Between the wolves merchants of kaidan series#

Is it the vengeful ghost of Yoriko, or is it Saeko, determined to plunge her sister's killers into suicidal madness?Ĭinematographer Masayuki Kato creates a series of images worthy of the finest kaidan: a chain gang of skeletons, bobbing together under the sea the half-burnt face of a pirate, caught in unnerving close-up Saeko's wide eyes, illuminated by a single candle in a darkened cabin. When the abandoned freighter that Yuriko died upon, the Dragon King, returns to land after three years drifting at sea, somebody – or some thing – starts driving the surviving pirates to their deaths. For an island nation like Japan, whose sailors were often subject to the brutal savagery of the raiders of the South China Sea, there is no such cutesy delusion. For Western audiences, even pre-Captain Jack Sparrow, pirates were romantic figures. Overshadowing this dilemma is the death of her twin sister Yoriko at the hands of pirates. Orphan Saeko (Kikko Matsuoka) is divided between her devotion to the Roman Catholic priest (Masumi Okada) who raised her, and her love for fisherman Mochizuki (Yasunori Irikawa). Shot in black and white, it echoes the form of a traditional Japanese ghost story or kaidan, as restless spirits take their vengeance on the selfish living. Amongst them, 1968's The Living Skeleton probably the most conventional of Schochiku's horror releases.

Yet between 19, they produced four horror pictures, all different in tone but melded together by a crushing sense that humanity deserves to be eradicated – whether by vampiric aliens, poisonous insects, nuclear self-destruction, or by its own brutality and selfishness.Īll four finally see release as a typically gorgeous but extras-free Criterion box set. Yet the Tokyo-based studio actually began in 1895 mounting kabuki productions, before releasing a series of delicate melodramas and period pieces like Yasujiro Ozu's A Story of Floating Weeds. Shochiku is best known in the contemporary West as a sometime home to Takashi Miike and 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano (or, to anime fans as the Japanese theatrical distributors of Appleseed and Dirty Pair films). That was kind of what happened when Japan's Shochiku studio produced a handful of shocking, daring and bizarre horror films. Imagine a world where Twila Tharp released the Friday the 13th films. The end of the world, Shochiku-style: 'Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell' headlines the new Criterion box set

Between the wolves merchants of kaidan