Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Spectacular Optical books really seem to be cornering the market when it comes to diverse, broadly academic but accessible collections of essays linked by a horror theme; this time around, we have an incredibly varied compendium all about that strange phenomenon, Christmas horror. Or, as you’ll realise after reading, it’s modern culture that’s the strange one: it’s incredible that we’ve ever come to think of Christmas as a routine, safe and sentimental time of the year. The Coca Cola truck only rolled into town fairly recently, after all; with that in mind, the book takes a look at the many films, television series and one-off specials we’ve been enjoying for a far longer period of time, with a few examinations of cultural archetypes like Krampus and the likes of Sinterklaas along the way.

Thinking about how such a wealth of ambiguous or even traumatising folklore never quite made the leap from Old World to New, the book makes a good point: the old Winter traditions of ghost stories and ‘things that go bump in the night’ seem to have migrated to earlier in the year once they reached America, where they’re now far more associated with Halloween – albeit that Halloween has its roots in Europe, too. Nowadays, Europe emulates the American schedule, with skeletons in October and schmaltz in December. This seems a shame, as the darkest days of the year seem an ideal time for ghosts; happily, then, Yuletide Terror sets about restoring something of that old order, simply by virtue of the wealth of material it covers.

We go straight into the essays themselves – there’s no introduction and as such, no overall proposed direction – and we start where you may expect, with slasher classic Black Christmas (1974). Stephen Thrower, one of my favourite film writers, provides a detailed history of the film alongside what to me seems even more interesting, a wealth of accompanying comments on the film’s reception (there were some highly amusing comments in the press about the indecency of female characters swearing). Likewise, you would probably expect to see a feature on Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) and the book fulfils that too: this material is engaging enough, though probably less interesting for me than other fare as I’m just not that into slashers (although fans of slashers often spend a great deal of time defending slashers against being simplistic, which is the case here too. Where you stand on that depends on your own tastes, of course.)

My personal highlights in the book come with the likes of Florent Christol’s study of ‘the fool’, as refracted through nerd-revenge flicks of the 70s and 80s – with a special focus on Christmas Evil (1980). Christol forges some fascinating links between vengeful fools in film to the role of the fool in fiction, via Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hop Frog’ back to the phenomenon of the ‘charivari’, a noisy mock procession dating back to the 14th Century. Some words are also reserved for the ‘Lord of Misrule’ tradition. Amanda Reyes’s appraisal of Christmas horror anthologies – the likes of Tales from the Crypt – shows how they interlink with A Christmas Carol, a novella which has definitely worked its way into the cultural consciousness. This section is exhaustive, and covers far more anthologies than I’ve even seen. Co-editor of Yuletide Terror, Kier-La Janisse, interviews the affable Fred Dekker here too.

Derek Johnson’s attempt to answer the question ‘why do we tell ghost stories at Christmas?’ covers a huge range of those Christmas Specials which include darker, even supernatural elements; I found out that UK police drama series The Bill once ran a Christmas Special along these lines! I’d have liked this particular essay to be longer, actually, but gladly, Janisse is back to take an in-depth look at the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas series, at its peak during the 1970s. On a similar note, it’s good to see some love for Robin Redbreast, a spooky and as-yet underappreciated folk horror. Of course, given its welcome return to our screens just this week, Owen Williams’s chapter on the League of Gentlemen Christmas Special is both welcome and timely; never before has a British television series shown that the divide between comedy and terror is as paper-thin as it is.

And as for Santa…Zack Carlson’s words on Santa at the ‘B’ movies are a scream, as well as lightening the tone of a few of the chapters which came before it, adding heaps to the overall variety. There’s an interesting rundown of some of the more malign (or at least ambiguous) folkloric gods and imps which influenced the idea of Santa in Europe and Russia, too.

Whilst I would have liked to see a bit more on films like Sint (2010) and Rare Exports (2010) and a bit less on Silent Night, Deadly Night – though was delighted to see a discussion of Sheitan (2006) and its deeply-warped spin on the nativity – overall this book is immensely engaging and far-reaching; from minor folklore to the best-known festive horrors, a read of this provides education and entertainment, and I’m sure its reputation will grow and grow from here.

You can pick up a copy of Yuletide Terror here.

 

Editorial: Hell is the ‘Hot Take’

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

An ancient curse, probably Chinese in origin, ran something like this: ‘May you live in interesting times’. It’s a wry old phrase. The insinuation is that when things get interesting, then it’s often a useful code for bad news, so via a play on meanings, and without saying so outright, it’s a hex that seethes with its true intent. Subtle, veiled…so it probably wouldn’t generate a Twitter storm or begin the only process which now seems to matter – breaking the internet.

We live in times whereby what’s ‘interesting’ hinges almost entirely on taking an approach which is deliberately simplistic, contrary, and – intentionally or otherwise – often misrepresents something of the topic at hand, allowing a flood of corrections from people who feel all warm and glad inside to be able to say so. This is the sort of thing which now dominates; a pinch of bullishness, a determination to find a new angle and a fight to get it recognised. This process has become known as the ‘hot take’; it happens fast, it happens often and it’s largely to the detriment of debate of any kind – in my humble, and not-so-novel opinion, of course.

As a fan writer, I’ve always tried hard not to get embroiled in the versions of this which spill over into film fandom. But, as someone who also uses Twitter, I do though sometimes pick up on whatever novel approach has just been grafted onto cinema by new commentators who arrive, amazed, to discover that films made fifty years ago on occasion display the opinions and attitudes of their own social milieu, or, those who hit on an unpopular mindset and realise enough to know that they can sail it on a ship to some sort of minor fame. With the former approach, I always find myself thinking of another idiom – that a little learning goes a long way. Well, now it can be #trending a few hours after it issues forth, particularly if it segues with something else which is currently exercising the masses. For the latter, it takes a little resilience, as they’ll in turn get pulled apart, examined and discussed in a number of new hot takes, but it can get the debate going! Everyone will know them! And yeah, I’m aware of the weak irony of using an editorial piece, like this one, to state a contrary opinion about a modern trend, like this one. More and more, though, having anyone read your work depends solely on whether or not you have ‘an angle’. We apparently don’t have time to digest anything without ‘an angle’. The ‘hot take’ has fundamentally reshaped the way we write and the way we read today.

