A boat carrying two young families — one, a wife and husband, the other, a wife, husband, and child — steers slowly across a mist-covered expanse of river water. The woman doing the navigating sings an eerie song. The two men are talking about the fortune they expect to make. “You and I will be rich men, and our wives will be wealthy women,” one says to the other. The women, however, have more immediate concerns. “It’s good we went by boat,” one says to the other. “On foot, we’d probably be dead by now.”
This scene is the linchpin for director Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, a movie from 1953 screened at Best Video Film and Cultural Center in Hamden on Tuesday night as the first installment in its latest film series, “4 Icons of Japanese Horror: From Mizoguchi to Miike — A Peek Into the Dark.”
As the advertisement for the screening stated, “here at Best Video Film & Cultural Center, horror films aren’t just relegated to the cold, dark months of the year — we celebrate them all year round. So why not a horror film series in July, Mother Nature’s hottest offering yet?BVFCC would like to invite you to a Japanese Horror series in the midst of humidity, sweat, and muggy moods.”
The weekly series, curated by Best Video staffer Teo Hernandez, will proceed to 1977’s House on July 12, 1997’s Cure on July 19, and 1999’s Audition on July 26.
Brian Slattery Photo
Hernandez.
Hernandez, who has worked at Best Video for three years, was on hand to introduce the film, his “first curated event” in the space, he said. “Personally, horror is a genre I’ve always loved since I was young.” He recalled watching The Omen, The Shining, and The Exorcist “with regularity” as a child. “I remember my younger brother and I crying while watching An American Werewolf in London when we were about eight years old,” he continued, drawing laughter from the audience. “It seemed like a traumatic experience, but when we talk about it now, it’s only with a sense of fondness.” In putting the series together, he found himself re-examining why his “terror-fueled weeping … feels like a good memory.”
His answer: “Film, like a lot of art, is best when shared with other people,” he said. “When you’re able to share something like a movie or a song with someone, you give part of yourself. So part of you is on that screen or in those lyrics, whether it’s a single shot or a line delivered in a certain way that touches you.”
Hernandez picked the films in the series because “something like that exists in them, especially the film tonight.” Ugetsu, he said, is “typically considered a masterpiece of Japanese cinema.” It’s not a horror movie in the strictest sense, but does partake of a “somber and sobering” mood. “I think in essence it’s a moral tale that happens to involve ghosts.” He picked it to open the series because “it’s a hugely important work in the grander sense of the word horror.” Subsequent directors have been heavily influenced by its style, as it evokes “a world that I truly find haunting,” Hernandez said, deploying “some of the most gorgeous and atmospheric scenery I’ve seen in almost any film.”
Hernandez’s introduction gave the right context for Ugetsu, which takes place in a feudal Japan roiled by a slow-rolling war. Two men, Genjuro and Tobei, are hoping to profit from the conflict around them. Genjuro wants to make money by selling earthenware to soldiers. Tobei is hoping to become a samurai. Their wives, Miyagi and Ohama, have misgivings; they want to flee the war altogether, particularly as Genjuro and Miyagi have a young son to protect. But the men are not to be dissuaded from their ambitions, and so they pursue them. Genjuro’s greed leads him into the arms of a mysterious woman in charge of a curiously empty manor outside of town. Tobei’s desires lead him to the battlefield. Both men for a time seem to get what they think they want, though as the film shows in non-graphic but unflinching detail, it comes at the expense of their wives. Their successes and the consequences of them dovetail in devastating fashion. Hernandez was right that Ugetsu can be understood as an influential film across multiple genres. It can be viewed as a precursor to Elem Klimov’s staggeringly brutal war movie Come and See as a film that focuses on the brutality of armed conflict toward civilians, and women in particular. Martin Scorsese considers himself a big fan. But it also fits easily among the best horror movies in the way that its deft use of supernatural elements conveys the delusions men create for themselves to justify their ambitions, perhaps better than realism ever could.
Support for the film series has been provided to Best Video Film and Cultural Center from Connecticut Humanities (CTH), with funding provided by the Connecticut State Department of Economic and Community Development/Connecticut Office of the Arts (COA) from the Connecticut State Legislature. For more information on “4 Icons of Japanese Horror” and other events at Best Video, visit the cultural center’s website.
