{"id":17327,"date":"2021-10-29T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-29T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=17327"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:13:52","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:13:52","slug":"broken-spirits-broken-promises-and-broken-traditions-a-j-horror-retrospective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/broken-spirits-broken-promises-and-broken-traditions-a-j-horror-retrospective\/","title":{"rendered":"Broken Spirits, Broken Promises, and Broken Traditions: A J-Horror Retrospective"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Drop the term \u201cJ-Horror\u201d into the average filmgoers\u2019 discussions and the examples most likely to come back include Takashi Miike\u2019s \u201999 dating caveat Audition<\/em>, or perhaps Hideo Nakata\u2019s Ringu<\/em> adaptation. Less likely, but just as deserving of praise, are the pre-1980 contributions to the Japanese horror pantheon. As it happens, three of them are currently accessible on HBO Max for all ghostly needs: 1964 monochrome nightmare Onibaba<\/em>, the sweeping anthology Kwaidan<\/em> of the same year, and the impossible-to-encapsulate 1977 festival of madness, House<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any culture, the horror genre has roots in the regional lore. Onibaba\u2019s<\/em> origins come from an old Shinto Buddhist tale about a woman who wears a mask to frighten but finds she cannot remove it. Kaneto Shindo\u2019s 1964 iteration retains the old story but infuses the narrative with socioeconomic critique and new images of grotesquery, influenced by 20th<\/sup> century Japanese history. The synopsis goes that in medieval Japan, a war is on, and somewhere in its windblown reed fields, a destitute older woman and her daughter-in-law, who are given no other names, make ends meet by killing lost samurai who wander into their overwhelming reed fields, dumping their bodies into a pit, and selling their possessions for food.  This is all their world presents to them from day to day\u2014 the duo kill, eat, and sleep only. A neighbor\u2019s return from battle launches raised tensions among the trio, where lust and desperation, and eventually a demon mask, mix to build to a devastating conclusion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The core arc of the movie belongs to the older woman (Nobuko Otowa), who begins in a macabre position. Shindo presents her as a cold-blooded murderer, not only killing samurai but relishing in it, as these men represent the draft, the war, and everything that took her son away from her. Even when she slaughters these warriors, she must taffy-pull decent compensation for their belongings from the uncaring merchant Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama). This is 14th<\/sup> century Japan, and these women have no means to survive without men. They may be able to kill under the cover of the reeds, but the same reeds render these women invisible to the world; without a man, they are effectively cut off. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s here that Shindo layers economic tut-tutting on to the fable\u2014women may have to do terrible things to survive, but the director wants it on the record that it\u2019s larger, male-dominated systems that perpetuate the horrors. The neighbor\u2019s lust for the younger woman and pride in his own ego, the older woman\u2019s rage and jealousy, and the daughter\u2019s eroticism all swirl into a primal frenzy of emotion, underlined by Hikaru Hayashi\u2019s percussive, insistent score. But despite the lofty messages, Shindo works in tandem with cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda to distill every image into a big-screen translation of two core emotions: lust (including bloodlust) and the simple, dogged determination to endure. Sporting third-act lyricism that takes the movie firmly into horror territory, Onibaba<\/em> is a stellar nightmare whose suggestions of the supernatural belie very human transgressions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adapted for the screen by Yoko Mizuki, Kwaidan<\/em> is based on assorted Japanese folk tales from Lafcadio Hearn\u2019s works, an oral tradition that finds a strong marriage with director Masaki Kobayashi\u2019s distinct visual flourishes and myth-making camerawork. Over four segments and a whopping three-hour runtime (a runtime cut down to 125 minutes for the U.S. premiere, eliminating a whole segment, \u201cThe Woman of the Snow\u201d), Kobayashi crafts one of the most ornately designed ghost story collections ever made, largely concerning itself with promises made and broken. