Banshee Chapter (2013)

directed by Blair Erickson

USA

87 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

"Can we go already? It's 2:45 in the morning and my eyes are bleeding."

I decided on Banshee Chapter for my Halloween night watch this year because having just seen The Thing in a theater got me in the mood for another movie that involves unknown entities puppeting human beings around. This movie has been an old favorite of mine since it came out, and it's one of very few movies that I've seen a multitude of times and have yet to get tired of - I might be mostly used to the scares at this point, but I still enjoy them.

Banshee Chapter is upfront about its basis in reality: from the outset the movie purports to be an exploration of what really went on during the U.S. government's MK-Ultra mind control experiments. Watching this in November of 2025, I unfortunately found the government's involvement to be the weakest part of the movie, to the point where it almost killed my immersion - maybe in 10 years, if we somehow have a semi-sane government, it'll be scary again, but right now, the government is openly doing things that are arguably far worse and much more materially detrimental than non-consensually summoning Outer Ones into the bodies of its citizens. That aside, though, if we can get past the concept that it's the government doing these experiments, the backbone of Banshee Chapter is scary as hell.

One of the highlights of the film is the video of protagonist Ann (Katia Winter)'s friend just before he (or his body, at least) went missing. We'll discuss the movie's quasi-found-footage style in a moment, but this part is shot as genuine found-footage. In the midst of research for his novel about MK-Ultra, James (Michael McMillan) gets his hands on a sample of the drug that was used in the original experiments and ingests it himself, with a friend filming the whole thing. This sequence of the movie is creepy from start to finish, but the thing that really bothers me about it is that it makes it very clear that the drug doesn't solely effect the person who ingests it. When it kicks in, James's radio starts picking up weird signals that his friend who's filming him can hear - as in, the drug summons something to the general vicinity, not just into James's mind. This right here is the really terrifying part of Banshee Chapter. If you take a drug and it makes beings from another plane notice you and come possess your body, then whatever, sounds like a you problem. But if you take a drug and it makes beings from another plane come and haunt your entire house and everybody else who happens to be in it, instead of just restricting itself to you, that's a little more serious.

As I just mentioned, the filming style is sort of a mix of found-footage and otherwise, and the camerawork has a kind of loose, handheld style that isn't quite Cloverfield-level shakycam but also feels like it could easily just be somebody accompanying Ann with a camcorder. You do keep expecting her to turn to whoever's holding the camera and make remarks about the film, but it never happens. The result is that we feel like we're seeing everything unfold in real-time, even though there are the normal cuts and time-skips between scenes that we expect from a typical narrative film.

Most of the scares in this movie are jump scares. I never thought I'd be in the position of having to defend jump scares, because for the most part I'm of the opinion that a lot of horror movies don't know how to use them properly, but in this case Banshee Chapter happens to be really adept at knowing exactly how much of its horror to show (and when) to create a sense of consistent unease that lingers even when the disturbing imagery is not on-screen. It's a really brilliant move for a low-budget horror movie, too: show a few cumulative seconds of the creepiest shit you've ever seen and spend the rest of the movie having people trip out of their minds and talk about horrifying things. That being said, though, one of the scariest scenes in the whole movie is actually not a jump scare: when Ann is in the abandoned experimental facility and sees something shambling down the hallway towards her, my god, that was freaky. We don't see enough of it to make it out - all we can see is the outline of something that's stretching out its human costume like a tall man trying to wear a too-small shirt.

As effectively scary as this movie is, it feels like it's destined to forever be one of those things that doesn't really get a lot of mainstream recognition and mostly relies on word-of-mouth to be seen at all. Every so often I hear people talk about it, and the tone is always mild surprise: usually something like "Hey, have you heard of this thing? I went into it blind and it's, like, really creepy". It's not a perfect movie, and I think I might be starting to see more plot holes now that I've seen it so many times, but it remains distinctly unsettling in a way that a lot of horror movies fail to be.

From Odo Island to the Big Island: 70 Years of Godzilla in Hawai'i

(I'm publishing this simultaneously to my other blog.)

