presumably just played by a child wearing a giant papier-mâché head, but again, the results are so pleasing that you’d be hard-pressed to find fault with such an arrangement.

Daimon – as the Babylonian demon is referred to in the subtitles and cast list – also has a *very* cool costume, immobile head aside, looking not dissimilar to the kind of creature that might have turned up in one of Daiei’s ‘Diamajin’ films (see footnote 2). Scaly and bony with a thick carapace, curly back-spikes, a belt of skulls and, strangely, feathered wings, he certainly makes for a formidable and scary bad guy.

The Karakasa-kozō meanwhile is represented by a life-size puppet bouncing around on strings – an utterly bizarre addition to any film – whilst Rockru-kubi’s stretchy necked attack is realised by means of a wild assemblage of flailing, flesh-coloured hosepipe, and the use of a lot of conveniently placed foreground objects for the actress to poke her head around. Nonetheless, she is a wonderfully sinister presence, and her one-on-one fight with Daimon is definitely one the film’s highlights, perhaps the overall peak of its “I can’t believe what I’m seeing here” awesomeness.

Well, prior to the conclusion, anyway. Here, as Daimon splits himself into a number of clones then grows to full scale kaiju proportions, the Yokai army close in to attack him, and the filmmakers decide to make best possible use of their twenty or so functional monster suits through extensive application of super-imposition, building up layer upon layer of shiny, transparent Yokai legions by the simple means of slapping loads of different shots on top of each other, to sublimely freakish, psychedelic effect. This ‘March of the Yokai’, shot in slow motion, with the spectral hordes traversing rivers, clouds and mountains, and their ensuing epic battle with Daimon, is one of the most extensive spectacles of mindbending fantastic cinema I’ve seen for many a month. (And as an aside, I like how many of the Yokai seem to tie handkerchiefs around their heads when they go to ‘war’, making them look a bit like desperate, battled-scarred fighters from a Kurosawa movie or something.)

As you may have gathered from some of the descriptions above, ‘The Great Yokai War’ features comical character designs and gentle slapstick humour that could have come straight from kid’s adventure movie, but frequently mixes them up with moments of unnervingly gruesome horror, leading to a tonal discrepancy that is never quite resolved. In addition to the demon’s gory neck-chomping antics and a few other bloody, gaping wounds, the atmosphere of the film is persistently ominous, and Shigeru Ikeno’s dissonant, Ifukube-esque music is often terrifying.

One sequence in particular, in which a pair of young children are forced to flee their home and take refuge in the ghost-infested cemetery as their parents are slaughtered by demon-possessed samurai, seems purpose-built to send unsuspecting little ones straight into a screaming vortex of no-sleep-for-a-month trauma, but apparently none of this stopped ‘The Great Yokai War’ from finding a home as a frequent holiday TV fixture in Japan, so who knows, maybe kids in the Far East are just made of sterner stuff?

With this mixture of kiddie-friendly creatures and genuine threat, ‘The Great Yokai War’ could perhaps be seen as a precursor to something like Joe Dante’s ‘Gremlins’. But whereas that film managed to merge the two impulses very smoothly, Kuroda is less successful, with the resulting stylistic confusion perhaps serving to make things a bit too weird and alienating for casual viewers. Whilst the appearance of the Yokai is clearly quite cutesy, with the exception of the Kappa they are never really anthromorphised very much, nor allowed to develop their own personalities. And whilst their refusal to really give much of a fuck about the fate of the humans in the film is pretty refreshing for those of us with an ingrained hatred of Disney/Hollywood schmaltz, the spooks’ failure to become “relatable” also leads to something of a character-vacuum at the centre of the movie, especially given the rather dry and unengaging nature of the accompanying human drama.

Really though, such confusion is probably to be expected when you realise that Kuroda and his collaborators were basically going way off the map here, with no established set of genre conventions to guide them: in addition to horror and kid’s fantasy, there’s a hefty dose of kaiju eiga DNA in the mix, to say nothing of some distant hints at kaidan ghost stories, and even a fair amount of chambara-style period drama. With all these generic tropes flying around but never quite coalescing into a coherent whole, it is probably best to view ‘The Great Yokai War’ as a complete one-off, and one whose drawbacks are very much the result of its untested and somewhat unique style.

