The Ghost Man (1954)

Original title: Yurei otoko

After a blood-drinking artist with very bad teeth and some missing fingers escapes from an asylum, a series of murders of young women strikes Tokyo.

The killer loves to pose his victims artistically/creepily, and has a habit of declaring his future plans via tape messages or public announcement systems like a proper supervillain. He seems to be particularly interested in the women working in a nude model shop that for some reason is also the favourite hang-out of a club focussed in the grotesque and the weird (with no mention of sexy young ladies in their name).

Eventually, great private detective Kosuke Kindaichi (Seizaburo Kawazu) starts taking an interest in the case, which doesn’t bode well for our hobby artist.

If you’re like me and working with the knowledge a handful of – mostly Kon Ichikawa-directed – movies adapting the Kindaichi novels by Seishi Yokomizo from the 70s, you might be surprised to find this adaptation of a Yokomizo work from the mid-50s, as directed by Motoyoshi Oda. As a matter of fact, the Japanese film industry started on the series early, with the first Kindaichi movie having been made in 1947, barely a year after the first novel had been published. Alas, most of these film have neither official releases outside of Japan, nor have heroic fan subtitlers gone to work on the films - except for this one.

Again, if you know only the 70s films and the slow trickle of Yokomizo novels that is being translated into English via Pushkin Vertigo, you’ll probably be as surprised by the style and content of the film at hand as I was. For where the Yokomizo works I know are pretty great, and somewhat self-conscious, whodunnits of the impossible crime persuasion, Ghost Man is a bit of potboiling romp through dark back alleys, featuring a pulp supervillain of a style comparable to those masked maniacs haunting the German Edgar Wallace adaptations at the same time. Sure, the killer’s identity is still in question, and Kindaichi gets to do a bit of traditional detecting, but this is very much more of a pulp affair, even ending with a dramatic rooftop scene. How much of this comes from an actual change in approach by Yokomizo himself, and how much of it is the film taking rather a lot of liberties with the material is anybody’s guess, if “anybody” lives outside of Japan, because there’s no version of the book this adapts available outside of Japan.

Though, given how different this version of Kindaichi is not only from the very eccentric character from the Ichikawa cycle but also the character as described in earlier novels, and turns a socially somewhat strange guy dressed in a shabby yukata into a suave dude wearing some sharp bits of the latest fashion, I wouldn’t be surprised if the original were a very different beast indeed.

I think it is worth setting aside the question of adaptation and taking The Ghost Man for the kind of fast and sometimes pleasantly weird thriller bordering (as is actually rather typical of Yokomizo as I know his work by now) on horror it is, however, for it works rather well as the kind of potboiler it is supposed to be. The film goes from one moodily shot and staged set piece of increasing grotesquery to the next with quite some pace, satisfies with slight but effective action sequences and the typically always at least decent acting of Japanese studio cinema of the era, and really does everything to create exactly the kind of somewhat outré mood the gentlemen’s club in it should find endearing in a work of art. In fact, when it comes to the presentation of most of the titular villain’s victims, things not only get outré but also surprisingly explicit for the time. The film already seems to be halfway to putting the erotic grotesque (ero-guro) of literature and manga on screen like rather a lot of Japanese movies would do come the following decade, the killer’s “artworks” showing this in a aesthetically interesting as well as creepy manner, and Oda making of it as much as he can get away with. Which, as it turns out, is quite a lot.