Last year, we celebrated 70 years of the first Godzilla film, and next year, we'll celebrate 70 years of its American recut, Godzilla! King of the Monsters. But this year was the 70th anniversary of something that, I would argue, is even more interesting: the opening of the Hawaiian run of the original Godzilla. The newspaper clippings I'm going to present below are the very first English-language reviews of the film, and the version of it that critics were watching was uncut, un-Raymond-Burred, and English-subtitled. 

I'm going to do my best to cover some of Hawai'i's rich theater heritage in this post, but for a wider exploration of the subject, you absolutely must read Lowell Angell's Theaters of Hawai'i.

Part I: Hawaii Times

On October 3rd, the first rumblings began... a tiny ad on the second page of the paper indicated that something unusual was on its way. In recent years, Hawaii Times had reviewed contemporary American sci-fi and horror movies: Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invaders from Mars, etc, but the Japanese films that were being shown at the three theaters covered by the paper's film department (the Kokusai/International, the Toyo, and the Nippon) were markedly different. Mother dramas were overwhelmingly popular, as were musical comedies starring the likes of Hibari Misora and Chiemi Eri, and if there was any hint of genre fare, it was in the form of kaidan films; many starring Takako Irie, all jidaigeki. This was the first modern Japanese monster movie, set in modern times, and it must have come as a shock.

On opening night, Hawaii Times previewed the film. In both the preview and the review from a few days later, the face of the film is Takashi Shimura, the only member of the cast who Hawaiian audiences would have been familiar with. HT's film reviewer, James T. Hamada, conjectures that the film's cast of young unknowns may have contributed to the theater being fairly empty during the premiere. (If I may interject, Hamada had seen Akihiko Hirata three months earlier in Itsuko and Her Mother, and Hamada's review marks the first time Hirata's name appeared in an English-language publication.)

Us Godzilla fans tend to have great respect for Raymond Burr for reprising his Steve Martin role in Godzilla 1985 because he genuinely cared for Godzilla, despite warnings that it would be bad for his image, and I don't think it would be too much of a reach to say we could probably feel the same way about Takashi Shimura. I don't know Shimura's personal feelings about being in the movie, but without a recognizable actor like him, Godzilla's initial appeal in the West may have been even lower.

Hamada's review of the film appeared in the October 6th edition, in a much longer column than was usually given to film reviews. It is fascinating. Hamada had some qualms about the movie's realism in practical terms, but praised its special effects right off the bat.

The most interesting thing to me here is that Hamada seems to understand that the film intends to present Godzilla as one of a species, and accordingly he uses the word "godzilla" without capitalization and as a plural, the way one would say "dogs" or "cats". Hamada comes away from the movie with the idea that "a godzilla" is something like a made-up species of dinosaur. The takeaway: Godzilla is not a character yet. Godzilla is just a big animal.

As someone who has not infrequently been the only person seeing a movie, when Hamada says "70 or 80 persons" attended the screening, that sounds like a fair amount to me. But the Kokusai could seat 1,200 people. Announced in 1939 and opening officially in 1941 with design by Hego Fuchino, it was one of many theaters in Honolulu, sitting in the 'A'ala Park district right next door to the Toyo, which also showed Japanese films, including some produced by Toho. After and during the war the theater was often referred to as the "International", the English translation of its name.

photo courtesy of Edna Kijinami, from the flickr account of Chie Gondo

The Kokusai, at its opening, was owned by Sanji Abe, president of Kokusai Kogyō. In September of 1942, Abe was arrested and placed into an internment camp for allegedly owning a Japanese flag. He was transferred between three different internment camps until being paroled in 1944 and released from parole in February of 1945. He would return to promoting and importing Japanese films after the war.

Part II: Honolulu Star-Advertiser

I include this as it does fit the scope of this article, but I should note that the balloon was not a strictly Hawaiian story. The above clipping was actually taken from the October 19th, 1954 edition of The Plain Speaker, published in Hazleton, Pennsylvania; Honolulu Star-Bulletin re-ran it in December of that year. You will notice that the publication date is several weeks before even the first limited-release screenings of Godzilla within Japan. This means that Americans were aware of Godzilla from the very, very beginning. Photos of the balloon must have made their way from Tokyo to American newspaper offices within days.