And, more importantly of course, those drawbacks never even come close to outweighing the sheer pleasure that the film’s wildly ambitious visuals, macabre atmosphere and unhinged creature designs have to offer to anyone with a fondness for unusual international fantasy cinema. In fact, if your tastes veer more toward the exceptionally weird, lower budget and culturally specific end of the scale, you can peg this one up as a ‘must see’ for sure... but then if you've read this far, you probably don't need me to tell you that.

As with just about every character or concept that emerged from Japanese popular cinema during the ‘60s, it seems that one film just wasn’t enough for Daiei’s Yokai, and they soon returned for ‘One Hundred Yokai Stories’ (1968) and ‘Journey with Ghosts Along Tokaido Road’ (1969). I’d imagine my quest to find both of those in watchable, sub-titled form might be worthy of a series of films in its own right, but nonetheless, I hope I’ll be able to share my thoughts on them with you sooner or later.

For now though, let's all wave goodbye to these spectral defenders of Japan's supernatural sovereignty, as they dance eerily back across the misty mountains. They may be apt to scare the shit out of us in nocturnal graveyards from time to time, but they're a good bunch really... well, provided you've got your visa papers in order and aren't planning to eat anyone or make with the mind control, at least.

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(1)Many thanks to the indispensable Yokai.com for helping me get all those names straight – a wonderful resource, and a great way to waste a few idle hours at work.

(2) Kuroda’s main claim to fame prior to this film was as effects supervisor on Daiei’s series of ‘Daimajin’ movies, of which three were made in 1966. A similarly off-beat kind of period kaiju / Shinto mythological(?) type creation that perhaps represents the nearest relative to what we see in ‘The Great Yokai War’ and its sequels, you can learn more about ‘Daimajin’ via this informative post at Cool Ass Cinema.

Cassandra Cat / Az Prijde Kocour(Vojtech Jasný, 1963)

A pioneering Czech family/fantasy film that I’m sure is fondly remembered by many people of a certain age in that part of the world, 1963’s “Cassandra Cat”, aka “When the Cat Comes”, confronts the modern viewer with a basic question:

How much whimsical small town life are you prepared to sit through, in order to see a cat wearing new wave sunglasses?

Assuming your answer is “a fair amount, I suppose”, read on!

The film opens with a jovial old geezer who lives in the clock tower in the middle of a small market town. Using a makeshift spy-glass, he observes his neighbours, passing oblique comment on their endearingly eccentric ways. You know the drill: ho ho ho, it’s ten o’clock, and here comes so and so as usual, arsing about in a broadly comedic manner as befits his or her single personality trait, etc etc.


In fairness to Vojtech Jasný and his collaborators, I suppose this stuff wasn’t quite so much of a face-punchingly played out cliché back in 1963, but still, the need certain filmmakers seem to feel to present their fellow countrymen as a bunch of lovable, simple-minded goofballs never really sits well with me.

In particular, we are introduced here to marginally bohemian school teacher Robert, who wears a baggy beatnik sweater and tries to encourage ‘imagination’ and ‘fantasy’ in his young charges (whatta nice guy!). Robert’s opposite number is the smarmy headmaster, who hates fun and enjoys science and taxidermy. We see him shoot a stork out of the sky as a crowd of gawping townsfolk look on (whatta prick!).


The headmaster’s ever-present henchman is the school janitor, who I mention simply to point out the fact that he’s played by the same guy who played the school janitor/friendly vampire guy in Václav Vorlíček’s “Saxana”, nearly ten years later. Looking at actor Vladimír Mensík’s CV on IMDB, he seems to have appeared in just about every Czech film ever made, and has at least a few more janitors, handymen and caretakers to his credit. Talk about typecasting!

When the headmaster has completed his stuffed stork, there is a scene in which the janitor picks up the bird and runs round and round the room at high speed with the camera following him, seemingly in an attempt to make the audience dizzy. So that was kinda cool.


A lot of rather vague faffing around follows, during which I began to seriously question the processes by which I ended up owning a copy of this movie and watching it. Things do eventually look up though, beginning with a scene in which Teacher Robert invites the old clocktower geezer into his classroom to model for the children (I’m all for crazy, creative teaching methods but I’m not sure I can really see the logic of the ‘drawing an old man’ lesson-plan). Asked by the children to regale them with a story from his sea-faring days, the geezer launches into a fine example of the kind of dazzlingly aimless, surrealistic old man story that really does brighten my day.

