Nippon Horrors Supplemental: The Devil’s Harp by Jun Morita (1969)

Written and drawn by Jun Morita from a story by Kyoko Murakami, ‘The Devil’s Harp’ is a rather strange and beautiful one-off manga, originally presented to readers of the popular girls comic-magazine ‘Ribon’ as a free gift accompanying the May 1969 issue.

Forty five years later, I was lucky enough to pick up a copy for a mere handful of change from the galactic nerd mecca that is Nakano Broadway in Tokyo, and found myself rather intrigued and delighted by the assorted imagery I saw within. Satori was nice enough to give me a rough page-by-page translation, and we both agreed that the comic was a hoot.

Thus, it is my privilege to present, presumably for the first time in the English-speaking world, the cautionary tale of ill-fated beat-group The Temples, and of the sinister Faustian pact that brought them to worldwide notoriety!

Thanks again to Satori for her help with the translations here, and for in fact providing just about every piece of useful information included in this post. Now, without further a-do, let us enjoy ‘The Devil’s Harp’.

Our story begins in rural France, where we find young Janet, who lives in a remote church-house, the ward of her grandfather, a devoted priest.

In her spare time however, Janet is more concerned with her devotion to fledging local rock n' roll combo The Temples, and in particular, their handsome leader Marc!

Encouraged by Janet’s enthusiasm, The Temples take a shot at a big gig…

…but their unpolished performance proves unsatisfactory, leaving the girls instead chasing the flash-in-the-pan pop star who was topping the bill.

Upset by their failure to make an impression on the crowd, Marc throws a right hissy-fit, breaking up the band in the process. [Click to enlarge for some dialogue translations.]

Not that this sinister fellow, who was paying close attention to their performance, seems to mind…

Walking the streets of Paris in an existential haze, Marc happens upon a music shop, and in the window…


…a golden harp!

Giving it a go, Marc discovers he has an immediate talent for the instrument, picking intoxicating , melodies seemingly out of thin air. But wait, is that the shop proprietor sneaking up behind him…?

Yes, it’s that bloke again.

To his surprise, the sinister fellow offers to let Marc take ownership of the harp free of charge, and the lad’s expression of his delight is, shall we say, a bit OTT.

But all Old Scratch requires of course, is a *signature*.

Before long, needless to say, The Temples are back in action, with the addition of Marc’s harp-based muse igniting their previously dormant creativity.

Soon, the group are super-stars, ensconced in a decadent, groupie-filled mansion, and setting the charts ablaze with a series of harp-infused psyche-rock classics whose unsettling titles hopefully speak for themselves…

 

At the periphery of their crowd though, a single girl watches, and reflects on the strange transformation that has overtaken her former sweetheart.

As its influence travels the globe, the Temples’ increasingly mesmerising and demonic sound arouses and intoxicates the world’s youth, stirring up an unprecedented whirlwind of teen rebellion!

The leaders of the free world flee, as student radicals capture the airwaves!

Sensing the Satanic influence behind all this to-do, grandfather ain’t too happy.

As Paris burns, Janet determines to stop Marc from driving the world to such frenzy with his infernal harping, and breaks into the group’s mansion to deliver an ultimatum.

After much toing and froing, Marc begins to realise the Satanic origins of his success and, to the shock of the band's entourage, cuts the strings from his beloved harp!

Janet is delighted!

But of course, this is merely the cue for His Satanic Majesty to turn up again, pointing out some of the fine print on his contract.

As Marc’s friends step up as advocates for him in a bid to overturn the contract, The Devil decides that the only way to settle things is a court case, taking place, of course, in his domain.

Following this, the comic rather slides into farce, with Morita’s illustrations beginning to betray the signs of a hurried deadline as we rush through one of those endlessly silly “trial in hell” scenarios, complete with the inevitable rollcall of potential prosecuting attorneys, including…

Jack the Ripper!

Jesse James!

Al Capone!

And, in case you were worried nothing specifically Japanese was going to happen in this manga, this guy in the bath is apparently the legendary 16th century bandit & thief Goemon Ishikawa.

Breaking up all this silliness, Morita herself makes a brief guest appearance;

So, to save the poor artist further embarrassment, and to save us all a bit of time, let’s just say “some stuff happens”:



And, of course, love wins out over Satanic red tape, The Temples return to the earthly realm, and everything’s back to normal.

Denied the benefits of their supernatural success, the talentless rockers are subsequently forced to mooch off Janet, hiding out in her grandfather’s dusty old chapel.