As for Honolulu Star-Advertiser's coverage of the film itself, it was fairly extensive. William W. Davenport writes about the film after having seen a showing at the Kokusai, the same theater featured above. This clipping is from the October 7th, 1955 edition.

Although this article feels more sensational than Hamada's, several takeaways can be made. Davenport, for whatever reason, does not seem to be aware of the Romanized spelling "Godzilla" and uses "Gojira" throughout his review. He baldly spoils the film's ending but refuses to describe the Oxygen Destroyer in detail. We also learn that an advertising short film played after Godzilla: a "musical documentary on the soft drink industry" produced by your friend and mine Bireley's. I have to say, I can't really tell what the critic makes of the film itself, but he seems impressed with Godzilla as a monster.

Part III: Hawaii Tribune-Herald

The first Hawaii Tribune-Herald mention of the film is used on Wikipedia to claim that the earliest English usage of the name "Godzilla" occurred on November 20th, 1955, which, as we have seen from the Hawaii Times material above, is not true at all.

Not to get personal or anything, but when I read "Walked home afterward under comforting stars, never so big and brilliant. Hua caught up with me presently. 'I saw Godzilla, too,' he said." I wanted to cry. Imagine walking home under the beautiful night sky in Hawai'i with your friend after being one of the first people to watch Godzilla outside of Japan.

This second mention is vanishingly small, only an ad, but it introduces us to our next theater. I want to mention the Mooheau Theater because it only existed for a scant six years after showing Godzilla and was then destroyed in a tsunami. As this ad is from November 5th, either the writer of the above review saw the film in another theater, or was recollecting his experience after the film had left local theaters. The author would not have seen it at the Kokusai as this paper was published in Hilo, not Honolulu.

Because the theater was destroyed such a long time ago, most information I have about it is anecdotal. It apparently existed as far back as the late 1910s, and it seems that it began showing Filipino and Japanese imports sometime around the 1940s. One Lawrence Akutagawa writes in a Google Groups post (that I'm really not even sure should be public) that the Mooheau catered to "more formal Japanese dance" and was, like the Kokusai, situated on a street with several other theaters.

Wreckage of Mooheau Street, credit to Craig Miyamoto

Part IV: Further Historical Context

Most theaters during this time were single-screen. Movies rotated in and out of Hawaii's theaters relatively quickly, since, basically, if you can't show a bunch of movies at the same time, you have to show a bunch of movies in rapid succession instead. From my own research, I found that some films would become massively popular (such as Hideo Ōba's Always in My Heart, which was evidently a smash success) and be held over or return for several repeat runs, but this was fairly rare during the 1953-1955 years that my research focused on. It's frustrating that we can't get a clear picture of attendance for Godzilla during its original run, and anything I come up with would be total conjecture, but if we assume that attendance was low at the Kokusai and probably much lower at the Mooheau (Hilo circa 1950 had some 200,000+ less people living there than Honolulu), allowing for a week-long run in both theaters would give us numbers perhaps in the low- to mid-thousands.

I unfortunately couldn't drag up any interior photos of either the Kokusai or the Mooheau, but this is the Waikiki Theater, which sat 1,353 people, and so would have been a roughly similar size to the Kokusai.

The interior of Honolulu's Toyo theater. From State Historic Preservation Office.

Another solution to not having multiple screens within one theater was to just have a lot of theaters. It may seem odd to us today to think of a street with several movie theaters on it, sometimes right next door to each other, but again, we have to consider that these theaters were single-screen and often specific film companies would have vested interest in them - so one theater would specialize in Daiei films and rarely show anything else, or another theater would frequently host traditional dance performances along with movies, et cetera.

