Kuroneko

Kuroneko – A pleasure afforded by the Asian popular cinema is the fact that we know very little about it and, therefore, films from Korea or India or Japan offer extravagant surprises. Kuroneko or The Black Cat from the Bamboo Grove is a stately, genuinely eerie, horror movie directed by Kaneto Shindo in 1968. The film chronicles the adventures of two ghosts, a gang-raped mother and her daughter, revenants who murder samurai by luring them into bed and, then, ripping out their throats. Somehow, the homicidal spooks are also associated with a black cat – it’s not certain if they inhabit the black cat periodically or if the black cat is some sort of spirit-familiar. The film is not exactly a revenge picture – the women wreak their havoc on any samurai happening to exit the Rajoman (“Rashomon”) gate at all Kyoto. (Apparently, the story is derived from a tale printed in the set of old legends from Kurosawa ultimately derived his famous movie named after that gate; Kurosawa got his plot and its modernist treatment from short story by Akutagawa based on the Rashomon legends.) Accordingly, the film has a social problem tint: the women represent aggrieved farmers revenging themselves on the predatory militaristic class, surely a resonant theme in post-war Japan. The film is slow, extravagantly beautiful, and a bit pedantic. Images are modeled off morose Japanese screen paintings with wide-angle black and white photography. As is common with Japanese wide-screen films, a mechanism for moving from extreme panorama to closer shots is required: the film makes copious use of the zoom lens, always an effect a bit disconcerting to a western viewer. The ghosts glide and float in the air; they can spin overhead, toppling through the black night in slow-motion in a blur of white diaphanous robes. An image of the mother ghost floating above the Rashomon gate is frightening. But the directors repetitive plot requires him to repeat the shot many times, along with less interesting pans along an ornately constructed cornice to the gate. There is a mysterious bamboo grove – it’s austere verticals are virtually indistinguishable from the ghost’s mansion hidden in the woods. The opening shots detailing the gang-rape and the murder of the women by a mob of samurai are almost too brutal for genre material of this sort – they spoil the fun with excessive realism. The film is too long for its material. A noble samurai, conscripted from his farming background into the Shogun’s army, is dispatched, like Beowulf, to kill the night-time marauders. Unfortunately, they are the ghosts of his mother and daughter. As in Ugetsu, the ghosts’ elegant Kabuki-set of a palace dissolves with the morning light into the wretched ruins of the despoiled hut where the women were raped, murdered, and their corpses burned. Shindo was raised in the farm country near Hiroshima and his shots of the women’s bodies in the charred hut have a savage, mournful intensity. All of these is strange and unfamiliar. It’s interesting to learn that the film is successful Bon ghost film synthesized with another popular horror genre. In the summer, Japanese film companies release ghost movies to correspond with the Bon festival, a Buddhist holiday that sounds something like the Mexican Day of the Dead – Japanese families invite the spirits of their dead ancestors into their homes for a few days. The other genre invoked by the film is said to be the “cat-monster horror film” – only in Japan!