The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)

directed by Nobuo Nakagawa

Japan

76 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I've been having this hankering lately for something that I am terming "dark-ass jidaigeki": A movie based in folklore or history with a palpable air of evil; a curse that almost feels like it could be imparted upon the viewer just by witnessing the film. As of now I haven't found anything that has exactly fit this description, but I'm watching a lot of good movies in the process. I had seen this version of The Ghost of Yotsuya six years ago, and evidently enjoyed it, but retained little to no memory of it at all.

Yotsuya Kaidan is one of the most oft-adapted Japanese ghost stories, sometimes being told with a focus on Iemon himself and sometimes focusing more on his doomed bride, Iwa (occasionally spelled Oiwa, with honorific, in the title). The gist of the story is that a samurai of fairly low rank has his sights set on a specific woman, but her family is not keen on him marrying her, so he murders them, but it doesn't end there. Once he kills her family and anyone who could object to their marriage, other people keep getting in the way, so he has to kill them too. Eventually Iwa herself "gets in the way", so he kills her as well, by disfiguring her in a way that causes her to commit suicide and take their newborn son with her. He also kills a masseur after attempting to frame him for Iwa's murder. (More convenient to just not have the guy around at all rather than try to menace him into sticking to his story, right?) Iemon is a sucking black hole, an otherwise relatively powerless figure who has decided to obtain power by discarding the laws and morals that govern him and his peers. Anybody who steps within his path has a bleak future. In this adaptation, he's played impressively (and impassively) by Shigeru Amachi, who has an extensive back catalogue of pretty much all hits and no misses. Iwa is played by Katsuko Wakasugi, who seems to have flourished mostly in other kaidan films such as this one.

This particular adaptation draws heavily from traditions of kabuki theater because the original source material is a kabuki play. I think the thirty seconds or so that make up the opening credits are particularly interesting: We're watching and listening to a stage show, but we don't see the actors. Instead, the camera is focused on a kuroko, a stagehand, with a candle - representing a spirit or a soul - on a long pole. This could be interpreted in any number of ways and all of them are, I think, fascinating for their relevance to the film to come. I cannot tell who is in the kuroko getup. It could be Iemon himself, or meant to represent him, in which case his status as manipulator of souls, as wannabe arbiter of the fate of those around him, could be represented in how he handles the candle/soul. But remember: We are supposed to regard kuroko as invisible. We're not supposed to be seeing Iemon, or whoever is holding the pole, here. So even if the kuroko does represent Iemon, he himself is irrelevant, only a tool for conveying the larger narrative.

My favorite moment in the whole film is when Iemon kills his first three victims after getting refused their blessing for Iwa's hand in marriage. The vibe here is pure theater, from the thundering drums in the background to the way Iemon walks across the screen from left to right, the camera following him as he paces towards his victims, who stagger and fall before him. It's heavily menacing. It feels like we're watching the making of a curse. Iemon gets his girl after this, but he's never satisfied. Even in a marriage he wanted, where he should be happy, with a new child, his only thought is of his own power, and how he can eliminate anything that could get in his way.

One really interesting element of this is Iemon's friend Naosuke - I can't recall if he's a common element in Yotsuya adaptations, but I find him fascinating here because he acts as a sort of id to Iemon's ego. His Lady Macbeth. Ultimately it's Iemon who makes the decision to kill, but for many - if not all - of his murders, Naosuke is the one who went "hey, you know, we could just kill that guy". He even pushes somebody off a cliff himself, laughingly saying afterward that now the both of them are murderers. But while Iemon, throughout the film, is a brooding, haunted person, Naosuke lives it up, seemingly showing no guilt whatsoever for the things he's done and abetted others in doing. Viewing Naosuke as a kind of external manifestation of an aspect of Iemon's own personality is an angle that I've yet to see anybody examine and it's something I really loved about this movie.