I’m not an idiot, or at least I hope I’m not. I can see how it works. Over the past…god, thirteen years or so that I’ve been uploading articles and reviews onto the Information Superhighway, on my own behalf or via sites belonging to others, it’s never been the case that any of my pieces have in any way ‘gone viral’. It very soon became apparent to me that very few people were ever reading, and this is the case to this day: thankfully, if that’s the right way to put it, I’ve never depended on writing for any sort of an income as I have a job which pays the bills with some spare; had I needed writing for anything other than a hobby, then who knows? This may have shifted the sands, changed how – or if – I wrote at all. I hope I wouldn’t have become a member of the Comment Police, and I hope I wouldn’t have spent my time doing the impossible – trying to change people’s minds or prove them wrong, to no purpose other than a flicker of personal gratification that I Turned Out To Be Right.

But I love writing, and it’s a hobby I’ve had since childhood. I love cinema too, so it makes perfect sense for me to write openly and honestly about films. On occasion, this has pitched my opinions very much against the rest of the ‘horror community’, and we have joked about our contrary natures here at the site for years. But it’s not a tactic; it’s not what we do to generate site traffic. If it was, then we’d have a hell of a lot more people stopping by than we do. No one can ever write entirely free from whatever buzz or hype is happening, sure, but, largely speaking, Warped Perspective’s writers try to steer around it as far as possible. A minimalist approach is the best way, in my book: find out enough about a new project via the channels we’ve come to depend on, but back away from other people’s reviews to get to the film intact and with an open mind. We want to be honest, and we want to write honestly about what we think. I think that’s fair.

Now, if I wanted to send the internet into a wobbler, then a crude attempt to draw people in would stand a far better chance than a lot of my more honest ramblings. Let’s take an example; and before anyone delightedly leaps all over this, it is not an example I happen to believe. But if I were to hack out a piece entitled ‘REASONS WHY JOHN CARPENTER IS A LOUSY DIRECTOR’, with a bit of judicious promoting, people would read it. They’d hate it, but they’d read it. People would ‘Quote Tweet’ and add some hyperbole about how I was a clown who clearly didn’t know how to appreciate the bleak wonder of The Thing (1982). The retweets could be retweeted. Eventually, someone would chip in to say I didn’t go far enough, and that Carpenter’s actually worse, he’s a [insert unpleasant and socially damning label here]. It would rumble on for a while, and enough people – even if a handful at first – would remember Warped Perspective, and be primed for my next piece, DARIO ARGENTO: A REAL LIFE DANGER TO WOMEN? It would only take a little, a very little imagination and a modicum of knowledge to do this sort of thing, and I maintain that there are many people out there who take this approach as a matter of course. It’s their modus operandi, no doubt aided and abetted by editors who want to get themselves on the map by any means and treat their writers as useful idiots.

So, is this the point of writing now? If you write an article and no one either feverishly agrees or ‘calls you out’ for being a bozo, then is it really an article at all? Some would undoubtedly say – no, not really. For my part, this is a tricky one for me because – although as I’ve acknowledged the numbers of people who read my work are small in comparison to many, many sites out there – some part of me is narcissistic enough to want them to be read. There’s no other reason for posting them where people can see them. I have notepads at home; I write my reviews here.

What I actually want from this process is harder for me to identify. On some reflection, I think a lot of my motivation is authentically just to share my enthusiasms, and on occasion, to vent my frustrations, because writing can be cathartic, too. Do I enjoy it when people respond to my writing? To an extent I do, yeah. I’ll maintain that I never deliberately court controversy, but speaking honestly, it can feel disheartening when pieces you felt proud of simply disappear into the ether, and people you feel would have enjoyed them will probably never, ever read them. I think maybe that’s it: the feeling of involvement, of adding to discourse about a beloved subject in even a small way. The way in which I part company so sharply with what counts as ‘debate’ today therefore relates to the nature of that debate; what people call a discussion is often nothing more than a tally of likes, and these can be mutually exclusive things. It’s not looking likely that we’ll ever generate the sorts of hits which would qualify us for Rotten Tomatoes here, then. But a glad word from a new director or a friendly comment from a reader feels an awful lot like it has more substance.

So, the curse of these ‘interesting times’ seems to be that what we deem worthy of notice nowadays has perhaps used invidious means to get there. We probably shouldn’t be too surprised, given that far more significant things than fan writing now live and die by social media (like, ahem, world politics) and very likely this article itself will reside in the TL;DR category. If you’re with me so far, though, we could start to deprive these features of the oxygen of assumed publicity. We could start to resist the pull of the clickbait, if we haven’t already. And as for writers, if you’re ever asked ‘what’s your angle?’ try to take a step back. None of us write in a vacuum, but hopefully we still have sight of our own impressions and ideas, and I wish that the world of online writing was more honest than this pitiable thing we’ve distilled it into. Surely, there’s still more to life – and what we like doing – than ‘likes’.

Devil’s Advocates: Ju-on: The Grudge by Marisa C. Hayes

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Alongside the likes of Ring and Audition, Ju-on: The Grudge was one of the first Japanese horror films to ever grace my collection. I still contend that it’s simply one of the finest supernatural horrors of the past twenty-five years, though perhaps unfairly, it’s now often seen as so much less than that – a victim of its own success, then its ubiquity. But Ju-on: The Grudge, though not the first film in the Ju-on series, did significant work: firstly, it brought the ancient idea of a haunting into a modern setting, turning light, airy urban spaces and modern technology into easily-infiltrated vehicles for its terror. Beyond this, it introduced Western audiences to a totally new rationale for a haunting: as the on-screen text tells us at the very beginning of the film, the events all hinge on someone dying whilst in the grip of rage, which passes on a kind of curse, which affects all the places in which that person once lived.

The Devil’s Advocates series is a collection of slim but studious volumes examining notable horror cinema: here, author Marisa C. Hayes takes us through an intimate, authoritative and long-overdue study of director Takashi Shimizu’s 2002 film. As Hayes notes, whilst Ju-on: The Grudge had a huge impact, it still gets less consideration in print than, for example, Ring. Placing the film at the heart of the rise of what’s known as ‘J-Horror’ here, Hayes builds a solid and readable case, showing how Ju-on both belongs to, and revitalises a tradition of ghost stories.

