Jitsuko Yoshimura in Onibaba (1964)

鬼婆 / Onibaba (1964) - Kaneto Shindo

Once it's dark, it can't get any darker.

Onibaba (Kaneto Shindō, 1964)

Onibaba, 1964

Kaneto Shindo

Onibaba (1964)

Onibaba (1964) #FilmReview

Synopsis- An impoverished mother and daughter-in-law kill soldiers and steal their belongings. After the mother learns of the son’s death, she dons a mask to scare her daughter-in-law into staying with her. Director- Kaneto Shindo Starring-Jitsuko Yoshimura, Nobuko Otowa, Kei Sato Genre- Horror | War Released-1964 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.5 out of 5. “Onibaba” (1964) is a haunting and atmospheric…

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(via 吉村実子（Jitsuko Yoshimura）「鬼婆」（1964）・・・久しぶりに其の四 : 夜ごとの美女)

Onibaba (1964)

Watching older, classic films - particularly foreign ones - is a unique experience. Many of the conventions from today’s cinema are in their infancy so you often see something old that feels new because the mold hadn’t been finalized yet. In its own, possibly unintended way, 1964’s Onibaba keeps you guessing. It feels like a horror movie but plays out as a drama. Deeply rooted in Japanese culture, I had no idea how the film was going to end.

Set somewhere in feudal Japan while unnamed lords wage a civil war, an older woman (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) hide in the endless field of tall grass. Stray warriors pass are murdered so the women can take their gear and make ends meet by selling it. When their neighbour, Hachi (Kei Satō) returns from the war, his presence creates a growing rift between the two scavengers.

Most of the characters in Onibaba are unnamed, further giving it a folk tale-like quality. You think you’re following a story about simple archetypes, a basic moral passed down through the ages when suddenly, characters will reveal something unexpected about themselves. This is probably going to be a morality tale - in the end, most horror stories are - but how is this a horror story? By showing you how cheap people's lives are. The women barely make a living stealing weapons and armor from people, human beings they had to kill. It fills you with dread thinking about how little they get for such a heinous crime done so regularly. The women are essentially cannibals, killing men at spearpoint to survive. It’s disturbing but is this what the title’s translation of “demon woman” translates to? It can’t be. “Woman” is singular so it must be that at some point, one of the two women will do something particularly evil… but which one?

The black-and-white photography adds much to this film. Had it been in colour, the fields of grass would make this whole movie green. It would feel vivid and alive. As is, it feels gloomy. The endless vegetation swaying in the wind reminds you of water. These two women are in purgatory and plagued by hunger. There’s got to be a way to escape but the only escape we see is this massive, gaping hole near their home. Its presence mimics the characters in the film, who are always hungry and never satisfied. You just know someone will eventually fall in, but when? What kind of hell awaits them at the bottom?

While Onibaba moves slowly towards an uncertain direction at first, stay with it. Just as you think you’ve got its story figured out, you learn a new detail about the old woman, or the daughter-in-law does something that sends ripples through their world and makes you forget your previous expectations. Now it's an erotic horror film, a drama, and a folk tale. It’s all sorts of things blended together and its artistic presentation makes it feel simultaneously classic and brand-new. (Original Japanese with English Subtitles, October 25, 2019)

Jitsuko Yoshimura in An Innocent Witch (Heinosuke Gosho, 1965)

Cast: Jitsuko Yoshimura, Kin Sugai, Taiji Tonoyama, Minoru Terada, Keizo Kawasaki, Yoshio Yoshida, Eijiro Tono, Takayuki Akutagawa. Screenplay: Hideo Horie, based on a novel by Hajime Ogawa. Cinematography: Sozaburo Shinomura. Art direction: Totetsu Hirakawa. Film editing: Sadako Ikeda. Music: Sei Ikeno.

