Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Preface: True Story of the Ghost of Yotsuya (2014)

directed by Kōji Shiraishi

Japan

71 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of Yotsuya Kaidan and I love to see how it's handled through all the different adaptations of it that there are. I have not seen very many modern adaptations, however (Over Your Dead Body excepted, which is one of my favorite horror movies) and especially not one done in a found-footage style by possibly Japan's finest found-footage director.

I've reviewed at least one of these Senritsu Kaiki File movies before, so I'll run through the basics of the series pretty quickly: the setup is that there's a team who investigates videos of apparently paranormal phenomena that are sent in to them by viewers, but where this series differs from other ghost-investigation found-footage (besides Shiraishi putting his usual spin on it, which I'll get to later) is that the leader of the team is genuinely unhinged, and his crew seems to stick with him largely out of fear. This is... not quite played for laughs, but there's definitely some kind of absurdist humor going on here.

The paranormal video that the team is sent in this film comes from another film crew who were in the middle of making a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation, but believed they'd provoked Oiwa's spirit because they didn't perform the proper purification ritual that's necessary to do before putting on a Yotsuya Kaidan production. (Note: I don't know if this is actually a thing.) The video is kinda bogus: all it is is what might be a floating head behind an actress wearing gyaru makeup. The team investigates the actress who was in the video and gets chased away with a knife when they find her, and then they look into another crew member from the art department, whose house also seems to be haunted. It becomes clear that none of the locations they visit is the problem, though - the problem is that Oiwa's spirit has attached itself to Ichikawa, co-host of the show.

I gotta say this really feels like The Ichikawa Movie™. Ichikawa undergoes a grueling exorcism to attempt to remove Oiwa's spirit from her, during which time she becomes possessed by it. Chika Kuboyama's performance in this scene gave me the impression that this was something she'd been holding back this entire time and only now was she given the chance to actually do some acting. It's kind of amazing.

I wouldn't recommend this for someone purely interested in the Yotsuya Kaidan connection, because it doesn't really focus that heavily on the play or its backstory, but what it does instead makes it even more interesting. The film posits that Oiwa is a fictional character who has been brought into a physical existence by the collective imagination: one of the film's more genuinely creepy moments is a surprisingly low-key interview with a scholar who elaborates on how a ghost story that is believed by enough people can gain the power to manifest itself in reality. But the film then takes a left turn and says that Oiwa is just a puppet, that there's something older and more terrible using her as a kind of conduit to enter our world. As always, the metafictional element of this series allows for some really fascinating explorations of the nature of ghost stories and how they influence reality, but you do have to put up with Shiraishi's quirks in order to enjoy it.

I have no trouble with said quirks, because I've already been a huge fan of Shiraishi's for a long time, but... the best way I can put it is like this: imagine you have a friend who is really, really good at telling scary stories. He has a huge repertoire and he's excellent at creating atmosphere, and all your friends get really into it whenever you're sat around a campfire or whatever listening to him tell a story. No two of them are the same - he has a great talent for inventing new stories. But every story ends with your friend talking about how there's a parallel dimension that's filled with worms. The things he has to say about the worm dimension are as creepy and engaging as the preceding story itself, but the worm dimension is always there. Some of your friends don't mind, because they find the worm dimension to be an interesting topic, and your friend is so good at telling his stories about it that it's hard to find fault. But some of your other friends just go "ugh, he's going off about the worm dimension again."

That's Kōji Shiraishi. You have to put up with the worms to watch his movies. They are always there. Always.

Summer of Demon (1981)

directed by Yukio Ninagawa

Japan

96 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I've mentioned on here before that I'm really into Yotsuya Kaidan and am always looking for screen adaptations of it that I haven't seen. Unfortunately I will never be able to watch them all due to the sheer amount of Japanese films from the early 20th century that were destroyed during WWII (if I had a stereotypical lamp genie, the first thing I'd do after getting it to grant me infinite wishes would be to ask it for a copy of Shōzō Makino's adaptation) but there are a good many of them that survive, and they still continue to be made.

One of the things that caught my eye about Summer of Demon was that it had comedic elements. (There are definitely comedy versions of Yotsuya Kaidan out there, but not a ton of them.) The other thing that made me want to see it was Renji Ishibashi in the role of Naosuke. I feel like Naosuke's role is the real wild card of any Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation: some films play him up as diabolically, remorselessly evil; some make him out to be almost a goofball; some have him just be a shady grifter, looking for money and not much else. More on Naosuke's role in this specific adaptation in a moment.