Blending knowledge of Japanese folklore and custom with acres of social context, the book told me a great deal that I didn’t already know. For example, I wasn’t aware that Takako Fuji, the actress who plays the female ghost Kayako, is also a voice actress who worked on the decidedly less-traumatic anime, Princess Mononoke. There’s much more in this vein; a section of the book forges links between the film and things such as Kabuki theatre, Butoh, a kind of modern dance (observable in the motions and gestures of the spectres) and even the significance of the long, dishevelled hair motif is explored and historicised. Hayes also takes in the influence of Lafcadio Hearn, a European who naturalised as a Japanese citizen and set about recording and popularising Japanese folklore, which eventually fed back into Japanese cinema – perhaps the first example of Japanese and European horror fusion, the likes of which we’ve seen in abundance during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There’s even a section on cats in Japanese culture (which, by the by, reminded me of that otherworldly yowling cat cry made by Toshio in the film which still sends shivers down my spine.) Want more? The book has fascinating content on the film’s links to Buddhist belief, contagion, Japan’s epidemic of domestic abuse, its ageing population…all of which are neatly linked to the film in a series of engaging and cogent ways.

Whilst broadly academic in tone, the book is definitely accessible; although there’s a brief mention of academic-reference stalwarts like the clever-if-odious Foucault, and Bataille, Hayes ensures that this approach doesn’t dominate, and she has clearly spent just as much time trawling fan sites and blog posts, no doubt occupying the overlapping space between both worlds herself. This shows throughout in an approach which balances detail, enthusiasm and knowledge. In fact, probably the biggest compliment I can pay to the book is that it’s reminded me of just how fresh and exciting Ju-on: The Grudge was when it first appeared, and made me want to watch it again. As if that wasn’t enough, the book also runs through all of the other chapters in the franchise, too. It’s the definitive deal.

If you have a love for J-Horror, or even if you simply want to know more about the background of a film which has wound its way into horror culture over the last decade and more, then this book is heartily, definitely recommended. This is exactly what film writing should be.

The Devil’s Advocates series is available via Auteur Publishing. You can find out more here.

Lost Girls: the Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

I first encountered the cinema of Jean Rollin via the UK’s Redemption Films, whose founder, Nigel Wingrove, became good friends with Rollin over the years; the film company deserves far more awareness of the great service they did by bringing so many of these films into the common consciousness in the Nineties, making the films themselves into an artefact worth having with an array of stylish, distinctive video covers marking them out. Until that time, any knowledge I had of the director’s work came via still images in magazines, and there it probably would have stayed until, in all likelihood, the films resurfaced – though probably not as well-presented – during the earlier years of the DVD revolution, when there was a real surge of hitherto-unknown releases. But however the films may or may not have made their way to our shelves, it’s taken some time for Rollin criticism to follow in print, although Immoral Tales first re-assessed Rollin’s work in the nineties, and more recently, David Hinds published his Fascination: the Celluloid Dreams of Jean Rollin. But is there more to say?

Lost Girls: the Phantasmogorical Cinema of Jean Rollin has been very much promoted for its all-female authorship, something which I’ll admit I was surprised by: editor and writer, Samm Deighan, hasn’t exactly been a fan of promoting women-only agendas in the past, but publicity for Lost Girls has asserted that women are a minority in genre writing, deserving greater recognition. Well, everyone is free to change their minds of course, though this idea of a lack of ‘recognition’ doesn’t chime with my personal experience as both a woman and a writer, as I’ve said many times before. However, undoubtedly true is the fact that Rollin adored women, frequently making films from the perspective of female characters, and this is something else behind the rationale of Lost Girls -a female perspective on his uniquely female perspectives.

A brief foreword by actress Françoise Pascal (of The Iron Rose) is a pleasing addition here, and the book overall is attractive, heavily illustrated in colour and black & white with a custom artwork cover illustration. There are a variety of writers offering their views, and as the chapter titles might give away, the tone here is rather academic – though not to the extent of being inaccessible to the lay reader, and by and large all the chapters are clearly written, avoiding the cardinal sin of academic writing – incomprehensibility. However, links are forged between Rollin’s films and all manner of  ideas; prepare to see his work linked to Nietzsche, Milton and Satan, to name but a few. Furthermore, the approach taken throughout the book is that Rollin was not about titillation, not featuring nudity for its own sake or to take pleasure in it on its own terms, but rather using female flesh in a range of pioneering ways, revolutionising tired tropes such as vampirism with his work. I’d be inclined to say that the truth lies somewhere between those two positions, personally. Yes, he was pioneering, but he also simply enjoyed filming and working with beautiful women, often coincidentally without a stitch on; I don’t think we do Rollin or his work any sort of disservice for acknowledging that. And lest we forget, Rollin also made pornography (though to be fair, Samm Deighan casts her eye over the likes of Anal Hospital in a chapter dedicated to Rollin’s ‘other’ films).

Happily, the book does far more than seek to reclaim Rollin as a proto-feminist. A large number of the essays in the book seek to re-position Rollin’s work by drawing parallels between it and other, comparable phenomena, such as 19th Century occultism. It’s an ambitious aspect of the book, and I certainly learned something; I hadn’t realised Rollin’s association with the poet Corbière, for example, so Marcelline Block’s study of the parallels between them was very enlightening. Alison Nastasi’s essay on The Iron Rose is also a definite high point in the book. A real sense of enthusiasm for the subject matter with an easy sense of knowledge combine to render something very readable (and the phrases “supernatural thrum” and “bellow of the human soul” are things of beauty.) The Iron Rose is an extraordinary film, a strangely gentle and barely-peopled story where a couple, trapped in a cemetery, confront the notion of their mortality via an erotic lens, and Nastasi captures this. Samm Deighan’s study of fairy tales is an engaging read, as is Virginie Sélavy’s detailed appraisal of Rollin’s use of castles in his films: whilst the same films are considered by separate writers, different aspects are explored.

I do have some issues with the book, however. Many of the essays carry the same message: that Rollin was a liberator of women by allowing his characters to escape the shackles of predatory male sexuality – often via a fantastical device (usually vampirism). To make this point, there is often a comparison made with existing vampire tropes in cinema. These comparisons perhaps unsurprisingly elevate Rollin, though sometimes at the expense of the older material. Promoting Rollin by rubbishing, as one example, Hammer seems unnecessary – as so frequently pointed out in Gianna D’Emilio’s opening essay on Le Viol du Vampire, they’re hardly comparable and dismissing Dracula Has Risen From The Grave as having an ‘antiquated Madonna-whore paradigm’ seems a rather heavy-handed dismissal; it’s perfectly possible to love and appreciate different takes on the vampire myth in cinema, and you don’t salvage the reputation of one film to the point of lionisation by knocking another.

