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Onibaba (1964)

★★★ — Onibaba (1964)

Kaneto Shindō wrote and directed Onibaba through his own independent production company, Kindai Eiga Kyokai, which he had co-founded in 1950 precisely to make the kind of personal, uncompromising work the major studios wouldn't touch. By 1964 he already had The Naked Island (1960) behind him, a film made almost without dialogue that had become an unlikely international success, and Onibaba followed a similarly austere, low-budget path, shot in stark black and white among the reed fields of Hyōgo Prefecture. The story draws loosely on a Buddhist parable about spiritual corruption, transplanted here to the chaos of civil war Japan. It arrived during a fertile period for Japanese genre filmmaking, sitting somewhere between the chambara tradition and the emerging art-horror that Shindō would revisit with Kuroneko just four years later in 1968.

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.

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

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Where to watch (UK)

Stream: Amazon Prime Video · BFI Player · BFI Player Amazon Channel · BFI Player Apple TV Channel
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK

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