Three Films Make A Post: Tell Me Why You Don’t Like Sundays

Phenomena aka Fenómenas (2023): This Netflix production by Carlos Therón isn’t the remake of the Argento movie one might fear, but rather a film that seems to imagine the Conjuring series, but with bickering middle-aged women (one of them the inevitable Belén Rueda) replacing the sexed up version of two right-wing con artists. Which is such an obvious improvement, one wonders why nobody did something like it earlier.

Therón does a good job of mixing the expected stylistic interests of modern mainstream horror with a very Spanish sense of humour without things ever exactly turning into a horror comedy. The spooky business isn’t original but fun and done competently enough to make this a very pleasant surprise.

The Seventh Grave aka La settima tomba (1965): This often amateurish Gothic horror meets Old Dark House piece directed by one-time filmmaker Garibaldi Serra Caracciolo is certainly not what you’d call a good movie, or a hidden gem, but recommends itself to the likes of me through moments when exactly the film’s flaws – terrible continuity, dubious lighting, stiff yet overheated acting, and a complete lack of aesthetic taste – turn it interesting. It’s a very traditional psychotronic film in that way, blowing one’s mind a little by seeming devoid of any actual understanding of how to make a “proper” movie.

Terror in the Streets aka Akuma ga yondeiru (1970): The first third of this horror-tinged mystery by Michio Yamamoto portrays the increasing social and economical isolation of its heroine (Wakako Sakai) as if by some shadowy evil force that seems to prefigure 2020’s Invisible Man with wonderful paranoid and melodramatic intensity in a way that might even suggest some kind of feminist thought being involved. Any idea of that disappears in the middle of the movie, when things become increasingly silly and surreal, with an utterly bizarre nightclub marriage without consent scene as a particular high point.

Yamamoto unfortunately can’t keep the tension or the sheer hypnotic bizarreness of what came before up in the third act. But then, who wouldn’t crash and burn when tasked to tie up what came before in a standard mystery knot?

Evil of Dracula (1974)

Original title: Chi o suu bara

aka The Bloodthirsty Roses

Shiraki (Toshio Kurosawa) comes to what the film calls “the bleak north” of Japan as the new psychology teacher of a boarding school for young women, shortly before the term break. It’s not an ideal time for such an arrival: the principal’s (Shin Kishida) wife (Mika Katsuragi) has died in a car accident, her body laid out in the cellar of the creepy western style mansion next to the school where she and her husband lived. The Principal explains this rather un-Japanese treatment of the body with a local custom that sees the bereft praying for a dead person’s revival for a week before cremation.

The Principal has other news for Shiraki too. He has decided the young teacher is to be his successor at the school in a few months or so. Shiraki’s understandably confused by this, as much as he is by his new boss’s insistence on him spending a night at the mansion before he moves into his own room in the school building. That night, Shiraki has a dream in which he is accosted by blue-faced women in nightgowns – one of whom looks a lot like the portrait of the Principal’s wife hanging in the mansion – who clearly (and perhaps disappointingly) have nothing good for him in mind.

If this experience has indeed been a dream is a question Shiraki will increasingly ask himself, for it seems connected to all kinds of strangeness going on at the boarding school. That one of the other teachers is a creep who likes to creepily stare at the students while dramatically – as well as creepily - quoting Baudelaire might be explained by this being a Japanese movie. But what is Shiraki to make of the tales the local doctor Shimomura (Kunie Tanaka) tells him about the place? Apparently, every year, one or two students of the school just disappear without a trace, and nobody seems to care all that much. And that’s just the beginning of it – this year’s disappeared girl looks exactly like one of the women from Shiraki’s dream. Shimomura also has some curious ideas about vampire legends of the area to share, as well as tales of the curious fact that the principals change rather regularly here but every new principal changes his behaviour radically once he is in the new job and starts acting a lot like his predecessor. Well, except for that one guy who just went crazy and is spending the rest of his life institutionalized. It’s all rather confounding and disconcerting to Shiraki, and becomes even more so when some of the students are getting stalked and attacked by someone who looks a lot like the Principal.