There’s also a similar issue to the one I identified in Satanic Panic – a tendency to have the same information repeated, because several essayists each want to mention the same thing: for example, we read several times that vampirism is an alternative to bourgeois society, and then there is repetition of plot synopses throughout the chapters, but, also in common with Satanic Panic, perhaps reading the book from cover to cover isn’t the optimal approach to take and it’s better to just dip in from time to time.

This is certainly an unusual book with much to reward its readers, though it is very much in the feminist criticism category, which patently isn’t going to be for everyone. I don’t particularly feel that the much-vaunted women-only authorship has given rise to something which could never have been achieved with men on board, but what we do have here is a collection of interesting and ambitious essays on a unique filmmaker, academic in tone, but showcasing the genuine enthusiasm of the writers too.

You can pick up a copy of the book from Spectacular Optical here.

 

Unto Death (2017)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Vampirism is something monstrous, something impossible, but it’s a broad enough kind of monstrosity to mean it can be explored in a number of ways on screen. Unto Death, by director Jamie Hooper, uses the vampirism theme to explore a relationship, and how it is put under extraordinary pressure by the most extraordinary of circumstances. The resulting film is a subtle, but affecting piece of human drama.

Thomas and Luke – although not named during the film, just in the credits – have an idyllic relationship, and are clearly in love. We see enough of them spending time together to understand the closeness of their bond. Thomas is a clergyman, and a sermon which he is giving acts as a voice-over, gradually linking the content of his speech to the events in the film. Religious motifs are, given the day job, therefore to be expected, and religious iconography fills the film; at first, crucifixes are just part of the decor, but they become more ominous as the film progresses. Luke, we are shown, has been attacked by a mysterious assailant. The wound he incurs during this causes him to sicken, and to change.

There are no prizes for guessing, perhaps, the nature of this injury, but the way in which it occurs is interesting. Inverting the expected ‘female victim’ narrative is a bold idea: as long as vampires as associated with sex, then we are always going to be faced with a glut of passive female flesh in horror films of this genre. I could name dozens. Not so with Unto Death, a fact which gives us one of the film’s genuine strengths. It works seamlessly to dispense with the old trope, giving us a predatory female and – something which is still unusual – it’s a gay couple under siege, meaning that the sexuality of the vampire simple doesn’t figure here. The after-effects of this attack are treated modestly by the film, with comparatively little in the way of a study of the symptoms; the point here is to engage with the emotional state of the characters, with Thomas in particular demanding answers of his faith as well as grieving for his partner, who says nothing during the film – he can only be seen in the act of moving away, losing his humanity, and edging towards becoming a monster himself.

Accomplishing some interesting things and flexing its imagination along the way, Unto Death is an engaging short film which shows that there’s mileage in the vampirism motif yet, and that it can – with careful handling – still surprise. The story told here isn’t necessarily complex, but it paints a plausible picture of a love story being torn apart by a sensitively-handled horror element.

 

Horror in Short: Andrew J. D. Robinson

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

It’s always interesting when an emerging filmmaker contacts us to share their work, so here – inside fifteen minutes for the lot – is a showreel from Andrew J. D. Robinson, which we are free to share. Making films this short is bound to be a challenge, but this is one of the ways in which short films hone the filmmaker’s craft, in my opinion, and why they’re worthwhile to both make and watch. What we have here is four films, each of which takes a subtly different approach. Some are stark and disturbing, some are more exploratory and surreal, but all of them indicate someone who is growing and developing, and I hope that Robinson is able to offer up more of his ideas on film in future. As calling cards, this reel shows that there’s promise there, and I look forward to seeing how that eye for style can be turned onto new narratives.

You can check out the showreel here.

As a genuinely unsettling introduction to Robinson’s work, Sightings (2017) plays with the idea of premonition – and it doesn’t pull any punches, opening with a stark reality – a girl’s corpse. Two women discuss a ‘strange daydream’ they’ve been having about their sister, Amy. Amy has gone missing, but they think they know what has happened to her, even if they’re afraid that it’s true. Then, the gruesome vision they both keep having turns out to be correct. But why has this happened? In what feels like the beginnings of a tantalising narrative, Sightings merges human interest with that most human of conclusions; it certainly grabbed my attention, and got under my skin – all in a couple of minutes. The harsh, atonal music fits particularly well here.

A Walk Home Alone picks up again on this sense of jeopardy to women – telling us about a presumed serial killer, who is possibly drowning his victims in the local river. Oblivious to this and to being observed by a mysterious stranger, a young woman remains glued to her phone, but for reasons which become apparent. The characterisation which A Walk Home Alone creates has been framed by the news report at the beginning; in that sense the film is ominous, with something looming over it. It does show its hand, though, and resolves probably as the audience might expect – albeit, it does so quietly.

Placebo, another incredibly short film of just a couple of minutes, takes a fairly simple idea – of dissatisfaction with one’s appearance, of obsession with celebrity – but pulls it into a surreal, rather jarring snapshot, managing to blend more of the unsettling special effects used in Sightings, but picking at issues of identity along the way. It puts me in mind of Excision, to an extent, chiefly for the way it packages surgery as something which looks grisly and stylish at the same time.

Finally, Something Scary takes the idea of a video game reviewer, live-streaming her first experiences with a brand new beta game – itself titled Something Scary. As she plays, we see through her eyes as well as seeing her reactions to the gameplay. This is a natural, plausible framework and yeah, it really works – this is by far my favourite film on the reel. I enjoy films where technology is rendered frightening, and it is here. The way that the film ends shows that moderation is good, too. All in all, this is a diverse reel of films, which tackles horror tropes and conjures up a few surprises, too.

 

The Tiger (2015)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Sometimes a film self-consciously goes for the ‘epic’ tag, and it’s clear from the very outset that this is the case with Park Hoon-jung’s 2015 movie The Tiger. With its sweeping Korean vistas, Sturm und Drang musical score and lone figure set against an unforgiving world it clearly fits the bill, and actually that’s just fine: it’s a genre which seems to suit actor Choi Min-sik, perhaps best known for his work in the groundbreaking Oldboy (2005) which was in many ways an ordeal horror epic, when you think of it now, a decade or so on. However, in its painstaking attempts at detail in this rather artistic study of cruelty, the film is certainly an epic-length two hours, forty minutes in duration. This is more and more the trend in cinema these days, but I strongly feel that The Tiger could have curtailed one or two hunt scenes, for example, and retained or even improved much of its impact.