(I am, out of necessity, focusing on theaters that showed Japanese films mostly or exclusively, but I don't want to make it sound like these were the only theaters in Hawai'i; due to its incredibly diverse population, theaters showed imported films in a multitude of languages, as well as your usual run-of-the-mill American oaters and sweeping melodramas.)

Another early Japanese theater, the Honolulu-za, ca. late 1930s-early 1940s. From Hawai'i State Archives.

One last thing to consider is that the concept of a movie having English subtitles was, at least in this specific time and place, fairly new. From context it seems like the bulk of the audience for imported Japanese features during the early- to mid-1950s were people who could actually understand Japanese - unlike today, when it's easy for anybody who doesn't speak a lick of the language to see subtitled features in a theater. The following is an article from mid-1954 concerning the recent introduction of English subtitles to the Japanese features playing at the Nippon Theater, and it takes possibly the most logical tack towards subtitles that I've ever heard: if you don't need 'em, don't read 'em.

Therefore, despite what may seem like a very small and limited run, Godzilla arrived at a time where the odds were actually more in its favor in terms of reaching a larger audience than they may have been just a few years prior, when it would not have been subtitled.

Conclusions

I know this was a boring one. Thanks for reading. I have to go to bed now.

No, really. The popular opinion of the Godzilla series in America has historically been a matter of clueless Westerners poking fun at the sweaty guys in rubber suits bonking each other around while ineffectual miniature planes on visible wires fly overhead. We have held that opinion because what of Godzilla that has reached our shores has largely been an adulterated form of the original work: ever since Godzilla, King of the Monsters! we've been fed recuts and bad dubs, pan-and-scans and late-nite TV reruns. We are of course in the kaiju renaissance now: "tokusatsu" is a word in the dictionary, Minus One won an Oscar, Eiji Tsuburaya has been inducted into the Special Effects Hall of Fame, there is a vague sense within academia that Japanese monster movies may be worth looking at closely.

But I want us to remember that there has always been an undercurrent of admiration for these films. From the very earliest days, there have been people appreciating Godzilla films. I want us to know that before the SNL skits and the MST3k episodes there were people like James T. Hamada who saw that something respectable was being done - that the effects were, in fact, good. I want us to think about walking home under the stars in the late autumn cool, talking to our friends about the giant lizard we just saw level Tokyo, the paleontologist and his empathy for the creature, the star-crossed lovers, the scientist fighting with his own conscience, and what it all meant.

Pretty Body: Frankenstein's Love (1988)

directed by Takafumi Nagamine

Japan

54 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

I only watched this because the thing I meant to watch fell through. I'd been aware of it for a while; it got subtitled relatively recently and looked like the kind of thing I'd be interested in, but until I thought to myself "who the hell is responsible for this" midway through the film, I had no idea it was directed by the same guy who made Diva in the Netherworld, a favorite of mine that is still in need of subtitles.

Pretty Body is a film that, on the surface, is not very complicated: it's a story about a girl named Izumi who moves into an apartment above an otolaryngologist's office while, unbeknownst to her, the doctor and his assistant have been murdering (and continue to murder) apartment residents and other random folks to harvest their body parts for a Frankenstein's Monster they're making. Somewhere along the way, the girl catches sight of the monster and falls immediately and intensely in love with him.

It would be a lot easier to explain the way it feels to watch this movie to someone who has already seen Diva in the Netherworld, because it's almost exactly like that. Diva in the Netherworld itself would be easier to explain to someone who's seen House, so to oversimplify things (perhaps to an unfair degree), I guess we could say that Pretty Body feels like a mixture of House and maybe one of the Guinea Pig movies if it was directed by somebody whose only previous work had been idol videos.