Evil of Dracula is the final film of Toho’s and director Michio Yamamoto’s western vampire aka “Bloodthirsty” trilogy. Where the first two seem to be closely related to Italian gothic horror, this one’s trying to split the difference between the Italian approach and Hammer’s style of the gothic. Particularly Kishida as the main vampire is heavily indebted to the Christopher Lee version of Dracula, ticking off all the check marks on the Christopher Lee Dracula scale: not a seducer but a rapist, likes to snarl and look pissed off at the slightest provocation, and is generally a physical threat as much as a spiritual one.

Evil’s vampirism is more sexualized again than it was in its successor, with the victims in general, once bitten, clearly having a rather pleasant time of it, while Mrs Principal prefers to suck the blood of young women from a point slightly above their breasts (providing the film also with a decent opportunity for some rather more artsy than sleazy looking breast shots). Getting bitten by a vampire still means instant Renfieldisation, too, so the film also keeps his predecessor's paranoia motives to a degree. It is, however, a less personal kind of paranoia here because nobody is quite as close as a sister to anyone else here, and the film doesn’t put its emphasis there.

Rather, this one returns to the mystery influences of the first film, concerning itself mainly with Shiraki, Shimomura and the - alas weakly drawn and rather uninteresting - female main character Kumi (Mariko Mochizuki) trying to puzzle out what exactly the vampires are planning, and how.

And the how turns out to be really rather interesting and creepy, involving a technique to take over someone else’s life I’ve certainly never seen in any other vampire movie, Japanese or western. It’s also a method not to be spoiled for the first time viewer.

Otherwise, Yamamoto still follows the method that worked out so well for him in the first two films and shoots contemporary surroundings in the style of gothic horror, doubling down when it comes to the obligatory creepy mansion. So shadows and the air of a dream abound, people act irrationally, and the irrational acts upon them. It’s all rather fitting to a series of films among whose recurring motives is their characters’ difficulty to discern dream from reality.

Most of this is atmospheric and effective, particularly the film’s final third providing one great moment after the other, Yamamoto regularly adding little flourishes like the Principal’s habit of sending his victims white roses that turn red once he’s killed them. It’s not a film for anyone who needs to have a plot or characters which work logically but I’d argue all three of Yamamoto’s vampire movies would be poorer for the addition of workaday logic, for they’d stopped being dreams.

Lake of Dracula (1971)

Original title: Noroi no yakata: Chi o suu me

aka Bloodthirsty Eyes

Ever since she was small, Akiko (Midori Fujita) has had a terrible recurring nightmare. In her dream she runs after her little dog towards a creepy western style mansion. Inside the building, she finds a beautiful dead woman at a piano, and is attacked by a blue-faced man (Shin Kishida) in black with blood on his face, very sharp teeth and yellow eyes she can’t forget.

Now, more than fifteen years later, Akiko tries to exorcise the dream by using her holidays in a nice modern house close to a pleasant looking lake to turn it into a painting. Alas, that dream will turn out to be a repressed memory once the mandatory amount of strange stuff begins to happen around Akiko.

A coffin is loaded off at the close-by tourist centre (hut), and soon, the friendly old guy working there is turning into a blue-faced somewhat rapey Renfield, Akiko’s sister Natsuko (Sanae Emi) starts acting like different person, and Akiko’s dog is murdered. Either our heroine is losing it, or some evil from her past has come to get her. Fortunately, her boyfriend, the doctor Takashi (Choei Takahashi) is one of those rare horror movie boyfriends who actually listen when their girlfriends are starting to tell strange stories, so at least, she doesn’t have to fight against the vampire who wants to make her his bride alone. Which is a good thing, what with her not being much good at the whole vampire fighting business.