The film is set over a period of around ten years, starting in 1915. Korea, long before it was split into a ‘North’ and a ‘South’, was at the time occupied by the Japanese – a nation which partook of a fair bit of empire-building during the twentieth century. We first meet our protagonist, Chun Man-duk (Choi) during this year: all happiness is relative, so although his life as a mountain hunter seems remarkably tough and fraught, he clearly enjoys a happy marriage and he is teaching his infant son the hunter’s craft. A chance encounter with a tiger – one of Korea’s last remaining tigers – is a dramatic moment at which we leave Man-duk, however, and the action moves forward by a decade.

The Japanese are still trying to drum out the last Korean insurgents in Man-duk’s Mount Jirisan jurisdiction, and for some unexplained reason, one of the military commanders, General Maijono, has made it his personal business to kill off the last tigers too. There’s a mawkish kind of sadness to all this: in a luxuriant room plastered with taxidermy, it seems the old general simply has a fetish for dead creatures, or just sees them as lucrative, which to be fair many of the local hunters – Man-duk included – also do. However, perhaps there’s some symbolism here, too: being the ones to kill the last, largest tiger would be the ultimate one-upmanship over the local population, even if ultimately the Japanese still need their help in order to do it.

And what of Man-duk? Well, he’s still living, but no longer works as a hunter. His son, now a teenager, is growing frustrated with their solitary, penniless existence, and wants to hunt, just as his father once did. Man-duk’s wife, however, is no longer to be seen. Gradually, we piece together the story of the intervening ten years, and find out why Man-duk now prefers to sell medicinal herbs, rather than living by his old skills. The linking factor here is an old, fearsome male tiger: the Japanese want this ‘Mountain Lord’, as do the locals; they try to entice Man-duk to help them, but it seems he has a terror of this particular beast.

This whole ‘man vs beast’ aspect of the film feels rather like The Revenant in places, a film which is its 2015 contemporary. Unlike the outraged mama bear in The Revenant, though, the ‘Mountain Lord’ here is more than an animal in many respects; the film plays fast and loose with animal realism in its (well-utilised) CGI sequences, and although the film is unsettlingly gruesome in its hunt scenes, there is a certain level of disparity of threat here too, as on occasion, the tiger becomes semi-mythic, something akin to a moral arbiter of the characters, killing savagely sometimes, but interacting rather differently sometimes. This shifting identity is something of a sticking point in the first half of the film; it’s not clear, for much of this time, what the tiger actually is. Still, eventually, a parity is created between the hunter and the tiger, which makes ever greater sense as the narrative progresses.

The performances here are strong, although the Japanese (albeit occupying comparably little screen time) are far more in the line of straightforward villains – moustachioed and all. Choi Min-Sik is superb, and the relationship between him and his young son is plausible, even if there are a couple of moments of maudlin sentimentality; there are also a few strange moments of levity during the film, which aren’t perhaps the best fit for me, but they do punctuate the otherwise unrelentingly grim pursuit of the Mountain Lord. The use of flashbacks, to fill in the back story of the intervening ten years, is well-used and definitely helps to maintain interest to the film’s story.

It’s just so, so long. I’m all for a sombre pace wherever it works, and a flashy, high-action film wouldn’t have suited the subject matter at all, but it does feel like some of the scenes here could have happily hit the cutting-room floor (so to speak). As I mentioned in the introduction to this review, there are – for example – a number of gory hunt scenes where the tiger’s abilities border on supernatural, and we are shown at length the animal cutting a swathe through the hunters; as pleasing as this is, however, I feel that the same effect could have been accomplished with less of it. The film risks being laborious or repetitive in places, and nothing can unhinge an epic like tedium.

Still, my overall opinion of The Tiger is positive: ultimately, it’s a brutal parable of a difficult, changing world and how the microcosm of human, and animal grief plays out against this backdrop. This film is a moving work of art, a Jeong Seon painting turned into a narrative, and on these grounds alone it’s certainly worthwhile.

The Tiger is available now from Eureka Entertainment.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula: a Retrospective

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

The vampire – at least as we used to know it – seems to have fallen out of favour in recent years. By no means has it disappeared, but certainly, as on-screen monsters go, it’s no longer in its ascendant. Terrific, spellbinding horrors continue to be made, sure, even if more often than not as remakes or prequels/sequels – but glorious, gratuitous cinematic vampires seem harder and harder to find. Vampires have either paced into the modern day, in drab clothes to match, or else they’ve come to identify as something altogether different from a blood-drinker – a creature that can be mollified, without the old need to take a human life. There have, of course, been some superb vampire horror stories in recent years. However, in many other ways, it feels like a very, very long time indeed since Francis Ford Coppola unfolded the last great Dracula movie.

The character of Dracula doesn’t just have a long history with horror; the history of horror is Dracula, and there have been regular interpretations of Bram Stoker’s novel since the inception of cinema in the early 20th Century. In fact, Nosferatu (1922) eventually appeared out of a legal wrangle between director Murnau and Stoker’s still-living widow; subsequent name changes to characters stemmed from issues around copyright. Funnily enough, this tussle between the Stoker estate and the filmmaker reaffirmed the novel’s fading popularity, and probably contributed to the horde of Draculas which eventually graced the screen. The classic ‘Universal Monsters’ legendarily numbered Dracula amongst their ranks, and versions of the charming, deadly aristocratic Dracula embodied by Bela Lugosi dominated horror cinema for the next forty years at least. Advances in technology and filming techniques allowed filmmakers to make Dracula more visceral, more preternaturally frightening perhaps, but he more often than not retained that suave, aristocratic veneer; the cinematic Dracula is now a cultural archetype, a mass-produced and understood image which adorns anything from cereal boxes to kids’ masks.

In terms of horror films, the more successes Dracula enjoyed, the more scope for interpretation there was, but it was some time before a filmmaker earnestly took up the imperative so resonantly uttered by one of the world’s favourite cinematic Draculas, Christopher Lee, whenever he was asked about how you could improve one of his most famous roles: “use the words which Stoker has written”. (When Lee felt that scripts deviated too far into silliness, he elected to play the role mute, remember, so we can assume he meant what he said). However, not only did Francis Ford Coppola ‘use the words’, he also – via screenplay writer James V. Hart – completely transformed Stoker’s original novel, melding the legend of Transylvanian nobleman Vlad Tepes with the fantastical events of the text in a way which Stoker never did.

