Given that, I’ve never even heard of anyone screening Nakagawa’s “The Ghost of Yotsuya” (1959) in a theater, much less on a 35mm print. A glorious haunting based around sexual jealousy, adultery and vengeance, and the vanity of the reflected image, Nakagawa fashions a suffocating series of social entrapments before events spiral into still-upsetting body horror and righteous supernatural violence. Shot by the great Tadashi Nishimoto, it would be a brilliant companion piece to Hajime Sato’s “Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell” (1968) or Mario Bava’s “Planet of the Vampires” (1965). A true rarity. A gem.
Less rare but shockingly contemporary is Hiroshi Teshigahara’s “The Face of Another” (1966), the third of four of the director’s collaborations with novelist Kōbō Abe that each find horror in the essential adaptability of man. What’s more horrifying, after all, than the extent to which one can disassociate themselves from the horror of the world? In this one, a nondescript working man (Abe and Teshigahara’s favorite subject) is badly disfigured in an accident and, in despair, begins wearing a prosthetic mask. His morality immediately shifts along with his appearance and in one of the great shock moments in Japanese horror, he realizes that everyone around him has also been fitted with a mask. Everyone is free from themselves, you see, and when everyone is free, there are no longer any boundaries between civilization and savagery.
If you’re looking for something a little less, shall we say, polite, can I recommend the mad films of Teruo Ishii? Film Forum is presenting two of his films on DCP starting with “Blind Woman’s Curse” (1970) and ending with the notorious “Horrors of Malformed Men” (1969). Both are delightfully skeezy productions skating the line between exploitation horror, pinku sexploitation, yakuza and samurai genres with a heedless, breakneck disregard for decorum or, when the dust settles, much sense. “Blind Woman’s Curse” stars “Lady Snowblood/Female Prisoner Scorpion” herself Meiko Kaji as the head of a vicious gang who, after blinding a rival in a swordfight, earns herself a vengeful demon cat and a blind archenemy. A sendup in some ways of the revered Zatoichi series and, in others, of Amicus horror films, “Blind Woman’s Curse” is action-packed, gory, and exceptionally stylish. It’s either your taste or not – but you won’t know until you go.