aka Devil’s Pit
Original title: 怪談せむし男
Yoshie (Yuko Kusunoki) finds that a nightmare about the death of her husband comes true on her awakening. Of course, he has been spending the last years as an incurably insane patient of his own father (Takeshi Kato, I believe, which is the best I can do with the credits situation of the film), and by older horror movie rules, this means he’s physically less than fit, too. The situation doesn’t improve for Yoshie in any case: during the funeral service, she hears a terrible creaking noise from her husband’s coffin, and on opening it, finds his teeth gnashed around the stem of a chrysanthemum; during the cremation, she believes to hear him scream. And right afterwards, a lawyer (Kazuo Kato) gives her the key to a villa her husband owned she never knew about. Apparently, he started on his way to screaming insanity while staying there, she is informed.
On what appears to be the same or at leas the very next day, Yoshie visits the “villa”, a place that turns out to be an improbably creepy western-style mansion in the middle of nowhere, whose only inhabitant now is a hunchbacked keeper (Ko Nishimura) with various disquieting habits, of which a tendency to appear and disappear without a sound is only the beginning. Soon, the hunchback tells Yoshie that the last time he saw her husband, he was grasping the naked corpse of a woman, but all attempts by her to get some straight, sensible information beyond creepy insinuations out of the man go nowhere. She is soon enough distracted by various frightening phenomena anyway: doors open and close without reason, an improbable wind seems to blow through parts of the building, and disembodied voices scream.
Yoshie has invited reinforcements for her stay in the house, but things only become more intense once her husband’s sleazy father – whose first step right after the cremation of his soon will be to try and bully Yoshie into a marriage with himself –, the husband’s niece Kazuko (Yoko Hayama) – apart from Yoshie the only innocent here – and the father’s younger subordinate doctor arrive. Rather a lot of murder and madness are waiting for absolutely everyone, innocent and guilty alike.
For quite some time, the Japanese version of Hajime Sato’s (also the director of Golden Bat and Goke, so clearly getting my vote) was supposed to have been lost, with only an Italian dub of the film floating around. By now, there’s a decent version of the Japanese original available to those interested, with – rather difficult – subtitles based on the Italian dub. So now there’s hope to perhaps sometimes get some sort of true Blu-ray version of what I believe to be a true classic.
The film was clearly inspired by Italian gothic horror (and given the Italian dub version, gave the favour right back) but sometimes also seems to prefigure that arm of the giallo influenced by the crueller arm of classic land house mysteries. At least, this is most certainly a film full of perfectly abhorrent bourgeois and upper class people who seem to have no morals whatsoever. The dead husband’s father is the most obvious example of the type, with his early designs on his daughter-in-law (whom he spied on having sex with his son through a peephole when she visited him in the hospital, too), the character of a rapist sleaze, and a background as Japanese medical war criminal.
While he might be the worst of the bunch, only Yoshie and Kazuko are innocent – or at the very least likeable – while everyone else is a grasping schemer who really deserves to be ripped apart by the film’s supernatural forces. Of course, this being a film about the Japanese kind of curse, the innocents aren’t going to be spared, either, the film ending on a series of pretty astonishing scenes that aren’t just ruthless but utterly without mercy towards any of the characters. Even the one whose body is the tool through which the film’s central curse does its work is a victim, of course, caught up and used by forces he has no defence against whatsoever. So expect a very early version of the most depressing 70s downer ending you can imagine going in.
The early parts of the film are pure gothic, Sato creating a dense mood of the macabre out of deep contrasts between light and darkness, so many Dutch angles the mansion might actually be situated in the Netherlands, a couple of scenes borrowed (cough) from Robert Wise’s The Haunting, and some many noises and screams. On the way to the finale we’ll also encounter an intense séance by an actual wandering shamanistic medium (which ends very badly for the medium, but why should she have it better than anyone else here?), encounter scenes that turn the sexual subtext running through much of gothic horror into text in a way only a Japanese movie could get away with quite this extremely in the mid-60s, and find characters dying in horrible ways again and again.
Sato’s as great at the more explicit moments of the film as he his at the subtle mood building, the ero guro, and the subtly macabre, so the last act of the film turns into an incredibly intense series of horrible events, the mood becoming outright hysterical before things end very badly indeed for everyone. It’s really fantastic, and suggests itself as a hidden connection between the Gothic and the more nihilistic and brutal horror that would come to dominate the 70s the world around.
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