Another thing I think I mentioned in one of my Yotsuya Kaidan reviews is that there is a spectrum of Iemon Nastiness™ that fluctuates throughout these films. Some of the most compelling are ones like Keisuke Kinoshita's version, where Iemon very clearly did love Oiwa at some point and is more of a bystander in a process that he is horrified by than a murderous, adulterous husband. The Iemon of Summer of Demon is somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. I would say he leans further and further into cruelty the more you think about him, though: he's not concerned with Oiwa's safety and well-being as a person and as his wife, just whether or not he's able to possess her for himself. To this end, he kills her father early on in the film to get him to stop asking Iemon to give her back. What's interesting is that Iemon actually seems to see everything coming: he says that he's concerned about people "interfering" with their life, and outright declares that he has to protect Oiwa, to protect their family, but protecting her, to him, is less about her protection and more about his strength and his ability to protect as a man.

And surprisingly, while he is a murderer and a general scumbag, Iemon is not the one to kill Oiwa. He's fine with it when he learns that the father of his new bride has started slowly poisoning Oiwa, and continues to make sure she takes the poison, but when Oiwa dies, it's an accident. I think a lot of Iemon's torment comes, therefore, from knowing that his hand was not on the sword that killed her; he could have stepped in to stop the process of her death, but didn't.

One of my favorite scenes in this is when Iemon, Oiwa, and Oume all go to watch a play together that appears to actually be a version of Yotsuya Kaidan. This exemplifies how oblivious the characters are to the cycle that they're caught up in. If you want to get deeper into symbolism, the figure in the play who is suffering what Oiwa would later suffer is scarred over her left eye, while Oiwa's illness affects her right eye - the play is a mirror that no one recognizes themselves in.

Back to Naosuke - I don't think I can recall having seen a version of Yotsuya Kaidan in which Naosuke and Iemon are contrasted this much as characters. Iemon is uncomfortable in the shabby, poor life of a ronin, but Naosuke actively wants that life. Naosuke doesn't care that he isn't a samurai anymore: he's done with that, would rather hang out at brothels and marry a pretty girl no matter her status. Iemon jumps at the chance to regain some standing by marrying a noblewoman who is obsessed with him - never mind that he already had a wife. Both of them kill someone in the first act of the film, and their reactions could not be more different: Iemon retains some of his samurai mindset in that he goes about the killing of Oiwa's father with a modicum of formality, but Naosuke kills a guy practically just for kicks and then laughs hysterically about it - and it's not even the guy he meant to kill. Iemon is amoral and conscience-haunted; Naosuke is amoral and having a great time, thank you very much.

Ishibashi steals the show in every scene he's in, by the way; Kenichi Hagiwara - former lead singer of The Tempters - as Iemon is good, but I didn't feel like he brought much depth to the role.

The cinematography is surprisingly gorgeous even when watched as a poor-quality webrip. There is one scene where Iemon's retinue of ne'er-do-wells are all running around a brothel as viewed from above, and then it cuts to an aerial shot of a group of women holding umbrellas - the jagged, squareish hallways of the brothel immediately giving way to the perfect circles of the umbrellas - and honestly, that was so, so visually satisfying. I personally prefer my jidaigeki dark as hell, so the comedy elements in this felt a little jarring, but it's balanced out by the fact that this is a really well-made film in all respects. Yukio Ninagawa is apparently mostly known for his Japanese-language adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, which makes a lot of sense.

The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1956)

directed by Masaki Mōri

Japan

86 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I'm a big Yotsuya Kaidan fan. I'm immensely fascinated by all the different retellings of the story and the spin every director who handles it puts on it, as well as the meaning the story can take on depending on who tells it, and the meaning a viewer can give to it that it may not have originally had. Although the framework stays consistent, the details change a little from film to film. As such, there's no way to really say that a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation is "standard fare", but... Masaki Mōri's Ghosts of Yotsuya feels like pretty standard fare, and I mean that (mostly) in a good way.