Looks like they might be done for when the rev finds out…

… but, turns out the old man’s got some rock n’ roll in his blood too!

Yeah, rock on Pops!

Woop, happy ending, yeah, etc!

THE LIVN’ END.

Japan Haul:Japanese Movie Brochures.

So, I’m back! And to ease us slowly into the small mountain of scanning material I brought back from Japan, let’s start with a no-brainer.

For many years now, one of the main forms of film industry publicity in Japan has been what for want of a better term we’ll call ‘movie brochures’. First introduced in the post-war era (or so I assume?), with the general idea of providing local audiences with the cultural background and such-like they’d need to fully assimilate Hollywood product, these brochures – some of them merely double-sided sheets of A4, others stretching to full stapled magazines incorporating the kind of content you’d normally find in a Western ‘press pack’ – have since become an accepted part of the promotional landscape. They are still available to browse or take home in the foyers of all cinemas, and these days a ‘brochure’ seems to be produced for just about every commercially released movie, whether foreign or domestic.

As you might imagine, contemporary versions of these brochures provide the cash-strapped with a great source of free artwork (it’s a bit of cliché for Japanese students to plaster their walls with them), and vintage examples of the form can be found by the thousand in Tokyo’s second hand bookshops, generally dirt cheap.

Sadly, the vast majority of brochures on offer tend to be for well-known Hollywood productions rather than the kind of way-out Japanese genre flicks I was primarily looking for, but nonetheless, how could I say no to the magnificent poster artwork accompanying Billy Wilder’s ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’ (1970) and Antonio Isasi’s ‘They Came to Rob Las Vegas’ (1968)..? Absolutely beautiful.

I’ll spare you the full spread of press stills and translated cast & crew interviews that make up the interiors of each of these brochures, but if for some reason you’re particularly mad on seeing them, just give me a shout.

I’m currently hard at work figuring out the best way to present the vast number of photos I took in Japan (many of them predictably pulp & pop culture orientated) online somewhere, so as soon as I’ve accomplished that, you guys will be the first (ok, maybe the third or fourth, but hey) to know.

Nippon Horrors: Genocide / ‘War of the Insects’ (Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1968)

Even when writing a weblog that prides itself on plunging headfirst into discussion of some pretty crazy motion pictures, there are some films that just present so much of a WTF it’s difficult to know what to do with them, and here we have a case in point. Quite what was going through the minds of Shochiku studio’s short-lived sci-fi/horror division when they decided to follow up their fairly jaunty low budget kaiju picture ‘The X From Outer Space’ with the cheerily titled ‘Genocide’, I almost think I’m happier not knowing.(1)

So first off, two things I’m usually reluctant to do in the course of reviewing movies: (i) classifying these sort of sci-fi / ‘nature goes bad’ disaster movies as ‘horror’. (I know strictly speaking they kind of are, but y’know… in aesthetic terms, there’re way off from what constitutes ‘horror’ in my mind.) And, (ii), giving in to the school of thought that seeks to frame everything shocking or extreme in post-war Japanese culture as a response to the trauma created by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. (It seems some Western critics like to crow-bar that issue in wherever they possibly can, but much of the time I just don’t buy it, personally.)

Both of those rules, however, are going to be jettisoned whilst we look at ‘Genocide’, a frankly extraordinary venture that resembles a humble genre programmer that’s somehow lost its mind and gone completely insane, beginning in the detached, utilitarian mode common to ‘50s and ‘60s science-goes-bad disaster films, but gradually spiralling off into a kind of beserk, hysterical fatalism, conveying a sense of absurd, nihilistic cruelty that surpasses just about any contemporary horror film, and reflecting the unthinkable reality of an era in which pointless mass death seemed ever imminent.

So how the hell did that happen…? Well, let’s begin at the beginning, shall we.

The very first thing we see in ‘Genocide’ is stock footage of an atomic bomb explosion.“The moment mankind unleashed the power of the atom..”, reads a somewhat gnomic opening caption, “..he immediately began to fear it”. So that’s the second of my above-stated caveats out the window right from the outset, I guess. I also get the feeling that anyone who bought a ticket in the hope of seeing a fun movie about killer insects is already beginning to feel somewhat uneasy.

