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In 2010, during the 10th edition of the Udine Far East Film Festival, Mark Schilling curated a retrospective of films produced at the Shintoho Studio under the leadership of Mitsugu Okura, who served as president from 1955 to 1961. To accompany the retrospective, “Nudes! Guns! Ghosts! The Sensational Films of Shintoho” a book written by Schilling was also published, offering an in-depth analysis of the history of the company, including biographies and interviews of some of its key individuals.

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In that fashion, the book begins with a chapter focusing on the history of the studio, from the its early days in 1947, when it was home to filmmakers like Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse and Ichikawa, to Okura’s reign in the 50s and 60s, who turned the company towards genre filmmaking with the titular terms being key in the style of its titles, along with the ama films,...

If you ask me, Hell is the ultimate horror setting. Sure, creepy castles and abandoned outposts are great and all, but a realm of eternal torment just strikes me as a tad more terrifying. And of the major cultural interpretations of Hell out there, none are quite as grisly as the hell of Japanese Buddhism: Jigoku. Sure, there’s a way out of it, but the torments inflicted upon the damned in Jigoku make the ones Dante wrote about seem fit for children’s birthday parties. Jigoku consists of sixteen separate hells (eight “hot” and eight “cold”), with eight great hells that consist of tortures ranging from being charred in massive frying pans to being eternally smashed into paste and revived by massive rocks. It’s a brutal, depressing place where hope is faint and mercy can wait billions of years away. Naturally, it makes for a great topic for a horror movie.