Kuroneko 藪の中の黒猫 (1968)
Kuroneko is a film by Kaneto Shindo. Coming out sometime after Onibaba this film continues the theme of using Japanese ghost fables to create period horror films. In both films, the story centers on strong female lead characters that become demonic do to circumstances of war. This all has illusions to Shindo’s earlier films that were related more directly to war and the atomic bombing. It is interesting how he broke into the horror genre using Japanese fables, and yet still alluding to war and more importantly the people caught in the middle who often suffer the most. They all share an underlying anti-war sentiment. Kaneto was from Hiroshima.
Even before this film’s supernatural elements take place, he covers the banality and natural horror of war, much in the way that Ichikawa Kon did with Flies on a Plain or much later with what Coppola did in Apocalypse Now. The story begins with a group of exhausted soldiers coming across a secluded house gang raping and murdering a mother and daughter. Soon after each of those soldiers are one by one found dead with their throats ripped out as they are lured out into the woods and seduced by the ghosts of the two women. It is interesting how each soldier talks heavily about the glory of war to these two victims of it, before they are killed. The killings soon come to a head with the governor calling in a young hero to take on these ghosts, resulting in an impossibly surrealistic final scene.
I typically detest the horror genre for their predictability and the fact that they say absolutely nothing. It always seemed to me that people who like horror films are generally just bored and need something to release certain anxieties. It is in this that it is easy to understand not only their popularity, but their necessity because as long as people are bored and have pent up anxieties there will be a horror genre. I say this because people don’t realize but so many genres have died and as bad as the majority of horror films are, this genre will never go away.
In comparison to the director’s earlier films, many of the same motifs are carried over. Looking past the illusions to war, there is a constant focus on his atmospheric settings. The Naked Island, shot the family struggling through the waterless island that they lived on. Long shots were heavily utilized to shoot the family as if they were ants working on an ant hill. In Onibaba, all the killings took place in stark susuki grass in which the mother and daughter in law dwell. Here it was used to give a dramatic effect of the characters, so at heightened moments the grass swayed most violently while on moments of reflection it would remain perfectly still. Here in Kuroneko it is the rigid bamboo forests that each samurai is lured into before having his throat ripped out. The dense darkness lead by the solid lines of bamboo, with the constant well of a black cat, set up the cat and mouse game it all becomes.
