Kuroneko
Kaneto Shindō
Initial release: February 24, 1968 (Japan)
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| images c/o Criterion |
When it comes to classic movie settings that leave room for a variety of interpretations and genres, the jidai-geki is a rather rich source of inspiration. From the dramas of an Akira Kurosawa flick to the sci-fantasy trappings of Star Wars, an idealized vision of feudal Japan has been a major part of cinema since the 1950s. But oddly enough, horror doesn’t typically appear in this setting; you would think, with Japan’s long history of ghost stories and yokai legends, there would be more, but not so. In fact, in my research, I could only find a few films that touched on the supernatural in any meaningful way. One of those films is Kaneto Shindō’s Kuroneko.
Shindō has a lot of movies under his belt. A lot. Deeply involved in the Japanese filmmaking industry since the 1930s, he directed dozens of films and written hundreds more; even as he neared the end of his life, he would talk in his sleep about new film projects. In a very real sense, this man was Japanese cinema. His films covered a variety of genres, but they each bore his personal stamp, focused on people on the edge of society, heavy with isolation and paranoia, and fixated on how the past weighs on the present.
Kuroneko,
literally “Black Cat,” takes us back to the Japanese medieval period —
exactly when is unclear, the presence of a historical figure suggests
the early 11th century, but references to ongoing nationwide warfare
seem to come from the Sengoku period several hundred years later — and
to an isolated farmhouse not far from the Rashomon gate at the south end
of what is today called Kyoto. A group of samurai, filthy and starving,
stumble upon the farm, steal food, and sexually assault the occupants,
an older woman and her daughter in law, leaving the women’s corpses
behind as they torch the farm and move on. Later, samurai traveling to
the capital are lured off the road by a young woman claiming to need an
escort through the nearby bamboo forest to her isolated home, at which
they are brutally murdered, their throats torn out, their bodies left in
the forest.
When a young conscript returns to the local governor, real-life historical figure Raikō Minamoto, to display the severed head of an enemy general, Raikō promptly promotes him to retainer and gives him the name Gintoki. After a bath and some fancy clothes, Gintoki goes looking for his family, only to discover them missing and the house burned down. Returning to the capital, he gets his first assignment: find and kill whoever or whatever is murdering samurai. It seems simple enough, until he realizes that the cat-like ghosts haunting samurai are in fact his deceased wife and mother.
Kuroneko
is one of the classics of late 60s Japanese horror; as a cinematic
movement, “J-horror” was still in its relative infancy at the time, but
Shindō’s one-two punch of Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968) laid a lot of the groundwork. Kuroneko
covers a lot of ground: revenge, desire, duty, grief, self-sacrifice.
The women want revenge for what was done to them; Gintoki’s wife is
willing to shirk her duty — to murder samurai — in the name of love, but
Gintoki’s own duty to his master leaves him conflicted. Shindō’s
cinematography is fantastic across the board, making me wonder if David
Lynch has ever seen this. Much of the movie exists in isolation, the
action occurring the deep black of night, or the shadows of a seemingly
infinite bamboo forest. Almost every movement is the careful, orderly
ritual of kabuki theatre. The overall result is sleek and darkly
graceful, if a bit short on actual story.
I’ve seen a lot of movies since the last time I saw this and I definitely have a greater appreciation for what this film is trying to do than I did when I wrote the fumbling texts that constituted a “review” back in 2018. But at the end of the day, it feels oddly prototypical, something to build on, rather than anything that can stand by itself. And yet it’s compelling, an atmospherichistorical horror flick in a genre that doesn’t have a lot of them.