After a beautifully garish title sequence (rather reminiscent of the similarly insect-filled credits to Teruo Ishii’s equally unhinged Horrors of Malformed Men), we join an American bomber carrying a nuclear payload, flying over Kojima Island in the Anan Archipelago on a routine exercise. The pilot Charly, played by Japanese cinema’s go-to guy for black American roles, Chico Roland,(2)spots a wasp outside the window and inexplicably freaks the fuck out, suffering flashbacks to Vietnam as he thrashes around, assaulting his fellow crew members and trying to activate the release mechanism for the bomb. Temporarily distracted by their colleague’s outburst, the crew fail to notice that they’re flying headfirst into an inexplicably gigantic swarm of insects, whose combined mass burns out the plane’s engines, setting the vessel ablaze.

From a hideaway on the nearby cliffs, a blond Caucasian woman, Annabelle (Kathy Haran, who also did some first-class freaking out in ‘Genocide’s sister film, ‘Goke: Bodysnatcher From Hell’), and her Japanese lover Joji (Yûsuke Kawazu), watch as the plane and its cargo fall to earth.

This Joji, it quickly transpires, is a bit of a creep. We soon learn that he’s been frolicking with Annabelle on the pretext that he’s out hunting for rare insects, leaving his trusting Japanese wife, a hotel maid, at the mercy of her boss, a disagreeable oaf who seems to try to rape her every five minutes. The next time we see Joji furthermore, he’s sailing into harbour in his dinghy, trying to palm off a handful of suspiciously obtained US military watches on the local fishermen. Yes, he’s a bad ‘un alright.

When army personnel make it to the island to investigate the crash meanwhile, they find the plane’s crew dead, having apparently contracted some hideous, bubonic plague-like disease whilst sheltering in a cave. That’s with the exception of Charly, who is found unconscious on the beach, having apparently fallen off a cliff whilst fleeing from his comrades. The wreck of the plane itself, and the H-bomb onboard, remain unaccounted for. So until Charly wakes up, I think Uncle Sam might want to have a quick word with Joji...

Joji’s arrest on some slightly trumped up murder charges brings the whole mess to the attention of Dr. Nagumo of the the Tokyo Biological Research Centre (Keisuke Sonoi), who, with a sense of taste and restraint typical of this film, is introduced to us via a shot that sees him stabbing a large rodent with a syringe full of bright blue fluid, apparently for real. (What can I say, you’ve gotta learn to wince and shrug this stuff off in older movies sometimes..). According to the doc, Joji has recently sent him samples of a rare insect found of Kojima island, one whose poison “..attacks the nervous system, causing madness and death”. Things just keep looking up for our poor islanders, don’t they?

Meanwhile, a world news report on the radio in the hotel bar announces that food supplies in Egypt and India are under attack from unseasonable swarms of locusts, and by the time Charly finally awakens in a hospital bed, portents of both local and global doom are accumulating so thick and fast it’s not surprising folks are starting to get a bit twitchy.

Ah, poor Charly. Rarely have I seen a character who has such a persistently dreadful time in a film as he is subjected to here. From his very first appearance on screen, he’s practically losing his mind with fear, and the catalogue of torments he experiences through the rest of the film beggars belief. After suffering severe head injuries on the beach, he awakens in an insensible state, raving about his fear of insects. So naturally the doctors decide to try to revive his memory by sitting him in a dark room and playing reels of insect footage whilst he screams in abject terror, after which he immediately gets smacked around by the attending US Colonel, who accuses him of being a hallucinating drug addict.

On his way to a military prison, he narrowly avoids being torn apart by machine-gun fire as he is kidnapped by a gang of Communist agents temporarily in the employ of the film’s main villain (who will remain nameless here). Determined to use him to locate the missing h-bomb, they tie him up, beat him and torture him with a cigarette, before trying out a new technique, confining him in a descending tunnel of that kinda gauze-like fabric that bee-keeper’s hats are made of, and pumping in a swarm of those nervous system shattering wasps.

Completely unhinged by this point, Charly is dumped by his captors on the shore of the island; out of sheer malice, they throw him a pistol before they depart, hoping he’ll wreak some kind of carnage before the insects’ poison kills him. Next, we see him staggering toward the island’s hospital, letting off shots in the air and laughing like a loon as he prepares to menace the film’s two heroines, who are within. Suddenly transformed from a hapless victim to a psychopathic monster by the poison, he suffers a singularly inglorious death, shot down from behind as he sets about trying to rape the nurse.

So basically, the unfortunate fellow spends the entire duration of the film in a state of extreme pain, terror and confusion, culminating in a pointless death that leaves everyone assuming he was a violent maniac. And as his corpse leers up at us, we’re suddenly hit with one of the film’s most singularly unglued innovations, as a hideous, electronically filtered voice that we’re apparently supposed to interpret as the ‘chorus of the insects’ begins chanting (in English): “genocide…. genocide…”.