In my original review, I talked a little bit about Iwa's role and the role of women in general in this adaptation. On the surface, it's easy to see her as a victim, but the whole point of her continuing to have a strong presence in the story after being killed is that she's not. Iwa had little to no ability to influence her husband in life - begging him unsuccessfully not to pawn the mosquito net protecting their baby is just one example of how her lot in life was basically to go along with whatever he did, up to and including abusing her. When he gives her the "medicine" that ends up killing her, she weeps with gratitude, finally envisioning a life where her husband will appreciate her and be kind to their family. But the entire point of this story is not that Iwa is a fragile side-character whose role as an accessory to her husband ends when she dies. She becomes - along with Iemon's other victims - his conscience, and haunts him relentlessly. Something I said in my old review that I will preserve here was that "her power as a woman lies in her ability to persist". To be the itching memory - not even a memory but a physical manifestation. In the final act of the movie, her sister, along with one of Iemon's would-be victims, seeks revenge for Iwa's murder. Women are shown retaliating in ways both spiritual and physical. I love Iwa's keening voice following Iemon wherever he goes, and always calling him "Iemon-dono", using the highly deferential honorific as if to imply, this is the regard I held you in, and what did I get for it?

The atmosphere of dread that permeates this film is created by its masterful cinematography that incorporates surprisingly experimental techniques. Another of my favorite scenes out of the whole thing is when Iemon finally kills Naosuke, and for a split second the lighting goes red, the sound cuts out, and we see him falling into the swamp that they dumped Iwa in, but it's in the middle of a house, recessed into the floor, reeds and foliage invading the room like a double-exposed photograph. Certain things like that and like the mosquito net floating in midair like a classic sheet ghost would absolutely not be out-of-place in an A24 horror movie made today. But the crucial thing about this movie is that it is conservative in its style, that it does mimic traditional theater. It is interesting that this is generally the most highly regarded of the Yotsuya adaptations despite more well-known directors having had a go at it, such as Kenji Misumi, Tai Katō, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Takashi Miike's loose adaptation that is one of my favorites of his.

The Ghost of the Hunchback (1965)

directed by Hajime Sato

Japan

81 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This comes to us from Hajime Sato, director of such bangers as Goke, Bodysnatcher from Hell, the live-action Golden Bat adaptation, Terror Beneath the Sea (which I'm the only fan of), and at least some of the Captain Ultra TV series. Until relatively recently it was apparently considered lost media, or at least the original Japanese audio track was: It survived via Italian dubs, but became obscure in Japan. It's a bit of an odd movie, not quite conforming to the flow of a typical haunted house movie in some ways, but in other ways laying on the haunted house tropes as thick as it possibly can.

The film begins with a woman waking from a dream of her husband's death only to immediately receive news that her husband really did die. From minute one, this movie is jam-packed with gothicness: Darkened windows show us trees twisting and blowing in the wind and rain, crows lurk in the shadows, blood drips everywhere, the very atmosphere seems thick with dread. The title card is played over a half-rotten skeleton that gets shoved in your face, as if you couldn't already tell what kind of a movie you were in for. That the film is in black-and-white adds to this sense of ominousness; even when characters are outside in the woods in the middle of the day, it still feels foreboding. A lawyer arrives to inform the widow, Yoshie, that her husband has left her the key to a rambling old villa, and the approach to the house is as doom-laden as any classic Hollywood gothic has ever been. This is an interesting example of a "house as character" film, wherein the location the human characters are in is as important to the story as the human characters themselves.

Several people eventually end up staying at the villa, including the widowed Yoshie, her father-in-law, the lawyer, and so many others that I had trouble keeping their roles straight in my brain. The house is cared for by a hunchbacked servant, played to pitch-perfection by Kō Nishimura, who is mostly why I wanted to watch this. I know him better from his jidaigeki roles, but as shown in such films as The Living Skeleton, he also plays a really, really good cartoonishly evil bad guy. We're not quite sure what to make of his character in this film at first; he's somewhat taciturn, but doesn't seem threatening apart from having a sinister appearance. I am of course not very fond of this portrayal of physical difference as inherently suspicious, and I only use the original title over the international one ("House of Terrors") because it is a more direct translation. It becomes apparent later in the film that it is necessary to have Nishimura's character look in some way different from his deceased twin brother, but there's plenty of ways that could have been achieved without resorting to a tired, ableist trope. But I digress: Again, Nishimura plays the role really well. And he's part of a slew of classic horror tropes that this movie is full of, although most of them are less offensive than the perennial suspicious hunchback.