Despite its simple plot, and despite the bizarre, dreamlike execution of that plot, I do think there's some sense being made here, somewhere. The more I thought about it, the more this started feeling like a classic "coming of age" story (I do not tend to be a fan of these, but sometimes they are at least interesting). A girl who's young enough that she probably hasn't been living on her own for long moves into a strange new place and, still innocent enough to find love and magic wherever she goes, meets another innocent like her, while all around them the world is full of random murders and sex & violence. At the end of the film, Izumi is forced to grow up when everything goes wrong and she's separated from the monster she loves, but her attitude shows that despite her loss, she seems like she's going to do fine in the larger world. There's also some upsetting implications, given the fact that we see very graphically where the body parts that made up the monster came from. This creature Izumi falls in love with is very much his own person with agency and autonomy, but he is made of pieces from people who had been Izumi's own neighbors until relatively recently.

I want to come back to that word "dreamlike" just now, because there's no better way to describe this movie. It really does feel like a lot of the imagery is taken directly from things that you would see in a weird anxiety dream. There's a scene where the doctor's assistant comes in the room and tries to talk to him while he's on the toilet and she doesn't acknowledge that this is unusual in any way even though it clearly makes the doctor uncomfortable. Then there's the viewing window to the chamber where the doctor keeps the monster, which is opened by way of giving a wet willie to a sculpture of a giant ear on the wall next to it. The practical effects are dialed down here more than they were in Diva in the Netherworld, and the aesthetic is much more beachy and modern, but the environment still gives off a similar feeling of unreality.

I don't really know how to end this review, so I guess I'll just mention for tokusatsu fans that Noboru Mitani and Tomorowo Taguchi are in this (Taguchi in only a small role, Mitani as the doctor), so if you're some kind of completionist, you are now compelled to watch whatever this is.

Talk To Me (2022)

directed by Michael Phillipou, Danny Phillipou

Australia

95 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

Talk To Me is a bad vibes movie for the ages. I will be discussing full plot spoilers. This review is not good because I have not slept in too long.

We start the movie off in the passenger seat and remain there for the next 95 minutes, whether that's where we want to be or not. The film semi-cold-opens into a party, a handsomely rendered continuous shot of a boy looking for somebody named "Ducket" who we later find out is/was his younger brother. The scene ends abruptly when Ducket stabs first his brother and then himself; while Ducket remains dead, the brother survives, and will become important later on in the film.

The protagonist of the film is Mia (Sophie Wilde), an outwardly cheerful young woman with an unremarkable circle of friends and normal teenager problems. She's not perfect, and neither is anybody else here, and that's why it's so easy to get wrapped up in their lives. For something that feels so character-driven, there are somehow still almost no characters in Talk To Me who feel like they have much in the way of personality (one exception being Cookie the bulldog, of course). Instead of hindering our immersion in the story, this actually makes it easier to put ourselves in the same frame of mind as the characters, because these don't really feel like "movie people", they just feel like average teenagers who have, before the movie started, done things that we as viewers are not privy to. The party trick/party ritual of linking with another plane by holding an embalmed hand and saying a specific formula is established to have been going on since well before the movie started.

About thirty minutes into the film I thought I had it pegged, and I was planning on writing something in my review about how this isn't a terribly original idea for a horror film (teenage party ghost summoning gone wrong) but that it's done refreshingly well here, with a cast of actors who put together a very strong ensemble performance. Those latter two points remained true, but the further I got into the film, the more it started throwing things at me that were more brutal than I had expected. There is a specific moment where it really pulls out all the stops and goes full Event Horizon; that was when I thought "Oh, this is something different, now."

The concept of this movie is horrific because it seems to objectively be real within the universe of the film, and if it is objectively real, then it posits an afterlife that's worse than anything even ancient Greeks and Babylonians could have thought up. But it feels like there's more nuance here. I think we have to go back to the protagonist and consider that the events of the movie are necessarily being filtered through her lens.

The term "grief horror" is perennially hot, to the point where I feel like probably about 2% of the media it's applied to is actually worth watching, but there's clearly an element of it to be found in Talk To Me. Mia has been struggling with her mother's death for two years, trying to reckon with the fact that despite what she wants to believe, it really does seem like it might have been a suicide. This desperate desire to believe is her weak point, and whatever is going on on the other side takes advantage of it. Mia is eventually able to talk to her mother using the embalmed-hand party-trick hell-telephone-thing, and her mother tells her everything she wants to hear: that she didn't kill herself, that she'd never leave her, and then, while Mia's "mother" has her ear, she says oh, by the way, there's nothing but suffering and torment on the other side of death, and your friend's little brother is in endless agony, and you have to kill him to end it, and that isn't your real father, they're coming to get you, you know what you have to do. When the first message Mia hears is the only thing she's wanted to hear for the past two years, wouldn't it stand to reason she'd listen to anything else that message told her afterward, too?