An Innocent Witch begins like a documentary, with a voiceover narration describing the pilgrimages to Mount Osore, where the faithful gather to ask blind seers to facilitate communication with their dead loved ones. One of the pilgrims is Kikuno (Kin Sugai), who wants to speak with her daughter, Ayako (Jitsuko Yoshimura). As the seer goes into her trance, the film switches abruptly to a conventional narrative in which we learn that Ayako was sold -- willingly, it seems -- into prostitution by her mother because Ayako's father (Yoshio Yoshida) is too ill to continue supporting the family as a fisherman and gatherer of seaweed. (The father is never told about Ayako's work as a prostitute; he thinks only that she has gone to the city to earn more money.) In the brothel, Ayako loses her virginity to her first customer, a wealthy lumber wholesaler named Kansuke (Taiji Tonoyama). Pleased with the young woman, Kansuke becomes Ayako's regular customer. Then one evening a shy young man named Kanjiro (Minoru Terada) arrives with his fellow military cadets and Ayako relieves him of his virginity. They begin to fall in love, but just before he is called up for service, Kanjiro realizes that his own father, Kansuke, has been one of Ayako's customers. Kansuke, it turns out, has been aware that Kanjiro has also been seeing Ayako, and doesn't really mind sharing her with his son. But Ayako has promised Kanjiro that she won't see his father again, and when Kansuke insists on having sex with her anyway, he dies of an apparent heart attack. Soon word arrives that Kanjiro has also died at the front. The coincidence of the deaths of a father and son causes Ayako to be labeled a "femme fatale." But while visiting Kanjiro's grave, Ayako meets his older brother, Kanichi (Keizo Kawasaki), and her involvement with this ill-fated family deepens into further tragedy. The film climaxes with Ayako seeking a kind of exorcism that will purify her of guilt, but that, too, has fatal consequences. The core story of An Innocent Witch is very well handled by screenwriter Hideo Horie and director Heinosuke Gosho, but the framing of it in the context of a documentary about the search for communication with the afterlife feels awkward, as if Horie and Gosho were trying to impose a larger statement about the consequences of superstition on the material. Ayako's story speaks for itself without extra help.

'Onibaba' – the horrors of war on HBO Max and Criterion Channel

‘Onibaba’ – the horrors of war on HBO Max and Criterion Channel

A curse hangs over Kaneto Shindo’s primal classic Onibaba (Japan, 1964) like a looming storm cloud. It looks like a ghost story and has the unsettling, hostile atmosphere of a horror movie, but the real demons arise from the desperation and savagery of the human animal trying to survive the horrors of war. The setting is rural 16th century Japan, where a futile war between rival Emperors has…

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¿¿¿ARE YOU READY JONSAS???

So, according to some reports, Kit and Sophie movie The Dreadful is a remake of the classic Japanese horror movie ONIBABA

Here some synopsis:

IMDB: Two women kill samurai and sell their belongings for a living. While one of them is having an affair with their neighbor, the other woman meets a mysterious samurai wearing a bizarre mask. Filmaffinity: After enlisting as a volunteer in a war in 14th century Japan, his wife and mother remain living in a swamp. They eke out their living by ambushing worn-out warriors, killing them and selling their belongings to a greedy merchant. The woman comes to mistrust her daughter-in-law who has coupled up with a deserter, and begins to wear a facial mask she has taken from a slain samurai. Soon the mask will not come off again. In this disguise she is at first taken for a demon by her daughter. Wikipedia: The film is set during a civil war in medieval Japan. Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura play two women who kill infighting soldiers to steal their armor and possessions for survival, while Kei Satō plays the man who ultimately comes between them.

If you read the full PLOT on Wikipedia, you will find that the movie is full of sex scenes.

ONIBABA was translated to Spanish as: "ONIBABA: The Myth of Sex"

Here some scenes from the trailer:

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***JONSA WON SO HARD***

Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura in Onibaba (1964)

Jitsuko Yoshimura in Onibaba (Kaneto Shindō, 1964)

Onibaba [1964 Kaneto Shindō]

ONIBABA 鬼婆 (1964)

CRITERION COLLECTION Blu-ray 2021