The second film in Toho’s and director Michio Yamamoto’s western vampire non-trilogy (sometimes also known as the “Bloodthirsty Trilogy” because that word is in each of the Japanese titles) is the weakest of the three. There are a couple of reasons for that: the pacing is just a tad too slow even for a gothically inclined horror film of the early 70s, the plot is not terribly eventful and the general set-up is just not quite as interesting as in the other films of the trilogy.

It’s still a nice example of gothic horror from Japan, mind you. I particularly enjoy how Yamamoto mixes a mostly modern setting with very classical gothic horror patterns, with a nervous and appropriately beautiful heroine who could have stepped right out of the pages of a gothic horror revival novel stumbling panicked through a world that very suddenly and quite literally turns into a nightmare for her, and where the people closest to her apart from her boyfriend turn into evil mirror images of themselves.

The film seems more interested in the personality changes in the people under the vampire’s spell than in the more typical sexual angle (which is there but not really a point of emphasis – there’s not even the scene of undead Natsuko trying to seduce Takashi you’d expect, particularly since the film appears to set it up a little earlier). The film’s not so much afraid of foreigners stealing a gentleman’s wife or of anyone getting sexually liberated than of the people around you stopping to repress their worst sides, sex apparently not falling under the description of bad for once in a horror film. It’s an interesting choice I wish the film had done a little more with, but it’s certainly there, and it plays nicely with Akiko’s fear of her reality turning into her recurring nightmare.

Interestingly enough, the film never actually threatens this kind of change for Takashi, nor does it ever go down the route of having him think Akiko is crazy. In fact, the guy generally seems to assume his girlfriend is just as strong and competent as he is – though she alas really isn’t – and treats her accordingly; not exactly a concept of relationships one encounters often in Japanese movies of this era, and it’s certainly welcome, though I rather wish the heroine treated this way were actually a bit a more proactive.

On the visual level, I don’t find Lake quite as strong as The Vampire Doll but there are still quite a few moody scenes, most of them hard-won out of shooting and lighting modern (by the standards of the early 70s) interiors as if they were part of an old crumpled castle. At times, the film also manages to mirror Akiko’s panic in her surroundings, becoming dream-like more literally than we use that word normally. Even the film’s flatter moments demonstrate the usual high technical standard of Japanese genre film of this time.

So, while I’m not as crazy about Lake of Dracula as I am about The Vampire Doll, I still think it’s a fine example of cultural appropriation doing its good work.

The Vampire Doll (1970)

Original title: Yûrei yashiki no kyôfu: Chi wo sû ningyô

aka Legacy of Dracula

aka Fear of the Ghost House: Bloodsucking Doll

Beware: I am going to spoil some plot elements of this four decades old movie!

After six months overseas, doctor Kazuhiko (Atsuo Nakamura) makes his way to the home of his fiancée Yuko Nomura (Yukiko Kobayashi). Once he’s arrived at her family mansion, and after the Nomura’s family servant Genzo (Kaku Takashina) has stopped trying to kill him (“he’s mute and hard of hearing” is his excuse), Yuko’s mother (Yoko Minakaze) gives him very bad news. Apparently, Yuko has died in a car accident about two weeks ago. Mum will show Kazuhiko her daughter’s grave the next day, and he can stay the night.

While Kazuhiko is lying in bed, still trying to come to grips with the news of Yuko’s sudden death, he hears the sounds of a woman crying. The noise leads him to Yuko’s former bedroom where he encounters what looks a lot like the girl herself, just very pale and with a strange look on her face, and hiding herself in a walk-in closet. Before Kazuhiko can act on this, he is knocked out. When he awakes, Yuko is gone, and her mother suggests he just must have had a very bad dream. But when he’s alone again, Kazuhiko looks out the window and sees someone who looks very much like Yuko running away from the house. He follows her to a graveyard. There, Yuko first begs him to kill her, but Kazuhiko instead moves in for hug. The traditional hug-cam shows a shot of Yuko’s face, her eyes turning into something halfway between cat and lizard, a terrible grin on her lips, and a knife in her hand just about to cut into Kazuhiko.

