Onibaba

Onibaba (鬼婆, 1964) is a Japanese horror film directed by Kaneto Shindo. Set in the aftermath of a fourteenth-century civil war near Kyoto, the story focuses on two (nameless) women who kill soldiers for their weapons and gear. They live in a hut surrounded by a seemingly boundless, inescapable sea of tall grass. There’s a deep hole there too, where they drop their stripped victims before trading the booty for millet and the occasional fowl.

When the slovenly Hachi returns from the war, he’s without Kishi. Kishi was the young woman’s husband and the old woman’s son, but he was killed trying to steal food from a group of fed-up farmers. Hachi takes a liking to the young woman, and the old woman tries to put a stop to the grimy affaire de cœur that develops between the pair. She fears that if she can’t end it, the hard-working girl will leave for good, abandoning her to fend for herself—and likely starve. Her solution: wear a devil mask, hide out in the grass at night, and scare the bejeezus out of the girl whenever she sneaks off to meet Hachi. This works well enough until one night, caught in the pouring rain, the old woman finds the mask ruinously affixed to her face.

This is a horror film, though not because anything in it is truly supernatural. We always know it’s the baba posing as the oni, not a real demon. What unsettles is the photography. Especially the shots of the endless grass and the hole, which, for the first half of the film, seems bottomless (though the narrative ultimately doesn’t sustain that impression). The poverty and ignorance of the characters are also disturbing, a kind of horror in themselves. All in all, I found it a good and memorable film, and one of the greats of the genre in Japanese cinema.