I
I
believe ‘Kwaidan’ was the first Japanese film I ever saw. I was already familiar
with theatrical, symbolist set design from Derek Jarman’s and Peter Greenaway’s
work, I am sure: that is, a cinematic world that was more like impressionistic
paintings and was in no way trying to hide its cinematic artificiality, its
theatricality. But with ‘Kwaidan’, this approach was in the service of
straightforward ghost stories in a way that accentuated, through affectation,
the storytelling nature of my introduction to Japanese ghost stories. I didn’t
know Asian cinema at the time, but I knew horror, and this was one that foregrounded
the eerie and the uncanny.
The
eerie-uncanny is an abstract value and tone that lingers that endows a film
with a haunting aftertaste; something a little opaque, unsolved or indefinable.
It’s not that I don’t like a punkish brazenness and outrageousness – I love ‘Re-Animator’,
‘Santa Sangre’, ‘The Reflecting Skin’, ‘An American Werewolfin London’ and I have an inexplicable fondness for ‘Xtro’ and ‘The
Gate’ for example, and I’ve been known to enjoy Richard Laymon books too, none
of which can be accused of subtlety – but their effect is visceral rather than
lingering. In contrast, a film like ‘Terror of All Hallows Ever’ sticks
with you not because of eeriness, but because it has the upsetting quality of
unfairness (which I will write about elsewhere).
Eeriness
and uncanniness are central to my enjoyment of the horror genre. I am therefore
more prone to return to and rate higher the works that possess this quality,
which is why my preference is for such as more recent films like ‘A Hole in
the Ground’ or ‘Black Mountain’, ‘In Fabric’, ‘I am the pretty
thing that lives in the house’, or ‘It Comes at Night’, regardless
of any flaws they may have. Of course, I am aware this is a particular strain
of hauntings and the eerie-uncanny that won’t appeal to all (it’s the kind Amazon
comments call “boring”). I am, after all, someone who favours the ambiguity of ‘Personal
Shopper’. It’s not that these are favourites, but they speak to mystery and
the unknowable and that’s resonates with me. These are pieces that leave question
marks that make them resound.
By
the time Robert Wise’s ‘The Haunting’ finishes its opening storytelling,
it is set in motion as royalty of the eerie-uncanny, just as ‘Don’t Look Now’
is a vector for it. And, of course, you have ‘The Shining’. It gives ‘Cat
People’ its evocative, sensuous core. ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’
is unforgettable for it (a peer like ‘Funhouse’ is too much a visceral
ghost-train, but eeriness is there, not least in the monster wearing a monster
mask).
It
is the quality that still draws me to Mann’s ‘The Keep’ even if it isn’t
actually overall unconvincing. It’s what makes ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ considerable,
despite its reductive conclusion. Similarly, the negligible ‘The Monster Club’
anthology always stuck firmly in my memory because the episodes ‘The
Shadmock Story’ and ‘The Humgoo Story’ proved to haunt me throughout
my childhood due to their eeriness (I saw it again recently as an adult and
discovered I still rated them, partly due to nostalgia; you can shrug at ‘The
Vampire Story’ and it’s “We’re The Bleeney” pun).
Rob
Zombie is far more successful evoking the eerie-uncanny with the much derided ‘Lords
of Salem’ than its introduction into his unfavoured ‘Halloween II’.
Of course, Carpenter’s original ‘Halloween’ has this built in: “As a matter
of fact: that was.” (Zombie’s ‘Halloween’ reboots Myers with brutalism.)
The
eerie-uncanny is how and why Ingmar Bergman’s films can be so unpredictable and
otherworldly whilst tied up with the earthiness of human existential and
romantic conditions. He can have Death itself crossing the room without losing
the flow of family drama. With Bergman, the eerie-uncanny is inexorably intertwined
with human experience and perception.
It’s
why ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ is so beguiling. Why ‘The Shout’ is
so wonderfully odd and memorable. It enhances more minor entries like ‘The Lady
in White’ into cult fare. A blockbuster peer like ‘Poltergeist’ is trying
too much to be a fairground ride, although like ‘The Ring’, it makes TV
screens scary.
The
current works of Robert Eggers and Ari Aster utilise the eerie-uncanny to great
effect: everything comes with a hint of untrustworthy reality. But Aster
punctuates with vividly visceral set-pieces. And the eerie-uncanny comes naturally
to folk horror.
Andrei
Tarkovosky veers between the eerie-uncanny and the ethereal (whereas Terence Malick
is just ethereal).
