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 site 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 site 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 Hachi 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 notscare 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.