Jigoku: (1960. dir: Nobuo Nakagawa) An early (perhaps the original?) Japanese example of what I call the "Bardo" film, in which the main character dies and has to wend his way through strange hallucinations, possibly real and possibly projections of his own guilt, before he can find his peace in death. Visually bold and unsettlingly edited, with a suddenness of scene change that lends pace along with eeriness and a continuing sense of threat, it shows us hell in every sense and from every angle. By incorporating both contemporary jazz and creepy theremin into the soundtrack, and by giving us a devil who is a young hipster, it feels both evocative of its moment and timeless.
By the roll of the end credits, it has long risen to a level of kabuki hysteria which is difficult to take seriously, but it's still a groundbreaking work of horror.
Images: (1972. dir: Robert Altman) Another fascinating study of a woman's descent into madness. Children's author Cathryn (Susannah York) and her wealthy American husband (Rene Auberjonois) go for a much-needed holiday at the country manor, where she has to fend off ex-lovers, both dead and alive, as well as an encroaching doppelganger, while carefully keeping track of which experiences are part of the "real", physical world and which exist in her (just as real) hallucinations. Altman kicks off the dis-ease with a jolt of Japanese horror-film music right through the credits over a montage of household items which already look weirdly malevolent beneath the eye of his camera, particularly when juxtaposed against the story which runs at a mad tumble through Cathryn's head, a story about children hunting unicorns. The husband's ongoing jokey banter approaches malevolence, too, and his three most constant props, --a camera, a long cigarillo, and a rifle, --all make vague but contiguous gestures towards an ongoing threat.
Why didn't I know about this film before? This is one of those happy things you stumble across when you're looking for something else; I found it (anomalously) on somebody's list of Paranoia films from the '70s(*). It was a smaller venture, filmed in England, wedged between Altman's major Hollywood outings McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the Long Goodbye, and perhaps it didn't get the press, but it's a wonderfully absorbing psychological thriller, and York is sufficiently earthy and grounded to get our hopes up for her salvation (unlike many actresses, who might have played up the ethereal, with too much of the changeling-caught-between-worlds thing. Picture, for instance, Mia Farrow or Isabelle Adjani in the role).
(*) Although there is certainly paranoia involved, it's too personal to fit onto a list including the Parallax View and the Conversation. It fits in rather well, though, with the new women's horror films of the time (Rosemary's Baby, the Stepford Wives, Repulsion, Let's Scare Jessica to Death). It also would not be out of place on a list including Roeg's Don't Look Now or Polanski's the Tenant.
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