Very early on in the film somebody points out that the angles of the house are out of true, and posits that people have been driven mad in similar houses because their subconscious notices something is wrong without them ever fully realizing what it is. I found this interesting because it's brought up once and then never amounts to anything, which is contrary to the rhythm of haunted house movies, where if a logical explanation such as that is ever going to be brought up, it's usually reserved until the very end of the film, when it neatly wraps everything up, not the beginning. And it proves to be wrong, anyway: This house is indeed super haunted, there may be problems with the beams or the foundation, but they're not what's making its residents see ghosts and hear mysterious voices.

Another interesting thing is that for all of its reliance on established ways of creating a spooooky, gothic atmosphere, there's not much that happens in the house that's identifiable as a classic signifier of horror. No creepy skeletons, no pouncing bats (lots of crows, though), no wraiths in the shadows, no weird lab in the basement. The Ghost of the Hunchback uses horror language to deliver a story without any actual already-established horror imagery. The real story of what's happening in the house is very original to this film, a sordid tale involving a man witnessing the death of the woman he loves at the hands of the army and vowing revenge from beyond the grave for what they did to her and eventually to him as well. I cannot help but wonder if the extremely negative portrayal of the military, along with several direct mentions of one of the characters having performed vivisections on Chinese prisoners during the war, is why this movie has fallen into obscurity.

Unfortunately the movie kind of falls off a cliff for the last 20 minutes. It's such a short movie to begin with, and once it gets about an hour in and most of the backstory is finally revealed, it spends the rest of its runtime having the hunchback rip a bunch of women's clothes off and run around the house doing nefarious things. It's actually kind of jarring how much the tone changes from something that had up to then been engaging and going in an intriguing direction to "oh, this is one of those movies where somebody rips a bunch of women's clothes off". Thankfully that stuff is reserved until the end so you get a lot of genuinely ominous, creepy fun beforehand, including some kills that are genuinely a lot more violent than I expected.

Gamera the Brave (2006)

directed by Ryuta Tasaki

Japan

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This movie retcons the Heisei Gamera trilogy as well as pretty much everything else since vs. Gyaos and places us in a version of 2006 where Japan has not seen a kaiju event since Gamera sacrificed itself to defeat Gyaos 30 years prior. The main character is the young son of someone who was himself a boy when that happened, and it's clear that Gamera and stories of Gamera are something that is deeply woven into the pair's lives. Going back to how things were pre-Heisei, children are once again central to this film. This is a coming-of-age story, but to me, it feels like there's a lot here that was intended for the parents watching over their kids' shoulders as much as for the kids themselves.

That being said, though, this also feels more explicitly "for kids" than earlier Gamera films. I think the reason for that is because everything is cute. This movie, being less than 20 years old at time of writing, is more in line with modern tastes and sensibilities than the films that first introduced us to Gamera. I have no problem with cute, and I was in love with the teeny-tiny baby Gamera who we spend most of the movie with, but I think that the insistence that everything made for children has to be in some way cute or stylized is a thing that has come about since Gamera made its debut. In the Showa films, there was not necessarily a lot of cuteness, but what there was was things that were complex and interesting and colorful and made you (if you were a child) want to be in that world and explore it. There's not a lot that's different from our world in the Brave, other than the kaiju. I can't speak for every child, but when I was young, I didn't only want to see things that were adorable, I wanted to see things that made me think in ways I'd never thought before; puzzles and scenarios that felt fresh and new. Something like the kids exploring the Virasian spaceship in vs. Viras and encountering the Virasians themselves, who have glowing eyes and can combine into one giant form, would have felt fresh and memorable to me as a kid. Little bitty hovering Gamera baby, while it is incredibly important and adorable and I loved it, would have felt to kid me like anything else from any other property aimed at kids.

