Review by Nia Edwards-Behi
1968 was a damn good year for horror films. The US gave us the very modern Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead, while in the UK, we had period horror films The Devil Rides Out and Witchfinder General. In Japan, the horror film delved much further back in time. Thus 1968 was also the year of Kuroneko, or Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko (‘The Black Cat Inside the Bamboo Grove’). Directed by Kaneto Shindô, who had previously directed Onibaba, this film is a stunning example of classic art cinema not only doing horror, but doing it very, very right.
I’m ashamed to say that Kuroneko marks my first encounter with classical Japanese horror. I’ve never seen Onibaba or Kwaidan, and my knowledge of this era of filmmaking’s roots is minimal at best. However, as much as Kuroneko stands as an important film of a particular national filmmaking context, it stands on its own just as well. Kuroneko, set in medieval Japan, begins with a horrific act: a group of soldiers invade the home of two women, steal their food, rape them, leave them for dead and burn their home to the ground.
The bodies of the women lie still in their ruined home. A black cat appears, clambering over them and licking their wounds. The two women make a pact with the devil and return as feline, ghostly figures, luring unwitting samurai to an illusion of their former home, then seducing them, and killing them by sucking their blood. Elsewhere, a young farmer is made a samurai for fortuitously killing the enemy general. The new samurai – now named Gintoki – seeks out his mother and his wife, only to find their former home burned to the ground. His general orders him to find and destroy the ghosts that are killing his men in the region, and Gintoki soon realises what has become of his wife and his mother.
At its core, Kuroneko is a rape-revenge tale, its victims damned by their ordeal and their revenge futile. The women never seem to truly revel in their vengeance against the samurai, which is made all the more poignant and clear when the Gintoki emerges – they are now doomed to destroy their loved one. Gintoki’s wife, Shige, further dooms herself by breaking her oath, briefly reuniting with Gintoki before being eternally damned. His mother, Yone, accepts her oath, but never once appears happy with her lot. The sense of futility and of remorse pervades the film; the only character seeming to be remotely satisfied in the film is samurai governor Raiko, who is very much presented as a character to be scorned.
This sense of remorse and regret is beautifully reflected in the expressionist cinematography. The sets are sparse and the lighting stark. The way in which Yone and Shige move through these spaces emphasises their emptiness, while this use of wire work is further explored when Yone and Gintoki are forced to fight. These ghosts are graceful, completely unlike their jerky modern counter-parts. Shinto’ s use of long-shots further constructs this sense of open, empty space. The film begins on a long shot of the bamboo grove, the relative silence disturbed by samurai emerging through the bamboo. What they do to the women inside the house is noisy, violent, and disruptive. We leave that scene to return to the calm of the bamboo grove. Shindô takes us away from what’s really happening, but then in the rest of the film these broad, empty spaces are not places of safety, but places of fear and places of death.
I suppose Kuroneko felt slow in parts, particularly the middle portion which sees Ginteki and Shige reunited (the ‘romance’ section, I guess!). The film does not use a sense of pacing that I’m familiar with, and I suspect that this would not have stood out so much if I was more familiar with classical Japanese cinema. The film also has a traditionally unsatisfactory ending, perhaps, but we are left at the film’s close with a striking image that is, in fact, preferable to a more straight-forward resolution. The film is art cinema in many senses of the word, but it’s also frightening and moving. That its legacy seems to be sequels to remakes of more recent ghost stories from Japan is somewhat disheartening, but to return to a film like this is truly a treat.
Kuroneko is out now on Blu-Ray and DVD from Eureka Entertainment.