He tells of how he was once shipwrecked on a foreign shore, where for the lack of anything better to do he wandered into a performance by a travelling theatre show, and fell hopelessly in love with a dancer named Diana, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. So infatuated was he that he proceeded to tag along with the show, helping them out and trying to ingratiate himself with the fair lady. Diana though preferred to lavish her attentions on her pet cat, who wore his own pair of special cat eye-glasses. The travelling show’s primary rule was that the cat’s eye-glasses should never, ever be removed. But, piqued by jealousy and curiosity, our hapless sailor naturally did just that one day, and suddenly, everybody caught in the cat’s gaze changed colour in a way that revealed their true nature – so ‘unfaithful people’ turned yellow, ‘liars’ turned purple, people in love turned red and so on - causing considerable hullabaloo that saw the cat killed by vengeful citizens and sailor-man expelled from the travelling show, after which he never saw Diana again!



Inspired by this curious tale, the under-stimulated Eastern Bloc youth begin drawing pictures of beautiful ladies and visually-impaired cats, and clap along as the old man dances a merry jig and sings a song for them, much to the chagrin of the crusty old headmaster, who is spying through the keyhole.

Just then, right on cue, a brightly coloured wagon pulls into town, carrying a trad jazz band clad in head-to-foot black bodysuits, a top-hatted magician (played by the same actor as the old man, for reasons that are never entirely made clear – I suppose the implication is that the travelling show has been ‘summoned’ into reality by the children’s imaginations?), and – YES! – this is the reason I’m watching this damn movie! The beautiful Diana and her prophetically attired pussycat!



Indeed, that is literally the case. Whilst browsing the selections at first class rare-movies emporium All Clues No Solutions recently, I happened across some pictures of this trend-setting moggie, saw that they emanated from another one of those reliably stupendous Czech fantasy movies, and thought, well, why the hell not, y’know? This one’s bound to be worth a look.

And sure enough, the arrival of the cat and his crew heralds “Cassandra Cat”s undeniable highlight – the extraordinary set-piece sequence in which the townsfolk fill the town hall to watch the magical travelling show.

The show begins as Mr. Top Hat presents a black-lit puppet show in which animated objects and empty suits of clothes enact strange and beguiling scenarios. The crowd are initially delighted, but then rather perturbed when it becomes clear that the objects on stage represent some of the town’s more prominent citizens, and that the story being enacted sheds light on their shameful secrets and general foolishness. After a few moments of stunned silence, the crowd slowly begins to applaud.




For the second act, the beautiful Diana descends from the rafters on a swing, holding her cat. With a dramatic flourish, she removes the cat’s glasses, and the people of the town find themselves bathed in a bright glow that reveals their true nature. For the next five or ten minutes, everything goes fucking nuts, as people leap from their seats and begin dancing and fighting and running around in a gloriously choreographed display of pseudo-psychedelic abandon. Kenneth Anger-like super-impositions are used to create fuzzy blurs of movement as patterns of brightly coloured human ebb and flow through the darkness of the grand municipal hall, interspersed with close-ups of the all-seeing eyes of the feline oracle, as the cutting and the music speeds up to a frantic, disorientating pace.

It’s pretty darn great.





As a film produced in the heady political climate of ‘60s Czechoslovakia, one might reasonably assume that there is some sort of deeper allegorical meaning to the colour-coded revelation of inner feeling going on here, but if there is, I’m damned if I can figure it out. Given the vague nature the film’s narrative logic, I suspect it’s equally likely that the filmmakers just came up with the idea for the sequence, thought it would look cool, and went with it.

At this point, I should probably draw the readers’ attention to the long-running phenomenon of more imaginative/subversive Czech filmmakers often choosing to work within the realm of children’s films and fantasies during the Communist era, on the basis that such films would be less liable to run afoul of official censorship – a tactic that can maybe be seem as one of the main factors playing into the creation of the playful, surrealistic aesthetic that went on to define much of the country’s best cinema during the later ‘60s and early ‘70s.

It is into this lineage that “Cassandra Cat” can easily be seen to fit perfectly. Though it carries no concrete ‘political’ message as such, the film has a more broadly subversive agenda that is actually quite extreme in its uncompromising anti-adult, pro-fantasy stance. For all the whimsicality on display, it is somewhat shocking to realise that, via the gaze of the cat, Jasný is essentially passing divine judgement on all of his characters, damning them as liars, adulterers, hypocrites and thieves, limiting the audience’s sympathy solely to the select few who are seen to be redeemed by their child-like ‘purity’ or their belief in love. Heady stuff for any movie really, even if it is only an explicit expression of the same ideology that can be found bubbling below the surface of thousands of kid’s stories/movies.