Books have been written and wars have been fought (or very nearly) about just how much inspiration Stoker took from reading about Tepes, a 15th Century prince whose barbarism is as feted as his fierce nationalism. It’s not for me to get too mired in all of that here, but certainly, Hart’s screenplay begins by placing the narrative squarely in Tepes’s court. In so doing, all the ambiguities regarding Stoker’s book, you know, the ones which have spawned a thousand essays on just why in the hell a Transylvanian nobleman suddenly decides to up sticks (and cases of earth) and move to England, are neatly skewered. Pardon me the pun.

In Coppola’s film, Dracula is Vlad Dracula; no further questions. His great victories over the empire-building Ottomans have secured his nation and his Church, but the church can offer him no gratitude, no spiritual flexibility. The recent suicide of his princess, upon hearing from the Turks that Vlad had in fact been killed, means that she is damned – whoever her beloved is and whatever he has achieved is immaterial. His ensuing grief and rage generates a blasphemy so aberrant that the very crucifixes pour with blood. He becomes a monster, and is damned to live forever for his crimes against God.

In one incredible cinematic sequence, there we have it. We know why Dracula continues to live. That tantalising line in the novel where Dracula asserts that yes, he has in fact loved, suddenly makes profound sense in terms of the narrative. It’s even – whisper it – an improvement on the source text, in my humble opinion.

I may as well be blunt here: it’s a notable book for many reasons, not least of which in how it’s generated so many more creative works down through the years, but I don’t think Dracula is a great novel in itself. The epistolary frame is interesting in terms of structure, and it’s cleverly pieced together, but this keeps readers at a distance from its protagonists; certain characters descend readily into farce (and are played faithfully as such in the film!) and there are a number of thankless questions, making the novel feel a bit like a whistle-stop tour of a fascinating place where you never have long to pause and look about you. Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula adds some sense and coherence to all of this by motivating its monster with undying love, but it doesn’t then abandon the effective and horrifying scenes from the book, either. Some of these – the creature turning into multiple rats which all flee, the still aged Dracula licking Harker’s blood from a cutthroat razor or impossibly scuttling down the castle’s steep walls – have lost none of their power. It’s these contrasts that allows the audience to see a fully-fleshed antagonist; to feel some ‘sympathy for the devil’, or at least sympathy for a damned being. Against the luxuriant add-on of what’s effectively a reincarnation based love story, it’s an absorbing array of contrasts.

This aspect is, by far, not the film’s only strength. It boasts a fantastic aesthetic sensibility throughout, combining shadow theatre with sweeping vistas and an immaculately staged version of the historical with cedes into the impossible. In many respects, Coppola’s vision represents the idea of the ‘hyperreal’, weaving something seemingly impossibly lurid out of even the ostensibly most realistic scenes. This kind of flourish is everywhere, as are a number of forced perspectives which trick the eye and add to the deeply dreamlike atmosphere. Dracula’s armour is blood red, foreshadowing what is to come; Oldman’s turn as the literally ancient Count Dracula, apart from rendering him unrecognisable, takes plausible shape as an elderly European nobleman, dressed hair and all; Sadie Frost transforms from a pre-Raphaelite into a Vaudeville harlot and finally into a beautiful corpse, her funereal/bridal clothes a perfect picture of excessive modesty – Frost’s ‘Bloofer Lady’ is perfect, and whilst more beautiful than terrifying (we owe Frank Langella’s Dracula that honour) it captures the threat which this character poses in the novel: she can still be sexual.

No one can ever accuse Coppola of shying away from things which could only ever be alluded to in 19th Century fiction. The Carmillas and Draculas of the day afforded the tantalising scope to be salacious, but likewise the sexual mores of the day meant calling things to a halt not too long after introducing this possibility of sex, couching even these supernatural encounters in veiled words and glaring omissions. Compare that, to give just one example, to the ‘Dracula’s Brides’ sequence in the 1992 release. Okay, even if the blood-sharing scene between Mina and the Count holds back to an extent (though still sending a million hearts a-flutter, no doubt) then the unholy trinity who make Harker their foodstuff/plaything must have been quite an education for more than a few young men – or women, for that matter. After that, we should be a hell of a lot more understanding as to why Harker’s speech sounds a little off. Then there’s what happens to Lucy Westenra, which is recounted as a ‘mystery illness’ in the novel, but is rendered overtly sexual on screen, in a series of eroticised, if dubiously consensual encounters – in one of which Oldman was advised to whisper scandalous nothings off-screen to actress Sadie Frost in order to encourage her to writhe appealingly. Coppola always intended his film to have this kind of sensory overload, storyboarding about a thousand scenes altogether and insisting that the costumes, alongside the mise-en-scène, underpinned the whole.

Over the ensuing years, much has been made of the film’s flaws – of which I accept there are many, even if for me they are still minor points, a mispronunciation of ‘bastard’ here, a somewhat dialled-in Dutchman there. Overall, this is still simply one of the most sumptuous adaptations of a notorious and oddly-beloved novel there has ever been, and I do not think that we have really seen its like since. It’ll always have a place in my heart, and it’ll always feel like a formative film, one of those many which, over the years, settle on you as a fond memory.

In the intervening years, perhaps only Dracula Untold has sought to interweave history with vampire fantasy on a similar ‘lost love’ theme, but, as broadly entertaining as it is, it just doesn’t come together in the same way. So, assuming we can ignore Dario Argento’s more recent jaw-dropping foray into the source material, will Dracula ever be back? Or has he now crossed the divide into pop culture, there to remain? Or, is this just the perception of viewers like me, all too happy to discard erstwhile Draculas as counterfeit, crass or otherwise lacking?

Perhaps, perhaps. But if Coppola was the man to bring us Count Dracula’s true on-screen swansong in 1992, then I think that it’s an extraordinary place to part company.

Fear in the Night (1972)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Hammer is best-known for its Kensington Gore and its literary monsters, usually shot against a 60s-coloured 19th Century which is a distinctive aesthetic all of its own; the studio deviated from this formula quite considerably at times, though, in a range of films which seem to have divided critics ever since. Fear in the Night is certainly dramatically different from other projects which had seen director Jimmy Sangster at the helm: the last time he’d worked with Hammer prior to this film, it was to bring us Lust for a Vampire, a film which is itself divisive, but inarguably, classic Hammer fare. Not so with Fear in the Night, with its contemporary setting and extremely slow-burn approach. The film is not without its issues, but it certainly showcases the flexibility of Sangster. There’s ne’er a scrap of flimsy white fabric to be seen.

