Jigoku 60th Anniversary
Sixty years ago today, Jigoku was released to Japanese audiences as the last gasp of air for bankrupt production studio Shintoho. Easily one of director Nobuo Nakagawa’s most widely known films, particularly outside of Japan, Jigoku is a unique film: It eschews the recognizable style of its contemporaries in Japanese horror, taking viewers on a phantasmagoric journey through the Japanese interpretation of Hell.
Jigoku’s set-up isn’t dissimilar to a number of Hitchcockian thrillers of the day: Protagonist Shiro, played by Shigeru Amachi, is a promising young theology student, and engaged to be married to Yukiko (Utako Mitsuya), the daughter of a well-liked professor. His only obstacle seems to be Tamura (Yôichi Numata), a mischievous classmate unconcerned with responsibility and, more distressingly, seems to have dirt on everyone he meets. Shiro’s troubles begin when Tamura implicates him in a hit-and-run that leaves a yakuza member dead. Shiro wants to go straight away to the police, but Tamura convinces him that it’s better for all involved if they stay out of it. What follows, however, is less Hitchcock and more a Dantean descent into damnation, as Shiro must contend with a number of seedy characters both in life and death, as he meets the same characters in the afterlife, in a trippy display of tortures that lasts for nearly a third of the film’s run time.
Jigoku can feel a little slow at times. After opening with one of the more provocative title sequences I’ve seen on the screen—an erotic montage of nude bodies that never really connect to anything else in the plot—the film takes its time building up its protagonist’s hapless circumstances only to violently knock him (along with every other character we’ve met) back down. But what it may lack, for some viewers, in pacing, it more than makes up for in creativity. With Jigoku’s final act, Nakagawa is brilliantly able to breathe life into the jigoku-zoshi—a terrifically gory set of 12th-century illustrated scrolls depicting the Buddhist Hell that put the grim depictions of its Christian counterpart to shame. He reinvents the Japanese kaidan, or ghost story, with his storytelling and visuals influencing everything from Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) to the savagely bloody action films of Takeshi Miike. Nakagawa’s visual flare for the grotesque can also be seen in Hideo Nakata’s much more modern kaidan, Ringu (1998). Even the character of Tamura can be argued to have inspired stories of vengeful strangers like Storm of the Century (1999), Let Us Prey (2014), and the episode “The Traveler” from the recent Twilight Zone reboot in 2019.
Over the course of his career, Nobuo Nakagawa racked up nearly 100 director credits. Of these, however, very few even approach Jigoku’s lasting impact on cinema. The trippy, horrifying final act aside, Jigoku is filled with characters as sympathetic as they are self-serving. Unconcerned with giving Shiro a path to redemption, the film concentrates almost entirely on his guilt—a guilt that begins early in the film and lasts (literally) for the rest of eternity. As Western viewers, we are given a disturbing gateway into a vision of Hell that the majority of us haven’t been exposed to, as well as a style of filmmaking that simply hasn’t been reproduced outside of J-Horror, and through which we could all benefit from being exposed.
Article written by Ande Thomas
Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.
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