So the horror here is largely Mia's personal horror, which makes it difficult to tease out exactly what's happening, objectively. There are these moments where it looks like maybe everything Mia has seen isn't quite true: when her friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) tells her that her brother seems to be recovering, and that he "seems like himself" instead of like he's trapped in the torment nexus the way Mia's mom and the other spirits want her to think, I started to wonder what was actually going on. But what are we supposed to make of those visions of a truly gruesome afterlife? And what about the ending? Did Mia damn herself through her own actions? Or, if any of the other characters had died, would they have gone there as well?

And I also just want to think about that hand for a minute. Given the backstory - the hand supposedly belonged to a medium or a Satanist or somebody who could contact the other side - it feels like the implication is that it's possible to become so saturated with that other world that even just the touch of your flesh can bring other people into it. If someone had cut off Mia's hand while she was still alive, would it have turned into another link to the horrible afterlife?

Letterboxd reviewers effectively sum Talk To Me up as "cold, bleak and icky", "hopeless and miserable", "gnaw[ing] at your soul and consum[ing] your spirit". All of these things are exactly correct. It is very, very good.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

directed by Roy William Neill

USA

74 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

Some friends took me into Atlanta to catch the afternoon Silver Scream Spookshow presentation of this film last weekend, which was an all-around great time. The danger with seeing a movie in a theater is that I usually don't have my brain powered up enough to review it since I'm more focused on the overall experience of being in a theater; doubly so if I just watched a 30-minute live stage show with puppetry and antics and skits and whatnot. But Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man kind of crept up on me, so I want to get some thoughts about it down in writing.

(Also please note that I basically have never watched a Universal monster movie so I might say some things here that would be "Well, yeah, duh" territory to anyone who has.)

The thing that really struck me about this movie was the incredibly sympathetic portrayal of the Wolf Man. At the beginning of the film he is dug up from his grave by tomb robbers looking for fresh-ish corpses with money on them, and despite having "died" four years ago, the man who in life was known as Larry Talbot somehow remains alive - very much against his will. Talbot is immediately, horrifyingly aware of his situation - of his status of a lycanthrope - but no one around him will take him seriously. There is something so deeply tragic about seeing Talbot plead, essentially, "I have no control over my own actions, when the full moon strikes I am a passenger in my own body, I am committing acts that are reprehensible to me and I desperately need to die because there is no other way for me to stop myself" and having no one listen to him.

The practical effects makeup here is obviously ahead of its time and an enormous amount of effort was put into what amounts to probably about 0.15% of the running time of an already quite short movie - our (g)host Professor Morte mentioned that the initial transformation scene was done over the course of eight hours and that Lon Chaney Jr. had to stay in the same pose on a pillow that was made out of plaster because a real pillow would have shifted around too much and ruined the real-time transformation effect. That is all remarkable, but what I think really cinched this movie was Chaney's performance as Talbot. Not as the Wolf Man - as Talbot. He has this forlorn expression on most of the time, and carries himself with the body language of a man heavily burdened, who knows that he doesn't belong among the vibrant, carefree living humans around him. Although this is a short, simple film, the true horror of being the Wolf Man is conveyed in a way that I found extremely compelling.

I haven't mentioned Bela Lugosi in heavy makeup as Frankenstein's Monster because he was somewhat of a weak point in the film to me, which from what I understand had a lot to do with behind-the-scenes decisions to cut a lot of his lines. I also think that every other character besides the two monsters could basically have been an NPC with the exception of Maleva, whose genuine care and compassion for the Wolf Man and total acceptance of him as a being did move me deeply.

