Japanese horror movies have become big box office in
many countries now, including the USA and Europe. Movies
like The Ring have become household
names. Video stores stock the American-made
English-language versions, and in many cases too, the Japanese
originals.
Onibaba is a much older movie
(1964). Some would argue that it really doesn’t belong in a
book on horror films; that it is more of a war film or possibly an
art film about the effects of war.
In some ways those people would appear to be
right. It is not easy to find another movie in this book
similar to Onibaba. For example, it seems
light-years away from The Ring. Off the top
of my head, I would probably say it is closest to
Deliverance, shown from the crazed backwoods
people’s point of view. Onibaba, like
Deliverance, shows people at their simplest and
most savage. It is not an optimistic outlook, to put it
mildly. The characters in Onibaba are in
desperation. The men have been forced far away, to fight a
war that means nothing to them. The old men, women and
children left behind are finding it impossible to work their farms
anymore. They are close to starving. Already they have seen
much bad weather. Strange omens of doom are signs of worse things
to come.
Onibaba takes place in a remote part
of Japan, in land covered in grass taller than any of its human
characters. At night, especially, the grass sways wildly in
the intense wind. The movie starts by introducing two of the
main characters, the Woman, and the Young woman, who is married to
the woman’s son, now gone to war. You never learn their
names. For a long while, it has been just the two of them.
They have done what they had to in order to stay alive; killing
soldiers and selling their weapons and armor in exchange for
food. Killing has become as familiar to them as washing
clothes, eating and going to the bathroom. It is just
something you do. All their humanity appears to be gone.
Brutal times; the only way to stay alive
Hachi, an old neighbor returns out of nowhere
from the war. He tells them that the man they have waited to
hear about, son to one, husband to another, has died. The
man’s death was just one of a long series of horrors Hachi has
seen.
Almost right away, Hachi’s return
creates a tense triangle between the three people, with each
struggling for ultimate power. All Hachi wants now is
his old house, food to survive, to stay out of the war, and to be
with the young woman.
And that is enough to throw
everything that existed out of balance. The woman sees
Hachi’s desire for her former daughter-in-law, and she is
terrified. Not because she cares about her, she is past
caring for anyone. But she absolutely needs her
daughter-in-law, to help with the killings now that she cannot
farm. If Hachi takes her away, she feels that her life will
be over.
Hachi’s return; a rapidly growing competition
When Hachi first returned, he described a war
with sides that meant nothing to any of them. But now Hachi
has started a new war; only three people, but they cannot live
side by side. Someone has to win; someone has to lose.
At first the older woman seems to be the loser. Strangely
enough, it is sex that determines the battlefield. Hachi and
the younger woman are attracted to each other almost
immediately. When they start their affair, you can feel the
heat; maybe it is their desperation, possibly more than that.
For the older woman, intimidation
is the only weapon left. She tells the young woman stories
about purgatory and a hell that sounds right out of Dante’s
Inferno, with the most intense physical pain saved for those who
indulge in extramarital sex. The young woman is afraid but
Hashi is not. He tells her that he would risk hell to
continue having sex with her. And despite her talk you know
that the older woman is tempted too by Hashi’s sensuality.
She tries unsuccessfully to seduce him, and not just to break up
the affair. She desires him too.
Things change one night the old
woman is alone. A samurai appears, wearing a grotesque
mask. All he wants is to find his way out of the sea of tall
grass. The old woman refuses at first, then seems to be
intimidated into helping him.
And here is where
Onibaba finally starts to feel like a traditional
horror movie. The samurai talks about his mask, and how he
needed it to protect his handsome face during combat. The
old woman has trouble believing him, the same way she has trouble
believing anything positive anymore. More and more, you feel
the bitterness eating her up from the inside. It’s no big
surprise when she lures him into the same deep pit where she has
thrown the bodies of the other men they have robbed.
To get his armor and weapons, she needs to
climb down to the bottom. Piles of human skeletons cover the
ground around his body. Seeing them, wading through them,
does not seem to bother the woman. She talks to the dead
samurai in a sarcastic way about his handsome face; she feels no
sympathy. He is just one of the many faceless samurai who
dragged her son away to his death. To her horror his
face is not handsome beneath the mask but horribly scarred,
possibly war wounds, there is no way to know.
The samurai mask now becomes a
weapon in the war between the three survivors. The older
woman puts it on, and uses it to play the role of a demon.
In this way, she hopes to keep the Young woman home and afraid to
leave. Each time the Young woman leaves for Hachi’s hut, she
finds the demon waiting for her. Knowing nothing about the
dead samurai and fearful of hell, she does not suspect the other
woman yet.
But other forces (Black magic?
Karma? The list is endless.) have been brought to life.
Whatever powers the mask may have, each of the three must now pay
a price. As you would expect you are left with a lot more
questions than answers: Why won’t the mask come off the
woman’s face? Is her pain while she wears the mask only
physical pain or is she feeling her terrible loss of humanity at
last? Has the mask been cursed by the dead samurai? As
the old song goes…Nothing is revealed.
Well, maybe a little. The director, then
in his 90’s when Onibaba was re-issued on DVD,
did talk about some of his ideas in an interview included on it.
For one, he hoped to show that sex was more
than just basic animal need. It was the one spiritual
experience available to these people in their ravished land.
A brief scene of Hachi and the young woman running naked in a
downpour shows this. Its tone screams of freedom; it is so
different from what has come before: the endless cycle of work,
the voices with no expression. The lust of the older woman
too (which she spells out clearly to Hachi) is a need for love as
well. Only she cannot express this (a need for love,
as well as the sex) until much later. Her anger
masks everything else about her. Why wouldn’t she want to
tear her inner mask of anger away, the way she longs to tear the
real mask off her face?
A mask; and perhaps a look inside a soul
But this is only one of many interpretations;
people will find many other insights of their own, based on their
own experience. Onibaba may or may not
scare you in the sense of making you jump out of your
seat. That is an individual thing. But this is
not all you can judge it by. For a lot of people,
Onibaba will stay with them a long time:
Outside forces stripping you of pieces of your life and people you
once loved. Realizing those forces mean nothing to you; That
your losses have been for no reason you can understand. The
theme of losing your humanity in a savage world. The
additional pain when another person finally makes you realize the
pain of that loss.
The word “important” has a bad sound to a lot of people…like
a teacher saying , “This should be important to you.” Still,
Onibaba is an important movie, much more than
just a good story.