31 Days of Hell: Jigoku (1960) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Janus Films

Japanese film director Nobou Nakagawa, best known for his folk horror influenced Japanese thrillers made between the 1950s and 60s, had already built up a formidable oeuvre before arriving upon his gargantuan 1960s horror epic Jigoku aka Hell or The Sinners of Hell.  Though arriving on the heels of such Japanese genre classics as the anthological Kwaidan and the erotic ghost story horror Onibaba, the film was unique at the time for being significantly more graphic in terms of blood and gore than any other Japanese horror film up to that point. 

 
Tragically the film nearly went down with the bottomless pit being depicted as Shintoho Studios was facing bankruptcy and soon Jigoku turned out to be the company’s last project before dissolving completely.  For decades this overwhelmingly visual masterwork remained unseen outside of Japan until the good folks at the Criterion Collection came along and rescued it from almost certain oblivion, finally giving western and international audiences a chance to see whether or not French provocateur Gaspar Noe was right about this being “far more visual than Bava or Argento”.
 
Opening on a surreal and provocative cacophony of abstract imagery hinting at the inferno to come, the story zeroes in on an ensemble cast of characters headed by student Shiro (Shigeru Amachi) and his mercurial possibly criminal friend Tamura (Yoichi Numata).  After a fatal hit-and-run accident involving a mobster leading towards numerous fellow gangsters and double-crossing elders, the film gradually takes every character it comes into contact with deep into the endless abyss for which the film has achieved cinematic infamy.  Plunging into a Boschian phantasmagorical underworld of carnage, torture, grotesque oppressive landscapes and giant demonic gatekeepers who dole out a myriad of eternal damnations for the characters.

 
Stunningly photographed in lush panoramic widescreen by Mamoru Morita with a disturbing and occasionally desperate score by Chumei Watanabe which fluctuates freely between avant-garde, jazz and the theremin, Jigoku is truly an awesome visual epic which predated the many extreme horrors to come in the 1970s and 80s world cinema scene.  Designed to be a slice of sensory overload with overwhelming gross and disgusting but oddly beautiful vistas of rivers of pus, entrails and gnashing of bloody teeth shown in claustrophobic close-up, Jigoku is as close to being a straight-laced Japanese adaptation of Dante’s Inferno as any Asian filmmaker up to that time had attempted.
 
Though performances across the board are strong with the cast and much of the film’s crew making up the extras, most of the film’s staying power lies with the production design team who were working under the gun in a state of emergency trying to quickly crank out the picture under the threat of bankruptcy.  Against a low budget with many of the film’s sets created by simply covering preexisting film sets on the Shintoho backlot with dirt, Jigoku nevertheless achieves a vastness of the ever-amorphous Satanic landscape changing throughout as the characters descend varying circles of Hell.  Watching the film one gets the feeling we’re in the presence of a production as ornate and time consuming as Kwaidan but in actuality the work itself came together rather quickly.

Courtesy of Janus Films

 
Initially panned by Japanese critics before dying a quiet death at the box office, in the years since the film has been reassessed and reappraised as a forgotten masterpiece of Japanese horror cinema.  While some elements of the film are indeed dated to the 1960s, notably the use of the theremin and some of the editing effects such as a superimposition of a silhouetted human figure falling into a pit of flames, others remain timelessly visionary and as contemporary as the present day.  Moreover, this is one of the first real truly adult oriented horror films featuring imagery at the time that was every bit as transgressive and envelope pushing as anything in Italian horror at the time.  Few films have dramatized the darkest deepest depths of Hell as completely as Jigoku.

-Andrew Kotwicki