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The first segment is \u201cThe Black Hair,\u201d about a swordsman (Rentar\u014d Mikuni) who leaves his devoted wife (Michiyo Aratama) to advance his station in life. It doesn\u2019t pan out, and his return home years later is where the black hair and the horror elements make their mark. At one point focused on a rotting house, the segment features the first of an array of efficient, atmospheric set pieces that compete easily with those of any Hammer or Amicus production. Kobayashi layers a thick blanket of frost onto the proceedings with the second segment, \u201cThe Woman of the Snow,\u201d which might look familiar to fans of the \u201cLover\u2019s Vow\u201d segment of John Harrison\u2019s 1980 anthology Tales From the Darkside<\/em>. In fact, the story of a monstrous woman was adapted from the same Hearn collection, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third segment is the most ambitious; \u201cHoichi the Earless\u201d achieves the epic sense of legend that its star crafts in his recitation of a historical Japanese sea battle within the Tale of the Heike<\/em>. Hoichi (Katsuo Nakamura), a blind monk, is known for recounting the battle of Dan-no-ura between two warring samurai clans in an elaborate, multi-part solo performance. One night, the monk is summoned by a gruff, semi-transparent samurai to his lord\u2019s manor to execute a classical recitation of the Heike tale for what the audience (but not Hoichi) sees is a platoon of phantoms. Boasting elaborate, theatrically choreographed skirmishes and composer Toru Takemitsu\u2019s elegiac score, the pomp and grandeur of the armed conflict rivals that of any American production at the time, and adds the natural hyperviolence of war to its supernatural bits, creating a horror segment more ceremonial than any of the others. A bonus appearance by Akira Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura as a priest puts the cherry on top, and the film\u2019s final segment, \u201cIn A Cup of Tea,\u201d brings the whole production to a perfectly bizarre end that might as well be located inside the Twilight Zone<\/em>. Each of these tales carries its own vibe\u2014some have plucky comedy reliefs, others are shot with pensive wide shots and hauntingly slow pans of the landscape\u2014but all have an unsettling, compelling, staying power long after the credits have rolled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With two films so reverent towards their spirit worlds, the addition of House<\/em> to the discussion seems like an unorthodox one, but there\u2019s nothing normal about Nobuhiko Obayashi\u2019s warped \u201977 funhouse horror. It\u2019s central path has been trodden before, in Kaneto Shindo\u2019s 1968 Black Cat<\/em> and various iterations of kaiby\u014d eiga<\/em> (cat horror), itself derived from the country\u2019s folklore. House<\/em> has a schoolgirl traveling with her six classmates to her aunt\u2019s rural home, which proceeds to eat them. That\u2019s the simplest explanation, but within the movie\u2019s crisp eighty-eight minute runtime there lies a flesh-eating piano, decapitated heads biting buttocks, a magic refrigerator, and conflicting continuity from one chamber of the house to the next, like the layout of The Shining\u2019s<\/em> Overlook Hotel. The film seems less a wild story from an eccentric filmmaker and more of a capsule gift sent from another planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was first conceptualized by Obayashi, who asked his adolescent daughter for examples of what frightened her (among her answers: her fingers hurt after piano practice, as if the ivory keys were chewing on her) and incredibly, Toho gave the film the greenlight– no one was watching samurai or kaiju movies anymore, why not take a chance on the odd new voice? The studio attached Obayashi to direct after his dedicated campaign to promote the movie. For all of its strange visual language, House<\/em> is most clearly a love letter from a father to a daughter, carrying fears from one generation to the next but reluctant to place those fears on the youth. After all, they never had to live with the burden of the Bomb. Her aunt\u2019s husband died in the war, remnants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pepper the plot, and the titular house manifests those horrors, setting the stage for a phantasmagoric clash of generations. It feels like a movie that plays during the fugue-state interim as you toss and turn on the couch, working through a nasty flu. Was the experience real? Less of a linear story and more a flurry of feverish imagery, House<\/em> essays a distinct, demented evolution of the classic haunted house picture, and remains a firm fixture at the temple of cult horror. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Onibaba<\/a>,” “Kwaidan<\/a>,” and “House<\/a>” are now streaming on HBO Max. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A spooky-season summary of three key films in the history of Japanese horror: “Onibaba,” “Kwaidan,” and “House.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":586,"featured_media":17329,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1422],"class_list":["post-17327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/586"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17327"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22143,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17327\/revisions\/22143"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}