I'm kind of interested in Mōri as a director because there's not much information about him out there. His short Japanese Wikipedia article says he died of overwork at only 55. He directed a respectable amount of films, but the only two that have ever been subtitled (not that getting subtitled is a measure of worth, it just makes films accessible to a wider audience) are this one and Ghost Story: Depth of Kagami, which I've seen and which is a decent movie, but no great shakes. Even this movie is fairly obscure; I couldn't find it online, but I received a DVD as a gift, and the third-party distributor (Sinister Cinema) who put it out seems to be the only place you can get it. To make matters more confusing, the synopsis on the distributor's website is for this, the 1956 movie, but the poster on the cover of the DVD is for Nobuo Nakagawa's version! I'm quite happy with the DVD, the print is very crisp and the subtitles are good, but as usual, I am begging distributors who release any adaptation of Yotsuya Kaidan to use a serif font for the subs.

The story in Ghosts of Yotsuya begins amid fireworks, and is told in such a way that details at the outset are relatively scarce, but more of the past is revealed as the film goes on. This is one of the more upstanding Iemons I've seen, which is another interesting variation: there's kind of a spectrum of Iemon Nastiness™ throughout the adaptations, where on one end he's almost a bystander in a murder plot that he becomes guilty of by association, and on the other end he is the one who kills Iwa directly. Here, Iemon loves Iwa, but his family isn't happy with her, and wants him to marry a much wealthier woman, Ume. He refuses, and Ume's family won't accept simply sending her to him as a mistress, so everyone is at odds about what to do. Whether Iemon genuinely does love Iwa or simply feels a sense of duty to her out of guilt for killing her father - a fact which, somewhat entertainingly, everybody knows except for Iwa - is a little ambiguous, but he does seem to feel genuine regret at the way things turned out at the end. Usually in these movies Iemon is pushed to act by the people around him, which is the case here. His own mother is out for blood, explicitly commanding him to grow a spine and kill Iwa. Naosuke's as amoral as ever, of course, and goes cheerfully along with the plot, but in this case it's Iemon's family who's the real impetus for most of what happens.

The big reason why I wanted to watch this was to see Tomisaburō Wakayama in a very early role. He would play Iemon again, much more amorally, in Tai Katō's 1961 The Tale of Oiwa's Ghost. As with most everyone else, his performance is very stiff - at least until Iemon's big freakout at the end, which is the best part of the movie - and it's funny to see him basically just doing a job, considering how distinctive an actor he eventually would be. He's got a full face of heavy makeup and looks quite a lot like his brother here.

There are some adaptations of Yotsuya Kaidan that feel like they're attempting to be ghost stories, and some - notably Keisuke Kinoshita's version - that feel like they want to be a character study and nothing else. I think this leans a bit more towards the "character study" side. Iemon is somebody who is constantly being pulled at from all sides and doesn't seem to have enough of a concept of self to figure out his own morals. One of the things that drives him in any adaptation is self-hatred; his resentment at his own low birth limiting his station, and his fall into poverty making him irritated with his life and in turn his family. After she dies and begins haunting Iemon, Iwa makes explicit a really interesting point that I never really thought about: by killing her (directly or indirectly) and their child, and joining Ume's family, he ends his own family line, forever. Iemon basically dooms himself from the start of the story, and everything that happens between then and the end is a long, protracted journey where he drags everybody around him down with him. As I said, his breakdown when Iwa and the masseur return from the dead is the high point of the film, and it bleeds out to Naosuke too, who seems to be less tortured by conscience and more just wanting to get all the ghosts to quit bothering him. Interestingly, Sode, who's usually more of a peripheral character, does not mess around in this one. She finds out Naosuke had a part in the murder of her sister and immediately comes at him with a huge knife.

This movie isn't bad by any means, but it felt much longer than it actually is. It goes through all the beats at all the right times, but aside from an unusually sober, reasonable Iemon, it doesn't feel too remarkable in terms of addition to the story. But I still love watching these, and I'll continue to hunt down all of them that I can find. I would love to see more from this director as well, especially any other ghost story films he has.

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 05: The Most Terrifying Movie In History (2014)

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

80 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Oh boy. 

I'm watching these out of order because they can be a bit hard to find and continuity doesn't seem to be too much of an issue. I'm not exactly sure how many there are, but I can't imagine there'd be a lot more of them after this one, because of... well, the way that it is. I tried to avoid spoilers in my review of Shivering Ghost, but I'm going to make no such effort here. It's just too complicated to dance around everything that happens. Depending on translation, the full title of this movie is something like "Terribly Scary and Weird Files: The Most Terrifying Movie in the World". You can't lose with a name like that.