We start with a languorous introductory sequence, with sweeping shots of a boarding school and its grounds, though eventually teasing the viewer that something is seriously wrong here, something which is explained through the course of the film. The subtlety of this revelation, coming in the first few minutes, is one of this film’s strengths; it casts a shadow over the rest of the film, as it indicates that there’s foul play going on and, by the by, we’ll come to understand exactly what form this takes. All of this is unbeknownst to Peggy (Judy Geeson), who is excited to be leaving her rented digs to move into a new home with her husband Robert (Ralph Bates). He’s a teacher, and he’s secured a post at…the boarding school we’ve already seen, living on site in a nearby cottage.

However, the night before she’s due to leave, someone sneaks into her flat through an open window and attacks her (in a sequence which is more reminiscent of a giallo than a Hammer horror, black leather gloves and all). As Peggy struggles, her assailant loses a prosthetic arm before fleeing. Or does he? When Peggy’s landlady comes to find out what all the commotion has been and finds Peggy lying on the floor, she gently insinuates to both Peggy and the doctor on call that the incident must have been all in Peggy’s mind. Peggy had a ‘nervous breakdown’ at some point in the recent past, and she is apparently not fully recovered.

Though shaken, Peggy does leave the next day as planned, and the Hellers begin to settle into their new abode, though Peggy worries that someone has followed her: she swears that she sees someone hanging around outside, and, soon enough, she is attacked again – by what seems to be the same attacker. Now, even Robert seems doubtful of the attack. To make matters worse, the headmaster of the school, Mr. Carmichael (Peter Cushing) is behaving in a strange, even unseemly manner: Peggy does not feel safe, not from him, or from anyone else in the extremely limited social circle she now finds herself in.

This is a very low-key piece of film, which takes its time establishing the interaction between Peggy’s state of mind and the possible threat to her. Unfortunately, some aspects of Peggy’s character and narrative haven’t aged particularly well; she behaves like a bit of a dupe, going from childlike to catatonic when the going gets tough. Mr. Carmichael’s wife Molly (Joan Collins) refers to her disparagingly as a ‘child bride’, and that is rather how she’s played. Eventually, she seems to withdraw from the plot altogether, every bit as unresponsive as Barbara in Night of the Living Dead. Before we get to that, though, Peggy is apparently primed to simply be ‘a teacher’s wife’, and having no other role, she has ample time to roam the grounds, where she has equally ample time to frighten herself half to death. The script accordingly does lag in several places, perhaps particularly where married life is concerned; perhaps as she is recovering from a mental illness (though we never discover the full nature of this) husband Bob is galvanised in his treatment of her as a lesser being, and the needy/dismissive dichotomy between them can be taxing.

Fear in the Night has one of those phenomenal casts which Hammer was able to assemble, though, and there are some surprises along the way, particularly from Ralph Bates. Cushing plays an interesting role here, a seemingly nasty piece of work who even comes across as a bit of a lech at times – which is faintly traumatic, given that Cushing seems to be every horror fan’s favourite gentleman. But it’s Joan Collins who steals the show here, and I only wish she had got more screen time. She’s turned in some great horror performances during her career, although she’s probably better-known for being an on-screen ‘bitch’: well, here she gets to be both, and it’s glorious. More films should have Joan Collins staring down the barrel of a shotgun, I feel.

And how does all of this resolve? Through a few ridiculously implausible plot resolutions, that’s how, albeit with some enjoyable, surprising twists too, before we finally find out what the hell has been going on at this particular school. There’s probably not quite enough cohesion and action to really sustain the film through ninety-odd minutes, but things definitely do gather pace in the last half hour after the patience-testing prelude. Fear of the Night is reasonably enjoyable, but perhaps most noteworthy simply for its radical departure from the Hammer tropes which have served the studio throughout its history. In this respect, it’s an ambitious film which is worth a look. You certainly won’t see it looking better anywhere else: the new Studiocanal restoration looks absolutely great.

Fear in the Night is available to buy on Blu-ray now.

 

 

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

I will confess that I have had no prior experience of director Yorgos Lanthimos’s work, but based on his most recent film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, I’d imagine that a little goes a long way. That isn’t to say that I wasn’t completely drawn in to this twisted story of unhappy families, but that it’s left an unseemly, faintly uncomfortable after-effect; I found myself squirming in (rewarded) anticipation of horrible violence, and soon after, laughing at things I definitely didn’t feel I should be. It has all conspired to create a queasy sensation, one which clearly took work to establish, and isn’t going away in a hurry.

Starting as it goes on throughout – by reducing people down to a series of often vulnerable and even somehow pathetic bodily processes – we see cardiac surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) first preparing to work, literally getting to grips with a beating heart in an open chest cavity, and then finishing up: he sheds the gown and gloves he’s been wearing, a clear disconnect from his day job but, again, only the first evidence of disconnection we see. Steven might be a great surgeon, or he might not, but however he conducts himself professionally, the stilted, almost ludicrously ineffective conversation he then shares with his anaesthetist Matthew (Bill Camp) doesn’t really suggest a man comfortable in his own skin.

At home, things are amiss too: he parrots expressions of love and fealty with his attractive but monochrome wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) and his kids, Bob and Kim, but there’s something hollowed out about it all: this is soon supported by the, shall we say, ‘niche’ tastes displayed by husband and wife when they’re alone in their bedroom. Then, there’s yet another layer of strangeness: Steven is mysteriously friends with a sixteen year old boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan). Initially, the nature of their friendship is kept in the dark. Their conversation is respectful in some ways, sinister in others: it seems that Steven has taken the apparently fatherless boy under his wing, meeting up with him to offer things like gifts and life advice, but the more he gives to Martin, the more Martin wants.

As Martin weaves his way into Steven’s life to an ever more claustrophobic degree, a situation facilitated by Steven’s apparent cluelessness about sensible boundaries and professional conduct, things feel as if they’re already on the edge of a precipice. Then, it seems as though the precipice is reached: Bob (Sunny Suljic) suddenly contracts a mysterious, paralysing illness, collapsing to the ground one day. It’s unclear whether this is a psychosomatic condition or a purely physical one. But there’s more, as the film reaches that little further to embellish its narrative, now with elements of the (arguably) supernatural escalating the tension in ways which are bleakly comic and appalling by degrees.