It’s
central to the work of David Lynch, and often terrifyingly so. His sense of
this is peerless, and it is why moments that would seem absurd or camp and
overdone by other directors are often frightening when Lynch does them.
It’s
why I love ‘Sapphire and Steel’ (one of the most unforgettable and disturbing
moments in this show, for me, is when Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) is trapped in a
painting, for example). And, yes, I am a MR James fan.
Dramas
like ‘Cross my Heart and Hope to Die’, ‘Shadow of the Valley’ and ‘Persona’
utilise eeriness-uncanniness to hint at horror or magic-realism with an
edge that provokes anxiety rather than wonder. (With ‘Cross My Heart and
Hope to Die’, I’m thinking of the dressing-up party.) Magic-realism speaks
to the boundlessness of possibilities whilst the eerie-uncanny speaks to reality’s
unreliability, instability, and malevolence.
A
thriller like ‘I’m Not There’ evokes this to convey how disconnected
from the real world its killer protagonist is. Even a thriller like ‘The Ipcress
File’ has this: something to do with John Barry’s score and the sense that
there is something not being said. And ‘Performance’ and ‘Repulsion’
use this to portray descents into madness (although the latter is often
considered a horror).
It's
not the visceral, physical reaction of jump-scares that the eerie-uncanny
offers. No, the eerie-uncanny is that something that is just not right,
something glimpsed at the back of the frame, something you presume is “normal”
or “real” but isn’t. It’s the shadow that suddenly moves and the precursor to
madness. It’s ‘The Babadook’. ‘Seconds’. Even ‘The Man from Planet X’ and many scrappy
fifties b-movies have it: the black-and-white and a theremin surely helps. ‘Insidious’
almost has this in its middle act (the kid-ghost dancing in the house), but it’s
ultimately just in the service of jump-scares and squanders the flavour.
And
then we come to a specifically Asian eerie-uncanny with films like ‘Kwaidan’
and ‘Onibaba’ with trend-setting long-haired female ghosts which would
come to distinguish J-horror globally in the wake of Hideo Nakata’s ‘The
Ring’ (1998) and Takashi Shimizu’s ‘The Grudge’. One thing I liked
about Shimizu’s 2006 US ‘The Grudge 2’ was that it implied you weren’t even
safe in your own hoody: both absurd and uncanny. ‘The Ring’ especially succeeds
in bridging the divide between old-style ghost Gothicism and contemporary technology
with videotape serving the traditional narrative purpose of dream-sequences: it’s
this spanning of the old and the new that allows space for the eerie-uncanny,
where the supernatural can get into the everyday. And Gore Verbinki’s 2002 remake of ‘The Ring’
is a masterclass of eeriness and truly unsettling (I certainly remember it spooking
me for the evening afterwards in a way films often don’t). Something like the
collection of horror shorts ‘13 Real AsianHorror Stories’
shows how the
Asian approach to genre can whip up the eerie-uncanny in a very short space of
time.
A
lot of the eerie-uncanny can be in just the waiting… Not necessarily for a jolt,
but for a chill, for disturbance, for something to make itself known.
II
Kwaidan
(怪談,
Kaidan,
literally "ghost stories")
Koboyashi
Mayaki, 1964, Japan
Adapted from the stories of
Lafcadio Hearn by Mizuki Yōzo
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set
designer
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Tannoura
battle paintings
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background
artist
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assistant
art director
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An
uneasy wind blows open the gates, and we’re in:
Key
to ‘Kwaidan’s ability to unhinge and to create the eerie-uncanny its use
of sound. It plays much like a silent movie, for the sound design and the music
by Miyajima Yoshio operates by its own rules, as if it’s intruding from another
film, making noise often abrasive, discordant and unsettling in its unpredictability.
This keeps everything ill-at-ease.
parallel to the images on-screen; rather, he plays a little with the visuals. He creates a certain mu and then engages the music.” Donald Richie describes the idea of mu as “very much like the idea of emptiness. […] So emptiness is not there until its antithesis is there.”* In ‘Kwaidan’, the audience can pour its own nervousness into these spaces: this disjointedness creates a nightmarish tone for being untrustworthy and often startling.
Similarly,
in the deliberate artificiality of the sets and the art design, a kind of visual
mu is created which leaves the viewer plenty of space to imagine background
detail and endow it with realism. It is vivid, painterly and dreamlike. With
the aesthetic mostly disassociated from naturalism, the viewer is ever aware of
the presence of the art department. It is a work that leaves plenty of room for
the viewer to colour in.
