Onibaba (film)

The film is set somewhere in Japan, in the mid-fourteenth century during a period of civil war. Two fleeing soldiers are ambushed in a large field of tall, thick reeds and murdered by an older woman and her young daughter-in-law. The two women loot the dead soldiers, strip them of their armour and weapons, and drop the bodies in a deep pit hidden in the field. The next day, they take the armor and weapons to a merchant named Ushi and trade them for food. The merchant tells them news of the war, which is driving people across the country to desperation. As they leave, Ushi makes a sexual proposition to the older woman, who rebuffs him. A neighbor named Hachi, who has been at war, returns. The two women ask about Kishi, their son/husband who was drafted along with Hachi. Hachi tells them that they deserted the war and that Kishi was later killed when they were caught stealing food from farmers. The older woman warns the younger woman to stay away from Hachi, whom she blames for her son's death.

Hachi begins to show interest in the younger woman and, despite being warned to stay away from Hachi, she is seduced by him and sneaks out of her hut every night to have sex. The older woman learns of the relationship and is both angry and jealous. She tries to seduce Hachi herself, but is coldly rebuffed. She then pleads with him to not take the young woman away, since she cannot kill and rob passing soldiers without her help.

One night, while Hachi and the younger woman are together, a lost samurai wearing an Oni mask forces the older woman to guide him out of the field. He claims to wear the mask to protect his incredibly handsome face from harm. She tricks him into plunging to his death in the pit where the women dispose of their victims. She climbs down and steals the samurai's possessions and, with great difficulty, his mask, revealing the samurai's horribly disfigured face. As she leaves, the older woman then gets an idea to keep her daughter-in-law away from Hachi.

At night, as the younger woman goes to see Hachi, the older woman blocks her path, wearing the samurai's robes and mask, frightening the woman into running home. During the day, the older woman further convinces the younger woman that the "demon" was real, as punishment for her affair with Hachi. The younger woman avoids Hachi during the day, but continues to try and see him at night. During a storm, the older woman again terrifies the younger woman with the mask, but Hachi, tired of being ignored, finds the younger woman and has sex with her in the grass as the devastated old woman watches from afar. Hachi returns to his hut, where he discovers another deserter stealing his food; the deserter abruptly grabs his spear and stabs Hachi, killing him.

The older woman discovers that, after getting wet in the rain, the mask is impossible to remove. She reveals her scheme to the younger woman and pleads for her to help take off the mask. The younger woman agrees to remove the mask after the older woman promises not to interfere with her relationship with Hachi. After failing to pull it off, the young woman breaks off the mask with a hammer. Under the mask, the older woman's face is now disfigured, as the samurai's had been. The younger woman, thinking the older woman has turned into a demon, flees; the older woman runs after her, crying out that she is a human being, not a demon. The young woman leaps over the pit, and as the older woman leaps after her the film ends.

After seeing Imperial Japan's defeat in the WWII, Shindo put in themes to criticize Japan. The survival of two desperate women in a time of hardship while the nation of samurais neglect its citizens shows a very realistic and natural form of humanness. The film holds Shindo's messages regarding disdain for his home country neglecting to take care of its citizens who are meeting the country's consequences after being defeated in a war.

Shindo portrays human emotions at a very natural and crude form. The two desperate women who need to kill to survive, feeling emotions such as lust and jealousy. The portraying of the characters show human nature of faithfully following its desires. This overflowing of emotions is shown mostly from the older mother-in-law. Shindo writes the script to portray the older woman's characters as a human with conflicting emotions, and eventually laying hands on a cursed mask to become onibaba. The very exercising of human emotions is one of the main themes of the film.

