Daiei Gothic Vol. 2
directed by Tokuzo Tanaka, Kimiyoshi Yasuda
starring Kazuo Hasegawa, Kojiro Hongo, Raizo Ichikawa
Radiance Films
Japan’s Daiei Film had a long run of beautifully staged ghost and horror films, and Radiance Films has assembled another trio (1960’s The Demon of Mount Oe, 1969’s The Haunted Castle, and 1970’s The Ghost of Kasane Swamp) from the vaults to comprise their new 3-disc Blu-ray set, Daiei Gothic Vol 2: Japanese Ghost Stories.
In 1971, Daiei Film went into bankruptcy, and the budget constraints on their films in those last months of operation are quite apparent in The Ghost of Kasane Swamp. The dip in production value is sharp even when compared to The Haunted Castle just a year prior, let alone the 1960 all-star epic of The Demon of Mount Oe. Where earlier films boast gorgeous costumes and set design, director Kimiyoshi Yasuda is forced to work in the shadows to help hide the seams of the bareboned production. The result, a far cry from the spectacle the director put on screen with the original Daimajin (1966), is still an effective and eerie tale of supernatural revenge. The lack of budget actually helps make The Ghost of Kasane Swamp even creepier. It’s a cruel and claustrophobic film that is punctuated with oozing, pulsing psychedelic color that adds to the unease of what lurks under the surface in men and the swamp.
Made just a year prior, The Haunted Castle showed none of the signs of poverty that were about to plague the studio. Director Tokuzô Tanaka (The Snow Woman, 1968) created a terrific take on the Japanese bakeneko ghost cat legends. When a concubine of a cruel samurai commits suicide to escape marriage, her spirit is transferred to her cat, who sets about the business of revenge, possessing various women in the castle to use as soldiers in its supernatural fight against the evil lord. Tokuzô Tanaka lets his camera crawl through the corridors of the castle, creating dread from the still darkness of the household at night in a manner that Stanley Kubrick would use in his horror classic, The Shining (1980), some two decades later.
A demon in human form decides to start a revolution against the Fujiwara Clan in Kyoto. The attacks take two forms. First, he assembles a massive bandit army for battle, and secondly, he sends his giant ox demon to steal concubines from the lord and ranking Samurai for… reasons. None of this is going to stand, and a quartet of seasoned demon slayers is dispatched to Mount Oe. One of the prestige films for the studio in 1960, The Demon of Mount Oe was a vehicle to showcase Daiei’s biggest stars. While the other films on Daiei Gothic Vol 2. are fairly small affairs, everything about this film feels lavish, even if some of the special effects don’t age terribly well. Despite the lurid title, it really is a historic epic that just happens to have supernatural elements.
One of the most remarkable things about both volumes of Daiei Gothic is the exquisite timelessness of the stories. Granted, they are based on ancient Japanese folklore, but the films themselves, with their intentional visual artifice and stylized acting, don’t feel imprisoned by the era in which they were made. The fairy tale aesthetic of the movies works on another level, as so many of these stories have been told in multiple films, but each version brings its own details. While sticking to a common style and structure in keeping with the stories’ oral traditions, each storyteller adds their own embellishments to the familiar legends.
The new box set, Daiei Gothic Vol. 2 from Radiance, not only delivers lush, restored transfers of the three films but they have augmented them with thoughtful extras, including an 80-page book featuring essays from Amber T, Jasper Sharp, and Tom Mes (who also has a visual essay on The Demon of Mount Oe), along with translated stories The Demon of Mount Oe and The Haunted Castle were based upon. This trio of films is an exciting continuation of the series for fans of the peculiarly Japanese take on the macabre.