As with the aforementioned ‘Goke’, there is a kind of vicious misanthropy at work in ‘Genocide’. In spite of the massed threats the film lines up against humanity, most of the characters seem incapable of uniting with each other or acting rationally for even a few moments. Dr Nagumo and the Red Cross nurse (Reiko Hitomi) are presented as our standard issue trustworthy, heroic characters, but aside from their obligatory presence, the whole film seems to take place in some upside down moral universe in which people routinely say things like “thank you for the poisonous insects” and “thank heavens for that plane crash”.

Just about everyone in this film’s world, it seems, is motivated either by callous selfishness or horribly misguided ideological fervour… unless, that is, they’re one of the contingent who is actively welcoming and encouraging the forthcoming nuclear/insect/plague apocalypse. Amid layers of political, global, cultural distrust and despair, “kill ‘em all and let god sort it out” seems to ‘Genocide’s general message to the world, a sentiment that is only amplified by a truly jaw-dropping plot twist that occurs midway through the film. Totally crazy and utterly black-hearted, I won't spoil the surprise for you here, but… just you wait.

Strangely enough though, despite all this bleakness, ‘Genocide’ actually remains pretty fun to watch. As an example of formula genre picture that’s gone completely off the rails into uncharted territory, it is astoundingly entertaining, and the weird, sledgehammer ineptitude with which many of its more extreme situations are portrayed, together with the randomised hysterical energy of the whole thing, is a whole lot of “WTF is UP with this movie?!” style enjoyment.

Initially, the basic characterisation, impersonal medium-shots and functional, exposition-heavy dialogue of a more traditional sci-fi / disaster movie predominates, but when the film goes full-on ape-shit following Charly’s death, the situations that transpire swiftly become so twisted, it’s almost as if the two dimensional characters can barely comprehend what’s happening to their little world. Meanwhile, the dry cinematic syntax in turn becomes freakier and freakier, until it practically collapses into an orgy of solarised stock footage, shrieking close-ups, assaultive montages and utterly bizarre psychedelic visual effects (the latter an attempt to portray the ‘mindspace of the insects’, or somesuch, as experienced by victims of the poison before they die).

And so, what could, in a more orderly, less threatening world, have just remained a mildly diverting Japanese answer to ‘Them!’ instead becomes a celluloid equivalent of Colonel Kurtz, gazing deep into the abyss, cackling as flies buzz around the heads on spikes, reflecting on the mad, unending horror of it all. Christ almighty. But, you’ve gotta laugh, haven't you? Just ask Charly.

(1)The original Japanese title, 'Konchû Daisensô', translates roughly as ‘War of the Insects’, a title that was also used for at least one English language release (see the film’s IMDB page for a poster using that name). How in the hell it ended up being called ‘Genocide’ for it’s slightly more high profile US release, I can’t begin to imagine.

(2)Chico Roland is perhaps best known for his appearances in Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Gate of Flesh’ (1964) and Shigehiro Ozawa’s ‘The Streetfighter’ (1974), as well as for playing the rebellious black GI ‘Gill’ in Koreyoshi Kurahara’s pair of cinematic molotov cocktails, ‘The Warped Ones’ (1960) and ‘Black Sun’ (1964). He always seems to present a rather weird, gentle, child-like demeanour on screen, and his frequently bizarre line readings suggest that he wasn’t very fluent in either Japanese or English. Quite who this guy was, and how he ended up appearing in so many awesome Japanese movies, I would love to know.

Nippon Horrors: Lake of Dracula (Michio Yamamoto, 1971)

 To some extent, my fondness for the second of Michio Yamamoto’s trilogy of low-budget Toho gothic horror films stems simply from its name. No, not the original Japanese title, which translates as something like ‘Cursed House: Bloodthirsty Eyes’, but the accidental genius of the English release title. LAKE OF DRACULA.(1) Fantastic. Not a lake belonging to Dracula, you understand – a lake OF Dracula. Pure essence of Dracula, sitting there glittering in the moonlight. I love it.

I was even planning to name my long-delayed horror-ish psyche/noise/drone type music project Lake of Dracula, in the hope that I might be inspired to realise that wonderful concept in audio form (it’s certainly a pretty perfect description of the sound I’m aspiring to create). Sadly though, I’m not alone in my infatuation with the title, and there is already a Lake of Dracula who released a couple of records a few years back. (Damn you, Weasel Walter!)