Which is when Kazuhiko’s sister Keiko (Kayo Matsuo) awakes in her home from a terrible nightmare about him. Keiko is very concerned, for she hasn’t heard anything from her brother at all ever since he went off to see Yuko at the family mansion; usually, he would have phoned, but…nothing. Keiko convinces her friend – supposedly her fiancée but they don’t really act that way – Hiroshi (Akira Nakao) to drive to Yuko’s mansion with her. There, Mrs Nonomura tells them the same story she told Kazuhiko about Yuko, adding that Kazuhiko left right on the day he came. Keiko has a bad feeling about all of this, and it’s little wonder. Not only doesn’t this story fit Kazuhiko (nor the things the audience has seen) but Mrs Nonomura is pretty damn creepy, and her house comes directly out of a western gothic horror novel. When Keiko and Hiroshi find one of Kazuhiko’s cufflinks in the graveyard covered in blood, they decide to investigate.

Usually, The Vampire Doll is seen as the first of Toho’s loose trilogy of western vampire inspired horror films directed by Michio Yamamoto. It’s a vampire movie in the loosest sense of the term, though, with a concept of vampirism that is an interesting cross of yurei lore, weird science, and a certain M. Valdemar. This isn’t a complaint, mind you, for the film’s own little vampire mythology is really rather more interesting than your usual bloodsucking count, opening the doors for a bit of psychological depth, as well as some lurid gothic family drama. To someone who has seen a lot of vampire movies, it’s always a pleasant surprise when a film’s version of vampirism offers some surprises.

Not that these surprise are all Yamamoto’s film has going for it. There’s some lovely set design at play in the western-style mansion the Nonomura family (or what’s left of it) is living in, the place sharing a clear kinship to comparable edifices in Italian gothic horror of the 60s, perhaps with a smidgen of Hammer added to the mix; the western Gothic once again viewed through Japanese eyes. The mansion is pleasantly creepy, Yamamoto using the strangeness of the place for all it is worth, interpreting it as the logical expression of the dubious history of the family whose last members (of course another obvious gothic trope) now dwell in it.

Obviously, there’s a very clear consciousness of the where and what-for of the tropes of gothic horror visible in The Vampire Doll. The film may update the dark family secret to something a little more contemporary to the Japanese experience and interests of the time, yet it still hits basically every note of the film version of the genre (with an added heavy debt to Poe himself - more than to Poe by the way of Corman, interestingly enough), effectively turning the Japanese countryside into the playground of otherwise difficult to express anxieties about the influence of the past (which, as it was in Germany at the same time, too, was not something people liked to talk about, for obvious reasons) on the younger generation, the older generation exclusively consisting of people who harbour dark secrets instead of helpful advice.

Apart from this, The Vampire Doll is also a film rather fetching to look at. Yamamoto makes particularly interesting use of blotches of deep black that isolate characters as well as emphasise them, but he’s also adept at the art of the slightly disquieting camera angle, and knows how to use coloured lighting (though not to an excessive degree). Yuko is rather effectively creepy in her habits: she tends to appear in the corner of a room (and therefore the corner of the eye), head down, pale-skinned, and stiffly limbed like a doll or a corpse. Add to that the jerky jump-cut movements she uses in a few scenes, prefiguring J-horror and the US consequences, and the whole idea of a dead woman kept artificially alive while losing everything that actually made her the woman she was, and you have a very effective, and sympathetic, monster.

On a plot level, The Vampire Doll is told like a weird mystery (a favourite genre in Japanese art), with Keiko and Hiroshi attempting to understand what’s going on around them through very traditional means of investigation yet always stumbling back into the realm of the gothic again; even a visit with the local doctor produces a ghost story. Clearly, trying to understand the world like a detective only works when that world is actually built on a basis a detective could understand.