Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Snake Girl (2005)

directed by Noboru Iguchi
Japan
53 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Don't ask why I gave this such a high rating because even I am not 100% sure. The source material being Kazuo Umezu helps, because he's good to begin with, but I definitely loved this movie for what it was regardless of where the story came from. Snake girls seem to be a semi-popular motif in Japanese horror, and I'd place this one under the category of "folk horror" due to that and its setting in a remote mountain village. In my opinion this all makes it good October viewing.

It seems like most of these Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater movies, and a lot of J-horror from the mid-2000s in general, made use of an extremely lo-fi, shot-on-video aesthetic that somehow enhanced them more than intricate cinematography and/or lighting, camera angles, etc. could ever have done. There's only minimal CGI, and even less set dressing, so you get the feeling that this is kind of just how Japan looks in its natural state- or I guess how it looked, seeing as most of these films were made ~15 years ago. But having horror set in such an intensely mundane atmosphere, with seemingly little done to prepare the environment for shooting a film, really makes for a unique look and feel that not many movies have.

Surprisingly, for such a relatively short movie, Snake Girl gets into the personal life of its protagonist enough that I genuinely felt for her. She has an affinity for posting nasty messages on an online message board, but the way it's presented is that even she doesn't really know why she's doing these things- she's a nice person in real life, but is having trouble figuring out her feelings as she gets older, and turns to this message board as an outlet. The film concludes with the main character recognizing her anger and realizing that it wasn't a good thing, and that it wasn't part of the person she wanted to be. I can think of tons and tons of movies and television shows that don't write their adult protagonists with this much maturity, and this is a 50-minute-long horror movie starring a preteen girl who encounters a village full of snake people.

So it's half fun folk horror with some... interesting-looking monster makeup, half a story about a girl growing up. The main actress does a great job with all of this. Also I don't support anti-snake propaganda, but I enjoyed this anyway.