One of the friends I was with pointed out the "economy of storytelling" in this film, which I agree is definitely one of its strong points; the plot moves along very quickly and doesn't get stuck on any one point or another for longer than feels necessary. It is a pleasure to watch a 74-minute film that feels like it got its entire message across and couldn't have been longer if it tried. I'm attempting to muster the effort to say that there's also something about this simplicity that is a detriment to the film, because although any more length would probably have drawn the plot out further than it could handle, in the end, instead of a satisfying conclusion, we basically get... nothing. Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf Man fight, the dam possibly gets blown up, we see some great practical effects, and then the "The End" card hits and we all left the theater. Just another ten minutes could have made that ending feel like an actual ending.

Jigoku (1960)

directed by Nobuo Nakagawa

Japan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

I have returned from my hiatus to kick off the spooky season with a film that I could superlatively describe with an awful pun¹ but am consciously choosing not to.

I happen to be in the middle of reading The Penguin Book of Hell at the moment, and that combined with my overall interest in religious studies makes for a mindset that is intensely receptive of everything Jigoku lays on its viewers. Something that I think any secular observer (and probably a good deal of non-secular observers) will begin to notice once they've been exposed to enough visions of various religions' underworlds is that after a while it really feels like concepts of an afterlife full of torment say more about the god or gods who created such a place than they do about the people who have been sentenced to live in them for eternity.

Case in point: the main character of Jigoku, Shiro Shimizu (played by Shigeru Amachi). An extremely normal person, guilty of essentially nothing by his own hand and by the standards of today's society, who ends up damned to hell alongside a crowd of his family, friends, and vague acquaintances, all of whom are objectively more "sinful" than him. Things seem to go very wrong whenever Shimizu is around, but again, none of it is his fault: his first "crime" is simply being the passenger during a hit-and-run that ends up claiming the life of a supposedly big-cheese yakuza, whose girlfriend and mother immediately begin plotting revenge not just on Tamura (we'll get to him in a moment - oh, boy, will we ever), the man driving the car, but on Shimizu, who happened to be in that place at that time because he wanted to take a different route than Tamura did.

Very shortly after the first car accident, before Shimizu has really had time to recover, he finds himself in another accident that ends up taking the life of his fiancée, Yukiko (the lovely Utako Mitsuya). Again, it is not directly his fault, but he is in the situation because he insisted on taking a taxi when Yukiko wanted to walk. He could justifiably walk away from both incidents carrying no blame whatsoever, but instead he chooses to take the burden on himself - therefore damning himself even before his death to a life in which he deems himself a murderer.

While Shimizu is the protagonist, arguably the most fascinating character in Jigoku is Shimizu's "friend" Tamura (Yōichi Numata). Every time I rewatch this, I spend the entire movie wondering if Tamura was ever human at all. He shows up out of nowhere accompanied by a sound (whether diegetic or not is hard to tell) like an onrushing train and seems to goad Shimizu further into believing life is nothing but sin and degeneration until you inevitably die and suffer for all eternity. He revels in others' suffering, and is oftentimes the cause of it: Tamura is the one who should logically be held accountable for the first accident, but instead he ropes Shimizu into sharing the blame, and later snipes at him for trying to "sell him out" - as if he is not the one actually culpable for a crime. We don't ever find anything out about Tamura as a person: where he's from, why he's attracted to Shimizu, what his overall problem is. Even Shimizu wonders "who is this guy?" at one point. When Tamura dies, he's no less of a bizarre psychopomp - he is, in fact, more of one. Numata's sudden shift into full kabuki actor mode when Tamura visits Shimizu in hell (only to be chastised by a force even more evil than himself, leading one to believe that Tamura was perhaps human all along) is one of my favorite moments in the latter part of the film.

