Original title: Yabu No Naka No Kuroneko
Kaneto Shindo’s follow-up to the extraordinary Onibaba (1964) is a more traditional horror film, a ghost story based on a Japanese folktale, but it’s no less remarkable for that. Like Onibaba, it revolves around two women living on their own without men who they instead prey on and like the earlier film it’s set in a spooky rural environment, the undulating sea of grass from the earlier film replaced here by a no less unnerving bamboo forest.
Kuroneko opens with a stark scene of very earthly horror as a gang of wandering samurai, filthy, unkept and maddened by the civil war they’re fleeing from, creep out of a bamboo forest and into the home of Yone (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law Shige (Kiwako Taichi) whose son and husband Hachi (Nakamura Kichiemon II) is also away at war. The gang rape and murder the women, setting fire to their house and melting back into the surrounding forest, leaving them for dead. But the women’s bodies are unscathed by the flames and a black cat appears, seemingly restoring the women back to a form of life by licking their bodies. The women find themselves living in a large mansion in a bamboo grove, travelling to the Rajōmon gate where they waylay and seduce samurai, returning them home where they murder them by tearing out their throats with their teeth after having sex with them. This goes on for several years as Hachi survives the war and, passing himself off as a man named Gintoki, kills the enemy general and takes his severed head to the governor Minamoto no Raikō (Kei Satō). As a reward, he is promoted to samurai and he returns home in search of his mother and wife, unaware that they are the ghosts he has now been assigned to locate and kill. He finds his way to their home but because they’ve made a pact with the underworld are compelled to try to kill him as they did all the others.
The cat monster or spirit has long been a staple of Japanese horror and ghost fiction, with two feline creatures among the yokai, the panoply of supernatural beings that stalk Japanese folklore, the bakeneko and the nekomata. Then too there’s the maneki-neko, the waving “lucky cat” familiar as the source of inspiration for the Hello Kitty! phenomenon. These cat creatures had appeared in cinema as early as Mokudo Shigeru’s Arima Neko/Ghost Cat of Arima and Misao Yoshimura’s Yaji Kita Okazaki Neko Taiji/Yaji and Kita’s Cat Trouble, both released in 1947 and would continue to be a source for ghost films throughout the history of Japanese horror cinema. Here the cat’s role is ambiguous – it seems to be an agent of supernatural change, and the women once revived from the dead take on cat-like attributes, biting and scratching their victims to death and their severed limbs reverting to feline form.
Shindo merges the tales of supernatural cats with a more traditional revenge-from-beyond-the-grave ghost story. Yone and Shige are memorably haunting creations, often appearing to glide through their impossibly lavish new home while at times transforming into terrifying creatures that fly through the air and lap greedily at the blood of their victims. They’re unusual “monsters” that have consciences, who recognise the man they’ve let into their homes as their son and husband but who are unable t resists the demonic forces that are compelling them to mutilate and kill and who are haunted by the knowledge that they will eventually have to murder him.
Packed with extraordinary imagery, beautifully shot in glistening black and white by cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda, Kuroneko is also remarkable for Shindo’s mesmerising use of sound. There are long patches in complete silence, audiences kept ion the edge of their seats awaiting the slightest sound that’s going to make them leap out of their skins. Elsewhere Hikaru Hayashi score alternates between stark percussive passages and unearthly sounds that are almost impossible to locate – working out quite what instruments might be making them is often impractical. They seem like (un)natural sounds emerging from the fog-shrouded forest that lies at the heart of the story.
Kuroneko was due to be shown at the 1968 Cannes film festival but when directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle inspired the shutting down of the festival in protest at the sacking of Cinémathèque française director Henri Langlois by Minister of Culture André Malraux, and to show their solidarity with the students whose protests had gripped Paris. Kuroneko should have emerged from the festival in triumph but instead it disappeared for a while into a sort of obscurity in the West, failing to recapture the success of Onibaba and that other famous Japanese ghost story of the mid-1960s, Masaki Kobayashi’s Kaidan/Kwaidan (1965). Only in later years did it finally start getting the respect it was due.
Ironically, Shindo was a very political director and one suspects that Truffaut and the rest would have greatly appreciated his take on the class injustices he saw in Japanese society. In an interview with Joan Mellen published in the 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema, when asked about class struggle that sits at the core of both Onibaba and Kurenoko, he replied “If you have to look at society through the eyes of those placed on its bottom level, you cannot escape the fact that you must experience and perceive everything with a sense of the political struggle between classes. This sets the general political background of the film.” One can’t help but feel that had its Cannes debut gone ahead it would have been greeted with open arms by the young, socially conscious cohort of film-makers that inadvertently prevented its screening.
Super stylised, politically passionate, erotic and haunting beautiful, Kuroneko is now rightly regarded as a classic not only of Japanese horror but of Japanese cinema in general. It may struggle for a while to recapture the uncanny weirdness of the early scenes of the first samurai meeting the women at the gate, but the wild finale is suitably terrifying and the final shots unexpectedly poignant. As gorgeous as it is unsettling, it’s a masterpiece, chock full of images that will haunt you long after the mournful climax.
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