Treatise on adorableness over, with apologies. So one of the things I really liked about this movie is that despite definitely being aimed at a young audience, there's still layers to it. The child protagonist finds a Gamera egg that hatches in his hands, and he takes home and begins to raise the infant Gamera that comes out of it. He gives it the nickname that his mother, now deceased, gave him - Toto, short for Toru. So he identifies himself with this poky creature that is small, doesn't have parents (well, Toru has a good father, but he's quite busy), and needs help getting around. This is something I haven't specifically seen that often: A child personally identifying with Gamera. He gives it the parenting that he wishes he could have had from his mother. The baby of course grows rapidly to abnormal size for a turtle, and it becomes apparent that this is not just a regular turtle, this is a Gamera. Using a kaiju in this instance as a role model is really interesting and works really well: That this creature who's so small can grow into something that can protect and defend other people and the planet is an uplifting message for any insecure young child.

This is where the coming-of-age aspect comes into the film. At some hard-to-define point, external events force the turtle to cease being a small, innocent, helpless creature and propel it into becoming Gamera. To me this felt like a really strong parallel to the moment - often impossible to perceive until afterwards - that a child becomes an adult. This also was one of the things where it felt like the heaviness of it was reserved for the adults watching. To a child, it would still be tragic to see your beloved pet having to go off and do something else without you, but to an adult who has watched or is anticipating watching that moment come for their own children, it carries more weight.

And I think the biggest place where that dual message for both parents and children comes in is at the very core of the film. Toru obviously cares deeply for his Gamera. He doesn't want to let it go, because he knows what his father told him happened 30 years ago, that Gamera died in sacrifice to save humans. As Gamera grows, Toru struggles with the fact that someday it is going to leave him and he's not going to be able to protect it anymore. He loves Gamera and he knows the world needs Gamera, but selfishly, understandably, he doesn't want it to die. You want to let the thing you love grow and see it live a full life, but that comes with the qualification that it will be in danger most if not all of the time.

But this is also an extremely chill film. There's a real summer-y, casual vibe to it. I got the feeling of being a kid on summer break and not really having anything more pressing to do than run around with a bug net. Time feels stretchy and weird and you live in a place that's safe enough (or as a kid, you don't see any danger) for you to just play in the sun all day. The film is so light and airy that I almost didn't like it at first after watching the darker and more urgent Heisei trilogy, but there is so much heart to this that I eventually saw how it is as good as those films, it's just different. As for the suits, which I always talk about, I liked them but wasn't wowed by them. There's something interesting about how visible the humans inside the suit are here compared to the way they were almost entirely hidden in the Heisei films, and how it means that the actor has to put in more work towards actually performing instead of just animating the suit, but despite that I wasn't enamored with the design of either Zedus (a very forgettable semi-aquatic dinosauroid with no backstory) or the refurbed Gamera and its cowlike eyes. 

I think this is the most complaints I've had about a movie I would still say I loved. It's hard not to be won over when something feels as authentic as the sequence in the end where a relay race of children hands off the object Gamera needs to get its second wind back in its fight against Zedus. I should have watched this at a different time, like possibly some time after the potency of the Heisei trilogy had left my system, and with different expectations.

The Blob (1958)

directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr.

USA

86 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I don't know how I've made it this long without having seen The Blob. I have remained fairly unaware of the particulars of it - excepting the blob itself, of course - and therefore I was absolutely unprepared for it to have a jazzy, peppy theme song about the blob playing over the opening credits. I'm very surprised that more is not made of this, because in the world of theme songs for horror movie monsters that have lyrics about the monsters themselves, this might just be the best one. Who wouldn't want to listen to a lounge-y '50s pop song about a blob?

I have to assume that this took at least some small inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft's "Color out of Space". The blob itself may not be as incorporeal as the extraterrestrial force in the story, but it is an extraterrestrial force, and it's amorphous and weird enough that nobody can quite describe it except to call it a "monster". In fact, now I'm thinking of it, I don't think anybody even attempts to describe it; they just stammer and say things like "it's huge, it's getting bigger, it's eating people". The foreignness of the blob renders all classical descriptions of life inapplicable. But anyway, the opening scenes of the film remind me of nothing so much as Lovecraft's "blasted heath" - the meteor coming to rest on the property of some poor dweller in the countryside and him becoming its first victim, the visual of it sitting in its own crater and then transforming when disturbed, it reminds me a lot of Lovecraft but with a stronger visual component.