Although loosely based on the Greek myth of Iphigenia – hence the title – The Killing of a Sacred Deer is right up to date, and full of very modern anxieties. Medicalisation, medical procedure, professional practice, wealth inequality and bereavement; here, these things are weaponised. As presented here, accompanied by an overwhelming, atonal soundtrack, the film is a fever dream anyway, but it sticks with the theme of sacrifice, pulling the already loosely-linked Murphy family apart via its genuinely effective, creepy central performance by Keoghan. The physicality of this young actor is – with apologies to the guy – well-suited to the role. He has a sly, usually emotionless face and a voice which betrays no emotion either, no matter what he says. He comes across as deeply unpleasant, and this eventually squeezes some terror and rage out of the Murphys – Steven becomes utterly unreasonable, whilst Anna turns into a conniving nightmare.

But in both cases, their extreme responses often border on black comedy. This is the effect I mentioned in the introduction, this feeling of deep unease in the laughter: there’s something quite unpleasant about laughing in spite of yourself at something you know is, at the same time, tragic. It doesn’t just happen there, either. The script’s fixation on awkward physical transitions, usually linked to adolescence but not exclusively, and on people as component body parts (we see characters kissing hands, kissing feet, spitting teeth) leads to some really unpalatable lines and sequences. Things cross into torture horror in places, then trip lightly back to farce in others.

An overbearing, nauseating but fascinating film, I am – somehow – still glad I experienced The Killing of a Sacred Deer; I also feel completely sure that it’s not a film I’ll ever want to revisit. It’s just that kind of skilful, weird experience that sticks in your mind and to your skin. I’d also say that this is not a film for everyone, and if you struggled with the sledgehammer symbolism of mother! (as I did) then this film will leave you in much the same state.

Indeed, it’s hard not to compare the two films: each disrupts logic and conventional plot developments in favour of a fantastical threat to family and personal agency; hey, perhaps our modern age is just lending itself to these wild-eyed, somewhat unreal concerns. I preferred The Killing of a Sacred Deer as a film, however, if in large part to the varied and unusual performances it drags out of its key players, from Farrell to Alicia Silverstone (!) and definitely Nicole Kidman, who is, to her credit, really getting the challenging roles lately.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is out on general UK release now.

Unchained Melody: The Films of Meiko Kaji

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Meiko Kaji is, from a Western perspective, one of the most unmistakable and recognisable Japanese actresses of all time, but this comes with a significant proviso. Most of us know just a tiny fraction of the films she has ever made; only a handful of these nearly one hundred films have really made it over here anyway, and even out of that, we tend to think of her in one of a couple of key roles. Either Meiko Kaji is ‘Scorpion’, the largely mute and indestructible prison inmate of the Female Prisoner series, or she is the sword-wielding agent of doom in Lady Snowblood. This is a state of affairs acknowledged by author Tom Mes in his neat Meiko Kaji book Unchained Melody, available now on the Arrow Books imprint (and thus an extension of the work which Arrow has so far done in publicising Kaji’s work via their existing range of Meiko Kaji releases.)

Mes provides here a meticulous and exhaustive filmography, starting at the very beginning of Kaji’s career with her shortcomings as an ojo-sama, or a ‘well-bred young lady’, the kind of girl generally sought-after in the Japanese cinema of the early 1960s, and how this soon led to rather meatier and more challenging roles – even though this doesn’t mean she was ordinarily as taciturn as she seemed in the Female Prisoner films, and the book does well to point this out. As a means of adding structure to the book, Mes has closed each chapter with a mini-biography of a number of significant directors with whom Kaji has worked – the likes of Masahiro Makino, Yasuharu Hasebe and of course Shunya Ito all figure. He also talks us through her work for a range of successful Japanese studios, each with their own key styles and themes, each who had to adapt, or sink as audience tastes altered. There are also other chapters, one on Kaji’s TV work – a complete void to me, and probably to many other readers – and a chapter on her musical career, although this of course goes hand in hand with her film and TV work. It’s nonetheless interesting in its own right.

There is a tremendous amount of knowledge on display in this book: it’s almost overwhelming in places, perhaps because a lot of these projects are so broadly unknown to us, but for anyone with a desire to know more about Kaji’s career then this book would be an excellent roadmap to guide them through. The emphasis here is very much on the acting work itself, however: this is not a biography in anything but the loosest sense, with little comment on what may have been going on in Kaji’s personal life during her career, for instance. The author’s initial recounting of an interview with the actress in Tokyo in 2006 was clearly a defining moment for him (and I’m not bloody surprised) but it feels unclear whether any specific parts of this interview thread their way through the rest of Unchained Melody; I suspect a lot of existing commentary, from a variety of sources, has been brought together here too. It’s not that the book doesn’t feel personal, exactly, just that the author’s fandom is revealed via his comprehensive knowledge and a range of interesting asides about Japanese culture pertaining to various films and audience trends along the way. This can mean footnotes which would just as comfortably fit into the main body of text, but it all goes to show that Tom Mes knows his stuff and wants to share as much as possible.

This is, despite its detailed approach, a slim volume: it comes in at just over 150 pages, including references, acknowledgements and so forth, in a compact and bijoux 17 x 14cm format. It’s an appropriately attractive book too, with a number of full-page colour images, a large range of hitherto-unseen stills and behind-the-scenes pictures, even including Meiko Kaji grinning (!) out of a Sunsilk shampoo print advert from the 1970s. Unchained Melody also boasts excellent custom colour cover illustrations by artist Nat Marsh.

Unfortunately the book can’t (and doesn’t attempt to) answer the big question, which is: why aren’t current directors, Japanese or otherwise, falling over themselves to hire Meiko Kaji now, considering her documented avowed desire to act again? This is even after her name reappeared in the limelight in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series, and even allowing for a couple of unhappy incidents which took her out of the running for a few projects in the noughties. Ah well, we can only hope that renewed interest in her career, coming across through ventures like this book, might lead to audiences seeing her again in cinema. In the meantime, this is a solid piece of work and a definitive guide to Meiko Kaji’s career – hopefully her career to date.

You can find out more about buying Unchained Melody: the Films of Meiko Kaji here.