To
achieve this, sets were constructed in an aircraft hanger. Most impressive is
sea battle depicted in ‘Hoichi the Earless’, but the decrepit house in
‘Black Hair’ and the winter vistas of ‘The Woman of the Snow’ and the
painted skies are equally unforgettable and beguiling. It is both sparse and
packed with detail. It is pure theatre where the world-building is on par with
fantasy works such as, say, ‘The Dark Crystal’. A side-effect of this ambition is that the film
went over-budget and bankrupted the production company, Shochiku Studios.
But
there are exterior shots in ‘Black Hair’, creating a contrast between
the outside world that the samurai leaves his wife for, and the claustrophobia,
chiaroscuro and rot of the haunted home. He leaves in search of wealth, and
although Craig Ian Man reads this as a criticism of Western capitalism,* it is
hard to credit just the West with a monopoly on cautionary tales of greed.
However, Man positions ‘Kwaidan’ in the post-war context when Japan was
still wrestling with its position and relationship with the world which gives
it undeniable allegorical weight. As predictable as the tale is, it is still distinctively
chilly, vivid, and mesmerising in execution, which is true for the film as a whole.
It also follows that distinct Japanese horror tradition of insisting that hair
is scary.
‘The
Woman of the Snow’
has even more vivid sets, recreating blizzard-ravaged landscapes, rural scenes
and eyes in the sky. There is no real fear or dread in this tale, but the cruelty
of the impending and inevitable loss speaks to the often forgotten softer and
sad corners of ghost stories. Melancholy is the sub-genre’s domain.
If
the blizzards blowing over giant sets of the preceding story are impressive,
the next up the ante even more, not least with comparable storm effects. ‘Hoichi
the Earless’ starts with external shots of waves crashing on rocks, but the
naval battle it the depicts is studio-bound, a remarkable set-piece, and this exaggeration
only promotes the feel of a painting coming to life. This episode is the longest,
feature-length. It tells of a blind biwa bard famed for his rendition of songs
trumpeting a great battle, but ghosts of war still want to be celebrated for
their sacrifice and trick him into serenading them. Again, the sets are often
breath-taking in scope, both dense and minimalist. Hoichi covered in protective
sutras gives ‘Kwaidan’ it’s poster boy, but practically any still is
distinctive.
The
final ‘In a Cup of Tea’ is ostensibly the least of the tales, or it superficially
has the least gravitas. But again, it displays that nothing is too casual in
Japanese horror that it can’t be used for haunting. A samurai drinks the soul
of a dead warrior from a cup of tea and is haunted, but his stubbornness won’t
let him accept what’s happening. This is where the film becomes very meta with
the narration commenting on the author. Although the film via narration makes much
of this being an unfinished tale, this actually ends on a note that much horror
ends on – madness - so in fact ‘Kwaidan’ offers two conclusions.
Craig
Ian Man reads all the tales through a post-war lens, and indeed it’s easy to
see these tales as warnings of leaving traditional values, or exalting the
ghosts of war, of falling for their trickery, of not letting the past stay
secret. The theme of facing yourself politically and personally via supernatural
encounters is what horror is for.
‘Kwaidan’
is
taken from Lafcadio Hearn’s collections of Japanese ghost stories, and the
tales are rich in the origins and tropes of supernatural stories, and for that
they may be predictable. This is folklore, after all. But here, the execution
is paramount, and a seminal example of the eerie-uncanny where it is the application
of discord and the unsettling that makes it truly creepy, if not frightening
(but ‘Black Hair’ and the first sighting of ‘The Woman of the Snow’
still have that essential creepiness).
Koboyashi’s
phantasmagorical rendering of folklore nods to the broad and colourful way
storytelling plays with the listener’s imagination and to cinema as a playbox
of illusion. Craig Ian Man talks at length of how critics have spoken of ‘Kwaidan’
as an Art Film rather than genuine Horror, but of course, it is both. It
speaks to artistry and design as much as anxiety and fears. It speaks to that
moment when reality fails and something else gets through, and that’s where the
eerie-uncanny lives. The elegance of the genre is often neglected, or at worse
refuted, but ‘Kwaidan’ is a seminal example.
* These quotes
from the booklet for the ‘Eureka!: Masters of Cinema’ release of ‘Kwaidan’,
pg. 72-3.
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