The world is faintly hellish even while Shimizu is still alive. The disquieting atmosphere is so similar to Nakagawa's later film Yotsuya Kaidan that I looked up the cinematographer for Jigoku, expecting to see them credited for that film as well, only to find that Yotsuya Kaidan and Jigoku share no crew members aside from composer Chumei Watanabe. I think the nightmarish imagery is largely carried by both Nakagawa and art director Haruyasu Kurosawa, who worked on numerous other horror movies, but Watanabe's score certainly does a lot to help the sense of a deeply haunted world that we feel while watching the film as well.

So, arguably, the most horrifying thing about Jigoku is not the elaborately staged underworld scenes, featuring people being flayed, decapitated, boiled, reduced to skeletons, bashed in the teeth with hammers &c, it's the fact that, like, there's a baby down there, dude. If Shimizu can get damned not only by himself but along with his girlfriend, his unborn child, his sister, and his parents for things that he was both not really guilty of and in one case was not even aware he was doing - if there are gods who will damn a baby to eternal torment to that - then those gods are infinitely more frightening than the demons bashing people's teeth in with hammers. And maybe even more frightening than that is the idea that maybe Shiro only went there because he felt like he deserved to be there.

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1 It is, in point of fact, one hell of a movie.

Celia (1989)

directed by Ann Turner

Australia

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Note: I am still extremely busy and haven't had the time to write anything new, so this is an old review that I've dug up from my archives and reworked for quality. My apologies - by hook or by crook I will be back to writing new reviews next week.

Celia is a horror movie (if it can be called a horror movie at all) where the horror is experienced through a child's perspective, it's also a movie that presents that horror as part of the experience of being a child. The horror here is inextricable from personal experience instead of existing as an external force that can be corroborated by an outside observer. What this movie is really about is how the worlds of children and the worlds of adults are often totally incompatible and incomprehensible to each other. The title character is a nine-year-old girl who has a relatively normal childhood (insofar as any childhood can be called "normal"), with all of life's mysteries still yet to be revealed, and to her - and, arguably, objectively - all of the adults in her life act against what she believes to be morally correct. 

A really good example of this last point is the way the film deals with politics. A running theme is the ruling by the then-PM of Australia that all rabbits, including those belonging to children as pets, are to be rounded up and killed, as they are considered vermin. Celia has to cope with this despite not having the capacity to understand it the way adults do. At one point she draws devil features on a picture of the PM in class and is told off for it by the teacher. While the adults view this as extremely disrespectful, they don't see that Celia is interpreting the PM's actions according to the rules of engagement that govern her and her peers: it does not follow that this man should be above recourse, he's a stranger who is telling Celia that her beloved pet is to be surrendered and killed, what is she supposed to do? Not fight back? Celia has no internalized concept of politics or the idea of respecting someone solely based on their office: she treats the PM the same way she would treat her own contemporaries.

Another running theme is the adults around Celia attempting to force her into cutting off relationships based on their own fears of communism. Celia also deals with this the same way she'd deal with a contemporary: you tell me they're communists, and that they're bad people, but they've never hurt me or my friends, and they're always kind to me, so how can they be bad people just because you say they are? The logic the adults follow is the strange stuff here, not what Celia does - the fallacy of shunning some people because of their beliefs and blindly following the rule of others - of strangers - simply because they hold the highest office in the land is presented as a more childish belief than the rituals and games Celia involves herself with.

The way Celia's most heinous act (not spoiling it) is dealt with is also interesting because I think a lot of other movies would make that the thing that ends the film. Other movies wouldn't show, afterwards, her doing something else that could have ended in a similarly disastrous fashion, but didn't. They would make it a black-and-white issue: as soon as Celia did it, she would have been established as being in the wrong. But the mock hanging of her friend afterwards shows that the balance between life and death, justice and injustice, and the definition of what is and isn't a violent act does not hold constant between the worldviews of children and those of adults. It doesn't cast judgement on Celia for what she did or place blame on the people in her life for not teaching her right; it presents her as someone with agency who made a logical choice according to the way she understood justice and reciprocity.

I very much enjoyed this movie and despite it not turning out to be what I'd call "horror" without reservations, I thought it was one of the better films to explore the unique anxiety of being a child. I intended to watch it as a Christmas movie but that didn't really work out.