Most of the cast consisted of members of Shindo's regular group of performers, Nobuko Otowa, Kei Satō, Taiji Tonoyama, and Jūkichi Uno. This was Jitsuko Yoshimura's only appearance in a Shindo film. The two women do not have names even in the script, but are merely described as "middle-aged woman" and "young woman".[3]

• Nobuko Otowa as Older Woman
• Jitsuko Yoshimura as Younger Woman
• Kei Satō as Hachi
• Taiji Tonoyama as Ushi
• Jūkichi Uno as The Masked Warrior

The story takes place shortly after the Battle of Minatogawa which began a period of over 50 years of civil war, the Nanboku-chō period (1336 to 1392). Hachi tells of an attack from general Takauji Ashikaga, who came to power in the 1330s.

The story of Onibaba was inspired by the Shin Buddhist parable of yome-odoshi-no men (嫁おどしの面) (bride-scaring mask) or niku-zuki-no-men (肉付きの面) (mask with flesh attached), in which a mother used a mask to scare her daughter from going to the temple. She was punished by the mask sticking to her face, and when she begged to be allowed to remove it, she was able to take it off, but it took the flesh of her face with it.[4]

Kaneto Shindo wanted to film Onibaba in a field of susuki grass. He sent out assistant directors to find suitable locations.[5] Once a location was found near a river bank at Inba-Numa in Chiba, they put up prefabricated buildings to live in.[6] Filming started on 30 June 1964 and continued for three months. [7] Shindo built things such as a makeshift turtle water slide to entertain the crew and keep things cool during harsh conditions of filming out in the fields of nowhere. The crew members were doing laundry and living in the fabricated buildings during the filming. The crew members grouping and eating together things like onigiri and soba noodles was caught on camera. [8]

They had a rule that if somebody left they would not get any pay, to keep the crew motivated to continue. Shindo included dramatized scenes of the dissatisfaction on the set as part of the 2000 film By Player.

To film night scenes inside the huts, they would put up screens to block the sun, and changing the shot would require setting the screens in a completely different spot.[9]

Kaneto Shindo said that the effects of the mask on those who wear it are symbolic of the disfigurement of the victims of the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film reflecting the traumatic effect of this visitation on post-war Japanese society.[5]

A makeshit tower where crew members could climb to look down and film using crane shots was built. The tower was tall enough to get a look around the entire field. [10]

The film contains some sequences filmed in slow motion.[11]

The scenes of the older woman descending in to the hole had to be shot using an artificial "hole" built above ground with scaffolding, since holes dug in the ground at the location site would immediately fill with water.[7]

Onibaba was released in Japan on November 21, 1964 where it was distributed by Toho.[2] The film was released in the United States by Toho International with English subtitles on February 4, 1965.[2] An English-dubbed version was produced by Toho, but any actual release of it is undetermined.[2] On the films initial theatrical release in the United Kingdom, the film was first rejected by the BBFC on its first submission, and then released in a heavily edited form after its second submission."[14]

Many critics have been divided on the genre of the film. While Onibaba is regarded a "period drama" by David Robinson,[20] or "stage drama" by Japanese film scholar Keiko I. McDonald,[21] Phil Hardy included it in his genre compendium as a horror film,[22] and Chuck Stephens describes it as an erotic-horror classic.[23] Writing for Sight & Sound, Michael Brooke noted that "Onibaba's lasting greatness and undimmed potency lie in the fact that it works both as an unnervingly blunt horror film (and how!) and as a far more nuanced but nonetheless universal social critique that can easily be applied to an parallel situation"[14]

Keiko I. McDonald stated that the film contained elements of the Noh theatre. She notes that the han'nya mask "is used to demonize the sinful emotions of jealousy and its associative emotions" in Noh plays, and that the differing camera angles at which the mask is filmed in Onibaba are similar to the way in which a Noh performer uses the angle of the mask to indicate emotions.[24] Other reviewers also speculate about Noh influences on the film.[25][26]

• Onibaba at AllMovie
• Onibaba on IMDb
• Onibaba at the Japanese Movie Database
• Onibaba at Rotten Tomatoes
• Kei Satō's home movies of the production of Onibaba on YouTube
• Onibaba: Black Sun Rising an essay by Chuck Stephens at the Criterion Collection