Anyway, needless to say, my own conception of the Lake of Dracula is not really one that you could claim to find in Yamamoto’s film, in which the titular lake plays an incidental role at best. In fact, although I’m kind of oddly fixated with the film and have watched it a number of times, it’s difficult for me to really say where it’s appeal lies, beyond the fact that it’s a Western-style vampire movie made in Japan (and you don’t see one of those everyday).

For anyone acquainted with the conventions of Euro-American horror films, ‘Lake..’ initially appears to be a blandly generic example of the form, short on original ideas and suffering from an absolutely chronic lack of narrative momentum. Even by the standards of low budget horror, it is excruciatingly slow-moving and cheaply realised, and yet…. something about it just keeps pulling me back in. Euro-horror fans will get where I’m coming from, I hope.

Probably the film’s most interesting aspect, from a high-minded film crit POV at least, is its flashback structure and vague investigation of repressed memories, primal imagery and the like. As such, we open with the sight of a young girl named Akiko, apparently alone, playing with her dog on a rocky stretch of seashore. Her dog, Leo, suddenly runs away as if summoned by some unknown force, and she follows him through a dark cave, and subsequently to the door of a foreboding, Western-style mansion (the same one used in Yamamoto’s earlier Fear of the Ghost-House: Bloodthirsty Doll, if anyone’s keeping score). Following her dog into the entrance hall, she encounters, in quick succession, a lumbering, zombie-like old man, a white-faced vampire woman seated at the piano, and - the final horror - Japanese Dracula himself, who appears at the top of the stairs, blood smeared on his lips, his eyes glowing with hypnotic golden light!

From there, we cut to grown up Akiko (Midori Fujita), still accompanied by a dog named Leo (a new one), who is now a painter, living in a house of the shore of a remote lake. A timid and rather nervous young woman, she has been tormented by nightmares ever since the aforementioned incident in her childhood, and attempts to exorcise these bad memories through a series of disturbing abstract canvas – each depicting the same giant, burning eye.

Amongst other things, Akiko acts as an unofficial ‘teacher’ to an apparently sub-normal man named Kyusaku who works at a nearby boat-hire centre. It is to this lake-side establishment that a mysterious white marble coffin is one day delivered, borne by a sullen and uncommunicative driver, who dumps it and disappears without a word. The name inscribed on the side of this unrequested coffin..? Well, you can probably guess. Quite why the scion of Japan’s own branch of the Dracula dynasty suddenly felt the need to relocate to a wooden boat-house is an issue that is never really addressed, but in keeping with the dream-logic that operates throughout this film, we can only assume he is being drawn toward the soul of the young girl who stumbled into his domain all those year ago.. or vice versa.

Soon of course, the Count arises, and Kyusaku falls victim to his influence, becoming a kind of lumbering, mindless Renfield-like figure. In a further echo of the original Stoker story, Dracula next sets his sights of Akiko’s sister Natsuko (Sanae Emi), who is staying with her, and soon our heroine’s only defence against the gradual onset of evil that seems to be overtaking her is her boyfriend Saeki (Osahide Takahashi) – a dedicated doctor and steadfast man of reason, who at first assumes she’s just going a bit neurotic, but is subsequently convinced of the danger when he ends up treating another vampire victim at his surgery.

And… that’s about it really. The main problem with ‘Lake of Dracula’ in conventional terms is that the story barely moves forward at all, with almost no significant development taking place through the majority of the film’s running time. Within the first fifteen minutes, Dracula has pitched up at the boathouse and begun menacing Akiko and her associates… and basically he just continues to do that for about the next hour. A few supporting characters meet sticky ends along the way, people move from one place to another, but basically, as far as the central drive of the story goes, things remain in a state of near unbearable stasis for absolutely ages, until Akiko and Saeki eventually manage to follow some clues back to the mansion where her traumatic childhood experience took place, where, somewhat unexpectedly, they encounter the corpse of Dracula’s father, whose journal is used to lay some heavy exposition on us, introducing some interesting new quirks in vampire genealogy, and explaining how Japan ended up with it’s very own Count Dracula.

This sense of narrative stasis is scarcely helped by the disinterested, sleep-walking quality that characterises most of the performances in the film, a circumstance that could easily be ascribed simply to a cast of underpaid actors doing the bare minimum with a bland, undercooked script (as was the case with ‘Bloodthirsty Doll’), except that in this case it all actually fits in quite well with the general somnambulant, vaguely hypnotic vibe of the film.

