After the success of such a gritty masterpiece like Harakiri (1962), Masaki Kobayashi got the greenlight to make one of the most ambitious movies in Japanese history. He took his clear-eyed revolutionary critique of power, Japanese national mythology and history and applies it to the horror genre. The anthology-format and the stunning set-design and cinematography make Kobayashi's first color film a resounding success. This also sees him go from his social realism style of his previous films to a surrealism influenced by traditional Japanese art-aesthetic (something had only previously done in Thick-Walled Room (1956)).
The film adopts four stories from Lufcadio Hearn's horror anthology collection Kwaidan. Kobayashi takes these stories and adds his own social commentary to them. Story one centers on greed. Story two centers on betrayal and the surveillance-state of wartime Japan. Story four deals with arrogance and Japanese culture. But for this review I want to talk about story 3 "Hoichi the Earless." This story is about a blind biwa player that lives in a Buddhist temple and gained renown for his performances of passages from The Tale of the Heike. Hoichi starts being forcibly-summoned to play for a mysterious aristocratic clan. It turns out that the dead Heike clan has been forcing him to play manically in a cemetery for them about there past glories despite it undermining his health. This keeps going on until the Buddhist priest figure out what's going on and intervene. This is the longest of the episodes in this movie and was Kobayashi's commentary on how the nationalist glorification of figures of like the Heike was so twisted and helped lead to the destruction of a generation during WWII. Kobayashi's interpretation of the Battle of Dan-no-Ura and the story overall was meant to make folks question the glorification of these suicidal-militaristic values in the Heike story. Kobayashi certainly did not believe in honoring any aspect of the past that senselessly harmed people in the present. Anything dealing with the military and rigid duty was the enemy of Masaki Kobayashi.
Though I am not a big fan of horror movies, I do appreciate horror films with a message or a point (though I have my exceptions like Zombie comedies or John Carptenter's Halloween) like this one or the Jordan Peele movies for example. This movie is showing you the uncanny, but also making you think of some real-world scary things like militarism, fascism, and nationalism–very 2020 type of horror.
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