Nobuo Nakagawa - Jigoku AKA Hell [+Extras] (1960)

Never mind that damnation to the fires of Hades is said to be eternal. For some of us, the wait we’ve already endured for a glimpse of hell has been plenty long enough. Director Nobuo Nakagawa’s Hell, that is, otherwise known as Jigoku (1960), the legendary—and for Western audiences, long elusive—genre-­busting Japanese masterpiece about the infernal desires that forever tempt us during our mortal existence here on earth and the afterlife agonies awaiting those who succumb. An exact contemporary of (if rather more ideologically obscure than) the first films of the nascent Japanese new wave, Jigoku was released in 1960 and quickly attained the status of “cult classic” in its home country—even as it would remain, for decades thereafter, a wildly rumored about but rarely screened phenomenon in international cine-extremist circles. Today, it is recognized as the cornerstone of extremist-visionary Nakagawa’s long and extraordinary career.
Born from some unholy union of Goethe’s Faust and Genshin’s Ojoyoshu, a tenth-century Buddhist treatise on the various torments of the lower realms, Jigoku was the last in a nine-film string of innovative and deliriously eccentric horror films made by Nakagawa during his 1950s tenure at the genre-driven Shintoho Studios. Overflowing with brackish ponds of bubbling pus, brain-­rattling disjunctions of sound and image, and at times almost dauntingly incomprehensible plot twists and eye-assaulting bouts of brutish montage, Jigoku is more than merely a boundary-pummeling classic of the horror genre—it’s as lurid a study of sin without salvation as the silver screen has ever seen. A tale of two male college students—one weak, one evil—who make a sudden detour from the path of righteousness and wind up on the road to hell, Jigoku’s plotline takes off from the same real-life Leopold-Loeb murder case that served as the basis for both Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion. But it’s the degree to which Nakagawa uses that familiar narrative framework to fearlessly extend the ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsense) ingredients beloved by Japanese filmmakers since the silent heyday of Yasujiro Ozu that preordained the film’s lasting notoriety. Fusing the goriest details of thirteenth-century jigoku-zoshi (hell scroll paintings) with Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s nineteenth-century ukiyo-e illustrations of innocence disemboweled—and climaxing in a centrifugal final blast of berserk, quasi-Butoh theatrics that seems to anticipate the lysergic gyrations of the 1960s’ Living Theatre as much as the flesh-hungry flailings of Night of the Living Dead—Jigoku’s dazzlingly art-directed and emotionally devastating evocation of unstaunchable dread continues to leave even the most stoic of modern moviegoers in a state of stunned dismay.

Size    1.55GB
Language    Japanese
Subtitles    included: English .srt

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