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.