One performer who does actually puts some enthusiasm into his role is, fittingly, Dracula himself, portrayed with admirable gusto by Shin Kishida, a writer and actor who worked on both sides of the camera on numerous Toho samurai movies. Apparently Kishida was a big sci-fi and horror fan, and was over the moon at being offered the chance to become Japan’s answer to Christopher Lee.(2) Though he’s not really the perfect physical type for Dracula (the cadaverous Ko Nishimura, as seen in The Living Skeleton, Kurasawa’s ‘The Bad Sleep Well’ and Koreyoshi Kurahara’s ‘Intimidation’, would have been my dream casting choice), he nonetheless gives it his all, in particular unleashing some of the most blood-curdlingly horrible vampire shrieks and death-rattles in cinema history. Allied with some pretty gnarly make-up effects, his inevitable disintegration scene makes for a pretty intense finale.(3)

Largely though, ‘Lake..’ remains the kind of film that seems to take place in a sort of dream-state. Not a terribly good or interesting dream-state perhaps, but a dream all the same – a fuzzy, indefinitely focused, inescapable sort of space, in which people seem to speak in slow motion and move as if wading through treacle, slaves to some alien logic that never quite adds up to anything the waking mind could relate to.

The role that memory plays in the film, and particularly the idea of the central character reliving the trauma of encountering a vampire when she was a child through dreams and hypnosis, reminds me strongly of Jean Rollin’s masterpiece ‘Lips of Blood’(4), and of course opens the film up to all kinds of thematic interpretations that, even if this film’s narrative is too simplistic and opaque to ever really engage with them, are nonetheless conveyed by Yamamoto’s directorial style, which succeeds in dragging us deep into an atmosphere of odd psychological gloop.

As in ‘Bloodthirsty Doll’, Yamamoto reveals himself to be a quietly effective cinematic stylist here, in spite of the clunky material and soporific acting, making good use of the usual Japanese widescreen aspect ratio as he cuts between extreme close-ups and distant long-shots, lodging the film’s central images in our brain like fragments of recovered memories, meaning that, whether by accident of design, elements of ‘Lake of Dracula’ stay with me long after the highlights of many ostensibly ‘better’ films have faded.

From the blood-red skies hanging over the jagged ocean shore where young Akiko plays in the film’s opening flashback, to the tunnel-like cave through which she pursues her dog to the vampire’s liar, functioning like a gateway to another world; from the extreme close-up of Dracula’s glowing yellow eye, mirroring the landscape shots of sun setting over the lake to the queasy, poorly staged terror of the grown up Akiko finding her dog dead amid the long grass, then immediately being attacked by the previously trustworthy Kyusaku… it’s all the kind of thing tailor-made to lurk in the back of your brain indefinitely.

In some ways in fact, the film really IS a “Lake of Dracula” – a stagnant, ever-drifting pool of unsettling imagery and sluggish, hypnotic movement that could potentially unspool forever before the tired eyes of those lost within it, an endlessly repeating landscape of Akiko’s internalised paranoid terror, with concerns of plot and forward momentum relegated to the corners, like glimpses of reality breaking through some thick, schizophrenic fug. Care for a swim..?

(1)Yes, these films did receive an American theatrical release, surprisingly; insofar as I can tell, all three hit the streets in 1973 as a triple package distributed by Toho’s US distribution wing.

(2)Info taken from a text essay accompanying the 2002 UK DVD of ‘Lake of Dracula’ from ArtsMagic. Picture quality is as dreadful as their ‘Bloodthirsty Doll’ release, by the way, (I’ve cleaned up the screenshots above a little), but I suppose it was at least nice of ‘em to throw in a few extras.

(3)VERY PREDICTABLE SPOILER ALERT, but just as an aside, something that really bothers me about ‘Lake of Dracula’ is that during the finale, when the vampire is staked by a big piece of wood, it’s clearly not anywhere near his heart! It’s, like, in his belly or something. I mean, c’mon! Still, I guess that’s what you get when you entrust these things to a country that doesn’t really do vampires very often… maybe they’ll have got the gist of it by the time we get to the final entry in Yamamoto’s vampire trilogy.

(4) Could Rollin have seen ‘Lake of Dracula’..? I suppose it’s not impossible, but as usual, I don’t feel the similarity between the two films is liable to be much more than a coincidence. I will go out on a limb and say that I think Rollin would have at least LIKED ‘Lake of Dracula’, however.