Black Cat Mansion (1958)

directed by Nobuo Nakagawa

Japan

67 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I have not seen as many bakeneko movies as I should, so I decided to watch a few of them this month to fix that. This particular one is directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, who's best known for Jigoku, which is regarded as one of the best Japanese horror films of all time, but he's also a prolific director of other horror and mystery titles (as well as some episodes of Ultraman Leo, which is... weird). At a little under 70 minutes, I was thinking I wouldn't have enough to say about this to warrant a full review, but to my surprise Black Cat Mansion is so good that I do have some things I want to talk about.

I was immediately taken in by the first post-opening-credits scene because I was honestly not expecting anything about this film to be so creepy in such a specific way. A review that I had glanced at mentioned Hammer horror, and so I was set up for something gothic and maybe slightly overwrought, but above all not truly creepy - just an embellished, deliberately showy type of horror, which itself is enjoyable, but is not what I saw. We watch masked doctors slowly wheel a presumably deceased body across the frame as the camera drifts up stairs, down a hallway, and towards an office, its field of vision illuminated only by the circle of a flashlight beam. This is so arrestingly eerie that it feels like something out of Silent Hill. And none of this is ever brought up again - the doctor from this scene is one of the main characters, but we don't see him actually practicing in a hospital setting outside of that first scene. So that whole sequence was almost like this non sequitur that let me know I was in for something with some real atmosphere.

After that, the film begins with a husband and wife in the process of moving to a derelict mansion, belonging in some distant way to their family line, that had sat abandoned for some time. The wife has tuberculosis and has to relocate to somewhere with a better climate. There's no kind of overly dramatic "I hate it here, this house is scary" whining like there usually is in horror movies (the myriad of them) that start when a family moves into a new, old house, but the wife obviously doesn't like it, and for good reason: It is scary. The shoji screens are all broken, it's covered in cobwebs, and everything looks out of place. It's still standing, and the shell of it is supposedly sturdy, but it's a place that from the first glance you can tell is filled with bad emotions and troubled history. The film is too economical to spend a lot of time on giving us any kind of elaborate tour of the house, but the shots that we do see are enough to establish the hauntedness of the mansion.

The entire reason why I wanted to review this film is because I'm obsessed with the camerawork and I want to talk about it. For many scenes, the camera doesn't remain static as the actors perform in front of it in a confined space, like a stage play. Instead, it drifts around fluidly, as if it's floating in midair, and the viewer watches the backs of the actors' heads, voyeuristically, like we're unwilling co-conspirators to the ghosts that haunt them. The "monster POV" shot is by no means unconventional or rare in horror cinema, but the slow and methodical way the camera moves around the frame, subtly fluctuating height between head-level and looking down on the actors, adds something deeply sinister.

Despite its scant running time, half or more of Black Cat Mansion is taken up by a period-piece drama that explains the macabre history of the mansion. This diversion into history is so important that, in the opening credits, the cast is actually broken up into "Present Day" and "Historical Drama". The historical drama is no less interesting than the present-day situation, and this is where the excellent camerawork and cinematography comes in again: While the present is either in black-and-white or a muddy, nearly monochrome greyish-blue, the parts of the film that take place in the past are in vivid color. This is an absolutely fascinating choice because I'm used to the past being depicted in black-and-white to get the message across that it is the past - but the message here is that when a story is told over and over again it becomes somehow more real than real, all the details become sharp, the colors bright and lurid. The modern-day characters trudge through the screen bogged down by health problems and a looming cat spirit, but in the past, people were ruled by hatred, desire, anger, and vengeance. In the world's tensest game of gō, the camera pushes in and moves back, pushes in and moves back, rhythmically, giving the scene a feeling of stress in a physical way instead of just letting the actors carry the whole of it. This kind of inclusion of the motion of the camera into the overall framing of the film is really inventive and not something I see often at all.

There is a sense of deep gothic horror to this that makes it all just so ghastly, I love it. The story of what happened in the house is such classic horror stuff because this is classic horror. You see in this a ton of tropes that would be carried through to Japanese horror in the present. Spoilers for a 64-year-old movie: Someone getting murdered and then walled up in a house, his mother cursing the family line of his killer for all time, transmitting the curse down the ages through the grudgeful spirit of a cat - that's all so good. It's not a complicated story and it's not hard to understand it or see where it's going, but it's executed so well, so artfully, and with such a real feeling of weightiness and proper drama that it hits in just the right way. Like I said, I haven't seen many bakeneko films yet, but I think this is probably one of the better among them.