Nobuo Nakagawa’s wild meditation on sin, redemption and punishment is often spoken of as the first real gore film, predating Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast by three years. Which is true of the film’s final act which is eye-poppingly violent but less so of the rest of the film which is a more-or-less straight melodrama, albeit one shot with arresting directorial and editorial flourishes and a surreal use of exaggerated sound effects.

Theology student Shirō (Shigeru Amachi) is engaged to Yukiko (Utako Mitsuya), the daughter of his professor, Yajima (Torahiko Nakamura). Being driven home one night by his mysterious friend and colleague Tamura (Yōichi Numata), Shirō is involved in an accident that kills drunken yakuza gangster, Kyōichi (Hiroshi Izumida). Tamura refuses to stop, leaving the main to die in the road, the accident having been witnessed by Kyōichi’s mother (Kiyoko Tsuji) who swears to take revenge. After his guilt gets the better of him and he tries to tell the police what happened, Shirō is involved in another traffic accident which kills Yukiko. A grief-stricken Shirō seeks solace in the arms of stripper Yoko (Akiko Ono) who turns out to be Kyōichi’s girlfriend, working with his mother.

Later, Shirō is called to the retirement home where his mother is said to be dying. There he is reunited with his lecherous father Gōzō (Hiroshi Hayashi) and meets the other residents and staff – disgraced alcoholic painter Ensai (Jun Otomo) who is working on a portrait of Hell, former reporter with a mysterious past Akagawa (Koichi Miya), corrupt cop Hariya (Hiroshi Shinguji), Dr Kasuma (Tomohiko Otani), the community’s negligent physician, and his nurse, Ensai’s daighter Sachiko (Mitsuya) who looks exactly like Yukiko. All of the residents and staff are hiding terrible secrets and after a meal of spoiled fish and poisoned sake, the guests either die at their own hand or from the tainted meal and the first part of the film reaches an absurd and over-the-top climax as the people at the party start killing themselves and each other. And then it starts to get really weird as they wake to find themselves in Hell, destined to suffer an eternity of punishment for their earthly sins at the hands of Lord Enma, the King of Hell (an uncredited Kanjuro Arashi) and his grotesque minions.

For many fans in the west, the wait to see Jigoku seemed almost as endless and agonising as the torment of the sinners consigned to the inferno. It was frustratingly elusive for many years, spoken about in hushed tones, its cult following in Japan taking decades to make it to the west. When it did slowly start to turn up in a subtitled print it was regarded as a masterpiece, a disquieting glimpse of a Hell taken from Buddhist rather than Christian belief but which turns out to be just as brutal and uncompromising.

The climactic descent into the pit is extraordinary, the last 40 minutes of the film a non-stop parade of surreal images and jaw-dropping violence. What the prissy critics who were appalled by Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) (“Depressing and degrading for anyone who loves the cinema”) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) (“the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer”) might have made of Jigoku had they seen it is anyone guess. Heads are severed, guts are spilled, bodies sawn in half, limbs skewered on spikes, all hazily filmed in a queasy green glow. It’s a demented pageant of weirdness played out at full volume and in gaudy Eastmancolor widescreen that no-one has even come close to replicating since.

It’s remarkably potent stuff even now and it remains as disturbing a vision of eternal damnation as has ever been filmed. The climactic scenes of a hysterical Shiro clinging to a large, spinning wheel trying to retrieve his unborn baby daughter is unforgettable. And it doesn’t end with an easy cop-out – once you’re in this Hell, you really are there for eternity. Even atonement for your sins isn’t getting you out of this nightmare.

The first part of the film seems at first sight to be more mundane melodrama about guilt and lust but it too is underpinned with a seam of the uncanny and the supernatural. Tamura is a sinister, almost demonic presence throughout, popping up out of nowhere to further complicate the already nightmarish life of his supposed friend Shiro. All knowing and seemingly the gatekeeper to Hell itself, Tamura remains an enigma to the end, turning up in Hell but seemingly as its agent rather than a victim.

Jigoku came at the end of an eight-film run of horror movies made by Nakagawa for Shintoho, a company set up in 1947 by embittered former employees of Toho (Shintoho literally means “new Toho”). The company had started out making films by Akira Kurosawa (Nora inu/Stray Dog (1949)) and Kenji Mizoguchi (Saikaku ichidai onna/Life of Oharu (1952)) but the arrival of new boss Mitsugu Okura, a former carnival barker, saw the company become specialists in ghost stories, sexploitation, science fiction and horror at the lower end of the budget spectrum. His other films for Shintoho were Kyûketsu-ga/Vampire Moth (1956), Kaii Utsunomiya tsuritenjô/The Ceiling at Utsunomiya (1956), Kaidan Kasane-ga-fuchi/The Ghost of Kasane Swamp (1957), Bôrei kaibyô yashiki/Black Cat Mansion (1958), Kenpei to yûrei/M.P. and the Ghost (1958), Tôkaidô Yotsuya kaidan/The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959) and Onna kyûketsuki/The Lady Vampire (1959). He went on to direct Kaidan hebi-onna/Snake Woman’s Curse (1968) for Toei but for Shintoho it was game over. Jigoku would be the last film they’d make, declaring bankruptcy the following year.

Jigoku was remade by Tatsumi Kumashiro, best known for his “roman porno” films, in 1979, and its basic ideas about Hell, sin and redemption were used by ero goru (“erotic-grotesque”) specialist Teruo Ishii in 1999 (he also used the same title) and by Thai directors Sathit Praditsarn and Teekayu Thamnitayakul for 2005’s Narok/Hell. None had the visceral impact of Nakagawa’s film, a bleak, despairing masterpiece whose technical aspects may feel dated today but whose central theme of sin without salvation and the vicious punishments that come with it still resonates just as strongly today as it did in 1960.