Last year around October, Radiance Films paired up with
Daiei Films to unveil what is frankly still one of the very best Japanese
horror boxed sets that has ever been released with Daiei Gothic, a
trilogy of films made between the late 1950s until 1968 which saw some of the
most visually arresting and terrifying jidaigeki set widescreen color supernatural
chillers of the decade curated together into one collection. After that set quickly sold out, becoming an
enormous success for the boutique releasing label, it quickly became apparent
that another round was needed, so Radiance Films have gather together three
more films for what is aptly named the second volume in what will hopefully be
a continuing series of Daiei Gothic horror releases. Limited to 4,000 copies and bound in a hard
box replete with a booklet featuring essay writing along with translations of
original ghost stories, Radiance Films have once again struck the home run with
the ball flying out of the field into the ether in one of many terrific October
home video releases and one of my favorite new series of older horror films
being curated for collectors like myself.
All three jidaigekis with the first two films in the set Demon
of Mount Oe and The Haunted Castle by none other than Tokuzō Tanaka of
The Snow Woman (my favorite film in the first volume) and the third and
final Daiei film Ghost of Kasane Swamp by recurring Zatoichi director
Kimiyoshi Yasuda, the trilogy represents another eclectic gathering of horror
films with the Tanaka films starting the series off with a big scary noisy
bang. Playing freely with magical
realism and demonology, the first entry Demon of Mount Oe is a tokusatsu
of wild and innovative proportions featuring a wide variety of curious visual
effects of inclement weather arising from nowhere as demons fly out of the
lightning in the sky to crash onto the ground and wreak havoc on the humans
below, stealing women in the process.
Fending off a giant spider, a demonic unearthly bull, a cunning near
martial-artist witch and strange weather, it’s an explosive, multicolored
sensorily overwhelming scope 2.35:1 widescreen piece lensed by The Invisible Swordsman as well as The Haunted Castle cinematographer Hiroshi
Imai. Equally striking if not chilling
is Ugetsu composer Ichirô Saitô’s score which ranges from sounding traditionally
Japanese before veering into experimental sound design. All in all, its at once a spooky and
surprisingly treatise on demonology.
Taking things further into the demonic realm particularly in
the forms of possession and transference of bodies whether it be from animal to
human form or both is Tanaka’s 1969 return to the jidaigeki horror film with The
Haunted Castle, inarguably the bright shining scary standout of the
series. Marinated in a deeply haunted
and terrifying score by Chumei Watanabe consisting of dissonant echoes and
metallic rumblings and poised on the premise of revenge from beyond the grave,
it tells the tale of a blind monk who is murdered by a samurai lord in order to
forcefully wed the monk’s sister against her wishes. Before committing suicide, she transfers a demonic
grudge to her black cat who freely licks up her spilt blood and thus hides in
the human form of one of the concubines.
Soon, a completely otherworldly, devilish malevolent force besieges the
castle and the lord, taking out guards one by one with the demonic concubine
occasionally revealing her true form in imagery that most assuredly influenced
(along with Onibaba) the face of the demon in William Friedkin’s The
Exorcist with the ravenous hissing of the xenomorph in Alien. Much like Tanaka’s The Snow Woman it
presents the monster in the form of an innocent seemingly helpless woman who not
only shows her true form in self-defense and/or feeding, but to cover her
tracks as well. Aided with contact
lenses and innovative lighting to illuminate her figure against the darkness,
the demoness of The Haunted Castle is one of the most ferocious and
terrifying entities perhaps in all of Tanaka’s eclectic fantasy/horror oeuvre
clawing and scowling her way into the far reaches of our subconscious.
--Andrew Kotwicki