The Bloody Sword of the 99th Virgin (1959)

Original title: Kyûjûkyû-honme no kimusume

Warning: I’ll spoil the hell out of this sixty decades old movie!

There is trouble afoot In a particularly remote part of the Iwate prefecture, a part of Japan that’s apparently seen as the most backwoodsy of places. The area the film is concerned with is dominated by a huge cultural gap between the people of a mountain village and their neighbours in a nearby valley town. Where the population of the latter is thoroughly modern and partially westernized, the mountain folk keep themselves separate, clinging to all kinds of traditional ideas, superstitions and rites, and perhaps worse. Right now, the young-ish new, and certainly not local, priest of a mountain temple is trying to change this and drag his flock into the 20th century. A first step in his campaign (he also seems to have saved the village from an epidemic, buying himself quite a bit of street cred with it) is his refusal to leave the mountain when the once a decade Fire Festival will start in a couple of days. Unlike in the rest of Japan where this is apparently a festival of communal joy and togetherness, these villagers lock themselves away from the spirits on this night, demanding all outsiders like the priest descend into the valley, so not to enrage whatever wanders the night.

There’s something worse than a relatively harmless superstition going on here, though. A hag (says the film) roams the countryside looking at people wrong; two young women from Tokyo disappear. Turns out, the villagers want all outsiders gone from their mountain because their version of the Fire Festival needs virgin sacrifices, the blood of the victims being used to coat a sword made in a tradition secretly kept alive for nearly a thousand years. This year’s sword is supposed to be the last one, a tradition of murder finally fulfilled, but the ladies from Tokyo happen not to fit the virgin part of the sacrifice, so the village needs to get ahold of some proper virgins stat – but only the blood of outsiders is allowed.

Eventually, after quite a bit of death and mystification, and with the assistance of an expert in traditional sword smithing techniques, the police (among them a very young looking Bunta Sugawara) begin figuring out what has been going on under the townies’ noses for centuries.

Apparently, the portrayal of the mountain folk in Morihei Magatani’s Bloody Sword did not go over well with various advocates at the time, and so it is one of those Japanese films that weren’t actually banned but were seldom or never shown out of self-censorship. From here in Germany, and after decades of backwoods horror and folk horror, the portrayal of the mountain populace is not terribly offensive. At the very least, every larger character from up top is portrayed with as much, sometimes more, actual characterisation and shows motives beyond “is crazy mountain person”, and they are treated as people even when they sacrifice women in creepy cult rituals. There may very well be some racial stuff going on here I don’t get from my comfy chair in Germany, of course.

On a metaphorical level, and very much keeping in the spirit of the body of works we now call folk horror, Bloody Sword is a film about the past and its traditions as something dangerous and poisonous that, having hidden itself for a time, comes back to the surface during the course of the film. Tradition here means a rejection of change, and an utter conviction that doing inhumane things and causing suffering is one’s duty when tradition demands it, instead of a reason to turn away from these traditions and change. Which is obviously a theme rather important in Japanese post-war cinema even outside of folk horror, though generally treated with rather more ambiguity. Of course, virgin sacrifices are not a terribly ambiguous thing, ethically speaking, last time I looked.

As is absolutely typical of Japanese commercial cinema of this era, the film contains a bunch of wonderfully shot and staged sequences. Magatani (a director with whom I am unfortunately completely unacquainted outside of this film) is an equally adept director of quietly poetic shots of people wandering down a mountain path as he is of the very effectively creepy cult rituals, going from scenes of dramatic dialogue to those of bloodied victims of murder with what feels like natural ease. The grand finale even contains some very adeptly done action, with bow-wielding cultists fighting a force of policemen who eventually pack out machine guns (just in case you haven’t gotten the “tradition vs modernity” memo by this point). Which is not the typical climax to a folk horror film. But then, the film then ends on the surviving policemen honouring the graves of the people they killed, while the surviving villagers look on sullenly and more than a little shell-shocked. The past clearly has added another thing that won’t stay buried to its arsenal, even if things are peaceful, for now, and the present has taken quite a toll as its own kind of sacrifice from these people.

The way on which we get to this point is moody and interesting, sometimes quietly creepy, with dramatic conflicts that always try to provide a bit more complexity to issues and characters than their standard trope treatment needs. A sense of disquiet, and perhaps guilt, subtly hangs over everything.