After the first victim gets blobbed and is transported to a doctor we then are inundated with late-'50s youth culture. Steve McQueen's character, Steve, and his maybe-girlfriend Jane (Aneta Corsault) end up in a poor excuse for a drag race with a couple of the town ne'er-do-wells - these guys will eventually get their redemption and be an important part of the effort to make the townspeople aware of the blob, but for now, all they're doing is trying to see who can drive backwards to a red light faster. There's a bit of whiplash between what we just saw of the blob and the normalcy of a bunch of teenagers doing teenager stuff, but I think it works somehow, because the audience knows that while these characters are preoccupied with their own silly stunts, there's somebody lying on a cot somewhere getting eaten alive by an alien lifeform. The knowledge that that is happening in the background makes us want to grab every character by the shoulders and tell them to get the hell out and stop racing their huge clunky cars around.

But as far removed as this specific strain of youth culture may be to us today, this movie takes pains to situate itself in something that feels like reality. There's a horror movie playing at the town's theater and it seems to be the main source of entertainment for a lot of the teens ("teens"). We should make note of the fact that this movie exists in a world where everyone is familiar with horror movies: It lends a sense of realness to it, like when characters in a zombie movie immediately recognize that they're in a zombie outbreak, just like the ones in the movies, except for real. But The Blob's vision of an alien invasion in a world that is already used to watching horror movies is scarier than that, because this isn't a zombie, it's something nobody has ever seen before and, as I said, they don't even have the words to describe it. A group of people sitting down to watch a horror movie in a theater when a werewolf or a zombie walks in would just be kind of corny, but the people sitting and having a good time watching horrors from what they think is a safe remove, only to be confronted with something huge and inexplicable, is much more potent.

The blob itself is just awful. It remains awful 65 years later. On a personal note, I have a strong texture aversion to things like Jello, yogurt, custard, semi-solid foods like that. I think this may have given me more of a full-body revulsion whenever the blob was onscreen than was intended. It made me want to throw up. I could not stop imagining it in my mouth, touching my skin, all over my body - there's a disturbingly tactile feeling to the blob, granted to it by its nature as a physical, non-CGI object, and it's so enduringly creepy that I totally understand why this traumatized a generation of kids. There's just something so unwholesome about it. It looks like it smells bad. It has no face, no appendages, nothing we can relate to, it's a being of pure want that can't be stopped. We don't know its motives, we don't know where it came from, and we can't kill it. This is a picture of an overconfident humanity being confronted with something that makes us realize our place in the food chain of the universe.

But the thing that makes The Blob a great movie is only in part the actual blob. The thing that makes this a great movie is that it's handled so well and so evenly when compared to other teen screams of the time. Steve McQueen delivers a remarkably naturalistic performance; I totally believed that his character believed there was something roaming around town that was deeply frightening, and his frustration when no one will listen to him is palpable. He doesn't outwardly panic, but you can tell in the way his voice catches when he asks one of the stubborn policeman if he looks like somebody who's lying or somebody who's scared stiff that he really is scared stiff. The horror of this movie is half in the blob and half in trying to get people to believe you about something that sounds completely ridiculous but that you know is real.

(I also really love how insistent the movie is on making sure we know the first victim's little dog is okay. There are so many moments when it leaves the screen and we think for sure it's done for, but every single time, somebody will bring up the dog afterwards and say they saw it running off down the street looking terrified or something. I'm glad that the dog makes it through okay. I think he might now be one of my favorite dogs of film. He's just a little guy. And he's a slippery one to have evaded the blob that whole time.)

When I think about horror movies from the '50s, most of them have a monster that's at least somewhat conventional - it's not that there were no weird monsters, but the movies that were really out there with their creatures are not typically the ones that have gone down as cultural phenomena - except The Blob. Usually it's vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's Monsters, things that we're familiar with; it must have been that sense of the unknown that has kept this movie so compelling for the last 60+ years. But again, the incredibly unique monster design is only a facet of what makes this movie so good; the rest, it owes to tight scriptwriting and empathetic, believable performances. And my god, what a terrifying ending. My one nitpick is that, as other reviewers have said, it could use a little more blob.