#onibaba

Onibaba 鬼婆 (1964) dir. Kaneto Shindô

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Here's a double feature from the same director, a fact I didn't realize until after we'd started watching.

Onibaba (1964) written and directed by Kaneto Shindo, is a Japanese historical thriller with a hint of the supernatural. It's about a civil war in medieval Japan, where two women live in the middle of nowhere and kill soldiers to steal their armor and weapons for money. They are linked by one dead soldier -- they are respectively the guy's widow and his mother -- and they don't like each other much. A neighbor, Hachi, hooks up with the daughter-in-law, which pisses off the mom because she blames him for her son's death, so she decides to retaliate by, uh, pretending to be a ghost-demon to frighten her away. Except maybe she actually is a little bit possessed by the mask she's wearing, which she pilfered off a corpse.

The film ends rather abruptly and ambiguously, and I get the sense that I would have gotten more out of it if I knew more Japanese history and from this time period, and more about Buddhism generally. It is beautifully shot, though, even if most of the visuals are just "tall grass being atmospherically creepy". But I quite liked the pitch-black humor of it.

Shindo's second film of the night is Kuroneko (1968), also set during a civil war in feudal Japan (the same one?) but this time it's about vengeful spirits (onryo) of women who were raped and murdered by a band of samurai. They're now possessed by a cat, I guess? and run a magical-illusionary brothel where they lure unsuspecting samurai and kill and eat them.

It's a pretty sweet gig, until we get to the part where a samurai returns home to his wife and mother (are we sensing a theme here) only to find them having come down with a bad case of the "we're cat ghosts now." That poses something of a conflict of interests because he's been instructed to kill whoever is responsible for killing everybody, and they have a pact with the underworld to kill samurai, soooo....