ONIBABA (1964)

A Japanese cult film which I'm not sure really qualifies as horror, but nevertheless works up a nice creepy mood, and at least one plot thread is right out of a Twilight Zone episode. In medieval Japan, during a raging civil war, a woman (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) live in a huge field of towering grass reeds, surviving mostly by killing passing soldiers, dumping their bodies into a huge pit, and selling their recovered weapons and belongings. When a deserting soldier (Kei Sato) returns and camps nearby, he tells Otowa that her son is dead. She refuses to believe him, but Yoshimura slowly finds herself attracted to Sato (even though he's a brutish pig) and the two begin a furtive relationship with her sneaking over to his place at night and returning before Otowa awakens. However, Otowa catches on pretty fast and becomes desperately afraid that Yoshimura will eventually stay with Sato and leave her to an uncertain fate--she doesn't think she could kill soldiers on her own. After the mother has a run-in with another deserter wearing a freaky demon mask (claiming he's hiding a particularly handsome face), she lures the man into a chase in which he falls down the hole to his death. She goes down the hole and takes the mask off, finding a scarred face beneath. This might have served as an omen, but instead the mother plans to scare the girl out of her nocturnal visits by posing as a night demon, wearing the mask. The plot works for a few nights (the scenes of the demon rising up over the reeds are very effective), but soon lust wins out over fear, and Yoshimura makes it past the demon. Later that night, the girl returns home to find that the mask is stuck on her mother-on-law's face, leading to a Twilight Zone climax. The movie is in glorious high-contrast black and white, and an extremely odd atmosphere is built up though the use of the ever-present high grass and battering winds which seem to blow constantly. A feel of sweaty lust and equally sweaty desperation saturates the film: the women are frequently on the edge of starvation; the soldier and the girl are sexually frustrated; the mother also has sexual feelings but mostly fears being left alone; the girl fears the wrath of the mother and the presence of the demon. Interestingly, the killing of the soldiers doesn't become a central moral issue here--clearly it's not something the women enjoy, but are doing out of desperation. Traditional horror elements are scarce: there is no gore here (though bare breasts are shown surprisingly often) and there is no supernatural element except for the patently false demon, though the final moments of the film are open to a reading of supernatural intervention. Most of the night scenes are shot well, with a pitch black background and brightly lit foregrounds. Recommended for its chilling October mood. [DVD]