Onibaba (1964)

Released in 1964 and produced by the small independent studio Kindai Eiga Kyokai, Onibaba arrived at a particularly fertile moment for Japanese cinema. The country's film industry was producing some of its most distinctive and formally adventurous work, and Kaneto Shindō's film sits comfortably alongside the stranger, more troubling end of that output. The title translates roughly as "demon hag" or "witch", and the film draws loosely on a Buddhist parable, transplanting its moral lesson into the chaos and desperation of civil war-era Japan. Two women, a mother and her daughter-in-law, are stranded in a vast, reed-covered swamp while the men around them march off to fight. Their survival depends on ambushing stray samurai, stripping their bodies, and trading the spoils. It is, to put it plainly, a grim premise, and Shindō leans into that grimness with considerable commitment. The setting, a tangle of tall reeds under relentless night skies, gives the film much of its atmosphere, shot in high-contrast black and white by cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda.

Shindō was already an established figure in Japanese cinema by this point, known for socially conscious work such as Children of Hiroshima (1952) and the equally uncompromising The Naked Island (1960). With Onibaba he pushed further into horror territory, though the film never entirely abandons its interest in poverty, desire, and the human cost of war. The production was made on modest means, which arguably suits the material: there is nothing polished about the world these women inhabit. Shindō also had a long working relationship with his lead actress, Nobuko Otowa, who plays the mother here with considerable ferocity. Otowa appeared in a great deal of Shindō's work across his career and brings a raw physicality to the role that anchors the whole film. Jitsuko Yoshimura plays the younger woman, and the tension between the two performances, one weathered and calculating, the other restless and increasingly defiant, drives much of what makes the film interesting. Kei Satō rounds out the central triangle as Hachi, the neighbour whose return from the front sets the plot's more lurid elements in motion. If you enjoy Japanese cinema from this era, it is also worth checking out The Snow Woman (1968), another film from Japan that sits in similarly atmospheric, unsettling territory.

Thematically, Onibaba is doing several things at once, sometimes uneasily. It is a survival story, a parable about jealousy and control, and a supernatural horror film, with a particularly memorable mask at the centre of its third act. Whether those threads pull together cleanly is a fair question, and it is one that critics have debated since the film's release. It has accumulated a strong reputation over the decades as a landmark of Japanese horror, predating the genre's later international breakthroughs by several decades, and it influenced a number of filmmakers working in horror and folk-horror traditions. For context on how 1960s world cinema was grappling with similarly uncomfortable human terrain, Bergman's Persona (1966) and the Soviet folk-horror of Viy (1967) make for interesting points of comparison from the same decade.

The morale of the story is let the wife of your dead Son go hump a random weirdo. Onibaba is a strange film. It's part survival and struggle of the women left behind as the men go off to war, and part possessed mask. It's genuinely unsettling at times. The writing is great and the acting is decent, despite being typically hammy and camp, as is often the case in older Japanese horror. I don't think I'd recommend this to my friends but fans of older horror or Japanese cinema will probably enjoy it.

That tension between its ambitions and its execution is something I kept coming back to after the credits rolled. There is genuine craft here, and the reed-swamp sequences have an eerie, claustrophobic quality that stays with you, but the film does seem at times uncertain about which of its preoccupations it most wants to honour. For horror fans with a taste for the unconventional, particularly those drawn to films like You Won't Be Alone (2022), which shares that same interest in women pushed to extreme measures in brutal historical settings, there is plenty to engage with. It is the sort of film I am glad exists, and glad I have seen, even if it is not one I will be pressing into people's hands down the pub any time soon.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1964  | Watched: 2025-04-16

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Japan: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Blue (1993) · The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)