The anarchic spirit, visual splendour and general strangeness of “Cassandra Cat” certainly help secure it a place as a defining early example of the Czech New Wave that would emerge later in the ‘60s - a filmic movement rendered a lot more exciting than it sounds thanks to the participation of such prime celluloid dynamite hurlers as Vera Chytilová, Jaromil Jires and Václav Vorlíček (oh, go google them for chrissakes). In particular, it is notable that “Cassandra Cat”s director of photography Jaroslav Kucera went on to work on many of that movement’s defining films, perhaps accounting for the familiarity of the bright, hazy, intoxicating atmospherics that characterise many of the best sequences in this film.

But to return to the distinctly out-of-time appearance of our Devo pussycat (the English sub-titles simply call him “Tabby”, although perhaps he had a more exciting name in Czech?), my guess is that that these glasses were simply the only shape of frame that the art department could manage to balance properly on the cat’s head. Furthermore, I would theorise that the cat was still less than co-operative, as direct shots of him wearing his glasses are frustratingly rare, despite being the film’s most distinctive image, and the one used on just about all posters and publicity materials.

Anyway, in case you were wondering, Diana falls madly in love with Robert the teacher, and is distracted to the extent that she leaves town without her cat, who is left wandering around town. Naturally the adults, led by the headmaster, want to do away with the embarrassing truth-revealing varmint, and try to lock him in a bird cage with a stocking on his head. The town’s children though are very much taken with the multi-coloured chaos wrought by the cat, and begin to treat him with cult-like veneration, plastering the town with delightful cat-based artwork, and at one stage liberating the moggie and marching through the streets holding him up before them, pointing the animal in the direction of grown-ups, who flee from his transformative gaze.


How will this generational conflict resolve itself? Well…. pretty inconclusively to be honest. One problem with “Cassandra Cat” as a film is that it’s various themes and story ideas are sketched out so haphazardly that they never really manage to coalesce into anything much. As mentioned, Robert and Diana ‘fall in love’, but whilst they have a lovely time going for a boat-ride and playing checkers with wine glasses, giving much exposure to Kucera’s exquisite cinematography in the process, we are never given any inkling of what they actually see in each other. In fact Diana is never really assigned any kind of personality at all, beyond being beautiful and owning a magic cat.

On second thought though, it’s worth remembering that this IS meant to be a magical fantasy romance or whatever, and so maybe that’s exactly what her character represents – the personification of romance, as defined by our male protagonist’s imagination, with a red dress and a big, easy smile. Shallow and fleeting as you like, their scenes together have a certain apprehensive, ‘fairy gold’ quality to them, and it is by employing this kind of fantasy vs. reality logic that one can maybe get the most of what is on some levels a pretty infuriating film.



Still though: how is life in the town affected by the arrival of the cat and its aftermath? Does anything change permanently, or do things remain the same after his departure? Does the film even have a happy ending, or a sad ending? Again, I’m not really sure. Everything is so under-developed that it is often difficult to really become engaged by the film’s story beyond the level of “well.. some stuff happened”.

True, many of our favourite strange films make up for such narrative deficiencies by simply throwing so much demented chaos at us that logic ceases to matter, but sadly “Cassandra Cat” is not one of those films. In fact it is very sparing in its use of fantastic imagery, emerging instead as a faintly perplexing experience in which the viewer’s attention is directed toward a somewhat meandering story that, just like the tale told by the old man, doesn’t seem terribly concerned with making much of a point about anything. And who knows, maybe the message of the film is simply that: that telling a wacky story that fires peoples imaginations and pisses off the grown ups is its own reward, and the hell with anyone who demands some kind of contrived ‘significance’.

Half-baked scripting and anti-authoritarian magical feline antics are not usually the sort of things that endear a film to the critical establishment, but nonetheless, “Cassandra Cat” apparently made sufficient headway to see it winning the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in the same year that Fellini’s “8 1/2” and Polanski’s “Knife in the Water” were released. And if it is less well known to fans of European cinema these days than such an achievement may suggest, “Cassandra Cat” is still rich in weird and singular imagery, and an important stepping stone on the path that led a few years later to glorious, otherwordly mayhem of “Daisies”, “Valerie..” and “Saxana”. If you can stomach all the whimsical peasant stuff, it certainly makes for an interesting evening’s viewing, and if you can’t, well… I guess it really does just come back to how badly you want to see the cat wearing new wave sunglasses.