So the setup is the same as the past films: a documentary crew producing a show where they investigate the weirdest, creepiest videos they can find is sent a new video, this time from a fan who goes into a notoriously haunted village specifically to shoot something to send the crew. His girlfriend disappears, and when the crew tracks him down, he attempts to kill himself in front of them and then disappears as well. The crew ventures into the village themselves, and from then on it goes in so many different directions that I can't sum it all up in one paragraph.

Right off the bat I was not as enthused with the supernatural stuff here as I have been with the previous two Senritsu Kaiki films I've seen. Compared to everything else, the wispy ghost hands erupting from people's mouths and grabbing their heads just feels a little wishy-washy. The thing I've come to expect from Koji Shiraishi is imagery that's jarring and unfamiliar; the ghost hands feel like something I've seen before. Even the investigation into the village is kind of boring, with the exception that somebody claims it to be the birthplace of the writer of Yotsuya Kaidan, who they allege was also a black magician and is somehow involved with the current extremely haunted state of the village. But it's all very routine: pixelated footage of what we're supposed to believe are severed animal heads and bloody body parts, people screaming, getting possessed, that kind of thing. I should note that there's a real-life idol in this film, who shows off her actual gravure books and whatnot that you can actually buy. I have no idea why she's there and neither does she. She mentions that the film crew paid her specifically to go along with them but that she thought she was doing some kind of variety show. No concrete explanation for her presence is ever provided. Along with her, they have an exorcist from a previous film, and a scientist who is clearly not buying any of the crew's nonsense. Kudo, his cohost Ichikawa, and their three guests each apply their own unique method of investigation to the haunted village.

And then this movie loses its entire mind. I'd started running out of patience for what had been a sparse depiction of silly possessions and bad CGI ghost hands when The Most Terrifying Movie in History took its first hard turn into the bizarre and then took about thirty more. We find out that Kudo, the host of the investigation show, is connected to the village via his parents, who were scientists working there on a project to create enormous, demonic super-soldiers during WWII. (For some reason these soldiers must be girls, hence why Kudo himself didn't get turned into one. Also they're naked.) Kudo brought along another weird talisman, which ended up merging with his body and eventually causing him to get sucked into the worm dimension (second Shiraishi film I've seen that involves somebody getting sucked into the worm dimension) where he witnesses his cohost being decapitated and is transported to the past. He meets his parents and his child self, and after failing to convince his parents to stop their research, he murders both of them. This doesn't seem to do anything to stop the giant ghosts of the super-soldiers from escaping the village, which leads to one of the most memorable final shots I've seen from a filmmaker whose most recognizable signature is memorable final shots. All that is only a quick rundown of what happens in this film.

It's pretty clear now that the backbone of this series is Kudo. He's unhinged in a way that is hard to describe. The completely deadpan way he's played by Shigeo Ôsako makes him feel real-life unhinged, not movie-unhinged. He does seem to have real human feelings - he attempts to stop a guy from cutting his own throat, and appears concerned when the exorcist disappears - but he also just straight-up kills at least three people. He might be self-aware, at least a little: someone asks him if he's an idiot and he says "maybe". Kudo's kind of terrifying because there's no trigger when he goes sicko mode. He's just constantly ready to punch people and beat them with aluminum baseball bats at a moment's notice with no preparation. His film crew are visibly scared of him but for some reason keep going along with whatever he does. I think they're afraid to leave him alone for fear of what else he might do. There are very few characters who feel as bonkers as Kudo. He also becomes a kyodai hero by the end of the movie, so yeah. Ultraman Kudo.

I really don't know what to make of this one. It devolves into chaos harder and in more directions simultaneously than maybe any other Shiraishi film I've seen. I would say that the actual paranormal stuff feels somewhat subdued, but "subdued" is not quite the right word - it feels different because it's taken to the macro scale. This is where the weirdness breaches containment, and now there's a bunch of giants roaming around the country, and all the characters are trapped in the worm dimension. It's no longer just a haunting, it's everyone's problem, and that makes it feel a little less personal and a little less creepy. But for sheer insanity factor, for the Kudo Method taken to its (il)logical extreme, you can't beat this. Unless you can. I still haven't seen all of these movies. And there's something to be said about how the restraints of budget do not keep Shiraishi from crafting something with as much impact and complexity as anything else. It shows that if you're dedicated enough, the medium of film can be used in pretty much limitless ways.

Apologies if this review is not quite up to snuff. I'm working on something.

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.

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.