Haunted Castle (1969)

directed by Tokuzō Tanaka

Japan

82 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Another entry in the "Kōjirō Hongō getting menaced by ghosts" cinematic universe. I only discovered after watching and enjoying this that I had, in fact, seen it before, and only four years ago, but absolutely nothing of it was retained in my brain. That is not a slight against the film itself, which is very memorable; I've seen over 1,700 horror movies and some of them just don't stick around for whatever reason.

This comes to us from Tokuzō Tanaka, a director whose most well-known credits are probably his Zatoichi films, but he's got a ton of heavy-hitters that are either cult favorites or just favorites. Just to name two out of the reams of stuff in his back catalogue, there's The Snow Woman and The Whale God, the latter of which has been getting some much-overdue attention lately via re-releases and restorations. His straight-up horror works are far and few between, but excellent, the lot of them. Haunted Castle is an adaptation of an old (and I mean very old) legend that has been done by many, many directors; much like Yotsuya Kaidan, the beats are usually the same, although some details may be changed from film to film. The basic story in Haunted Castle goes like this: During a game of Go, a retainer of the wealthy, apparently amoral daimyō of Saga Mansion displeases his lord by pointing out that he totally cheated, and is unceremoniously put to death. The Go incident was likely just a convenient opportunity to kill him off, though, as the retainer was not enthused about the daimyō putting the moves on his sister. Now left with the responsibility of dealing with the aforementioned sister, they choose to strip her of any and all official support, cutting off her income and essentially casting her into the wilderness. The night before this is to happen, however, she chooses to kill herself instead of facing a life of excruciating poverty. After she's stabbed herself through the stomach, she invites her pet cat, Tama, to drink her blood, thereby having the cat absorb a sort of curse from her and become a vessel for her vengeance beyond the grave. (Fun fact: When the play based around this legend was first performed, a member of the actual family depicted as having wrongly executed their retainer filed complaints to get it stopped, but this had the opposite effect of increasing gossip about the legend being true. To put the time spans into context, this is kind of like if a descendent of Lincoln were to campaign against Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.)

The specific way that Haunted Castle depicts this legend is, first and foremost, Scary-with-a-capital-S. I don't mean subjectively scary in that I found myself getting chills from it, but scary as in, this movie does literally everything it possibly can to be as atmospheric, dreadful, ominous, and terrifying as a movie can be. This is what stuck out to me while I was (apparently re-)watching it, because the kind of atmosphere present here is something I really don't see in Japanese horror films of this period, which utilize actual darkness and grotesque imagery a lot less than they do atmospheric music and implications of doom. The horror in this is more along the lines of something I would expect out of Koji Shiraishi or Hideo Nakata or somebody working in more modern times. You can watch things like Illusion of Blood, Kinoshita's Yotsuya Kaidan duology, or any other adaptation of a kabuki play, and not feel like you're watching a horror movie in the same way as you would if you're watching, say, The Exorcist, but this one feels like a horror movie.

(To be pedantic here: I do recognize that plays like Yotsuya Kaidan and the Nabeshima ghost cat story do not belong to the horror genre in the same way The Exorcist does; I'm not referring to their historical presence within a specific genre "canon", simply the response that a modern viewer might have while watching them.)

A lot of that creep factor has to do with lighting, or lack thereof, which is unfortunately also the film's downfall, in a way that's not entirely its fault. Watching this in a dark theater in 1969 would scare the utter pants off of me, but watching it on the small screen in the '20s was just kind of annoying, honestly. It's hard to get the lighting right when you're watching a movie in your own home so that you don't see your own reflection in dark scenes, and almost all of this movie is a dark scene. I think the lighting department should get a lot of credit here, though, because light is placed very deliberately within that darkness in order to achieve maximum creepiness. During scenes when Otoyo is possessed by the cat demon, or when a ghost shows up, light is cast on them that seems to reflect off of them only and then be swallowed up by the darkness of Saga Mansion. The effect is that the spirits or people possessed by spirits feel like they're glowing with an unearthly illumination. It's creepy as hell.

Naomi Kobayashi should also get credit for being one of the fiercest, most terrifying bakeneko I've seen on screen. Once she gets possessed by Tama's spirit, she's nothing but a snarling, yowling, grimacing vengeance machine. We get to see her do things like catch raw fish out of a pond, and Kobayashi nails all of these cat mannerisms with an unsettling grace that really drives home the unnatural nature of the character she's playing. She wasn't in a lot of other movies, and certainly didn't become a "bakeneko actress" like Takako Irie, but her performance here is super creepy. I always love to see women on screen in earlier times who aren't afraid to do "ugly", especially in something like this where we also get to see Otoyo dressed up in all the regalia of a lady of her status before turning into a horrifying cat demon with fangs and golden irises.

I've been watching a lot of kabuki adaptations this month, but this is the first one I've seen that feels like a Halloween-appropriate viewing. Even the title card, with the kanji dripping blood down the screen, informs you that you're in for some thrills and chills. I would probably rate this higher if it had felt more well-rounded, but it really is a movie carried by two major elements (the strength of its ambiance and the strength of its scary-ass bakeneko lady), and while those are important things, I still think it could have been filled out a little bit more around them.