Jigoku (film)
Encyclopedia
is a 1960
Japanese horror film
, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa
and starring Utako Mitsuya and Shigeru Amachi. Jigoku was re-made in 1970 by Tatsumi Kumashiro
, and later re-made again under the title of Japanese Hell by Teruo Ishii
in 1999.
Jigoku is notable for separating itself from other Japanese horror
films of the era such as Kwaidan
or Onibaba due to its graphic imagery of torment in Hell.
Jigoku was released on DVD
in North America from the Criterion Collection on September 19, 2006.
Though Tamura feels no guilt for the murder, Shirô does and attempts to go to the police. After telling Yukiko of what happened, Shirô insists that they take a taxi cab to the police station, despite Yukiko's pleas to walk instead. While in the cab, Shirô hallucinates that Tamura is driving the cab, and it crashes, killing Yukiko. After her funeral, Shirô seeks solace in the arms of strip bar worker and Kyôichi's grieving girlfriend Yoko (Akiko Ono), who discovers Shirô's culpability for the hit-and-run after sleeping with him and, with Kyôichi's mother, plots revenge.
Shirô receives a telegram that his mother, Ito, who lives in a country-side retirement community run by his father, Gozo, is dying and rushes to see her. There, he meets the other residents including a disgraced painter, Ensai, who is painting a portrait of Hell, a former reporter, Akagawa, a corrupt detective, Hariya, and the community doctor, Dr. Kasuma. He meets Sachiko (also played by Mitsuya), a nurse and the Ensai's daughter, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Yukiko, and the one taking care of his mother. During his stay, Shirô and Sachiko become close while each of the residents' sordid activities are revealed: His father carries on an open affair while his mother lays dying and also cheats the community of its money by cutting corners; the painter is wanted for a crime in another city; the detective threatens to turn the painter in unless he gives her Sachiko to marry; and the doctor knows his diagnoses are wrong, but feels seeking a second opinion too cumbersome. Both Mr. and Mrs. Yajima, both despondent after Yukiko's death, arrive by train to pay their respects to Shirô's mother. Ito dies, and Ensai blames Gozo; decades ago, he and Ito were lovers before Gozo came between them and married her leaving her unhappy. Inexplicably, Tamura appears and reveals that each of the residents has some complicity in a murder: Mr. Yajima killed his comrade during the war, stealing his water for himself; both the detective and reporter framed or slandered innocent men who then both committed suicide; and the doctor knew his diagnosis of Ito's condition was wrong, but chose not to tell anyone.
Yoko tracks Shirô down and meets with him on a rope bridge in the area. There she reveals her identity and attempts to shoot him while Kyôichi's mother watches from the trees, but she trips and falls to her death. Tamura appears, and the two struggle over the gun, and Tamura also falls into the gorge. Shirô stumbles back in time for the community's tenth anniversary party, where Gozo has knowingly allowed cheap, rancid fish to be served to the residents. As the party descends into debauchery, Mr. and Mrs. Yajima both decide to leap in front of the train, killing themselves, and Gozo's mistress falls to her death following an altercation. The residents die from consuming the tainted fish, and Kyôichi's mother sneaks into the party, poisoning the remaining residents' wine, killing them. Tamura, near death, stumbles into the party and shoots Sachiko, while Kyôichi's mother strangles Shirô to death and then commits suicide.
in Limbo, Shirô encounters Yukiko, who reveals that she was pregnant with his child, a baby girl named "Harumi", but has sent her floating away on the river of the underworld and begs Shirô to save her. Shirô enters Hell and is sentenced to punishment in the Eight Realms of Hell by Lord Enma for his sins. While running through Hell to find his daughter, he encounters each of his acquaintances, who suffer, in gruesome fashion, a variety of punishments for their sins, such as being boiled and burned alive, dismembered and flayed, or cut apart and beaten by ogres, only to be revived to suffer anew. Meanwhile, Tamura taunts Shirô, saying there is no escape from Hell, before being butchered for giving his soul over to evil. In a realm filled with needles and spikes jutting from the ground, Shirô finds Sachiko, but their reunion is interrupted by Shirô's mother, who shamefully reveals that Sachiko is his sister: Shirô is actually Ensai's son, and Sachiko is actually her daughter, also a product of her later affair with Ensai. Shirô is disgusted with his family, and continues searching for his daughter, determined to live and save her. While caught in a vortex of damned souls, he finds his baby daughter helplessly rotating on the Buddhist wheel of life. Lord Enma gives Shirô one chance to save his daughter, otherwise she too will suffer for all eternity in Hell. As Yukiko, Sachiko, and his mother call to him, Shirô leaps onto the wheel, but cannot reach his daughter.
The moment is frozen in time, revealed to be nine o'clock: the exact time that everyone at the party has finally died, including Ensai, who has hanged himself after completing his portrait of Hell and set it on fire. In a final scene, both Sachiko and Yukiko stand smiling in peaceful light, calling to Shirô as lover and sister, respectively, with lotus petals falling around them, symbolizing mental and moral purity.
asked Ichirō Miyagawa to write the script, which was originally supposed to be called Heaven and Hell, under order of producer
Mitsugu Okura. Mitsugu Okura read the script
and angrily said to Miyagawa that "Heaven is nowhere to be seen in this script!", to which Miyagawa jokingly replied that he would write about Heaven in the sequel. Actor Yoichi Numata
played Tamura in the film, and expressed that he had tried to analyze the role, but couldn't find the best way to play it.
The film was not expected to be well-received, as Shintōhō
studio was considered to be a maker of low-budget, gory films. Jigoku was made in a hurry, and was the last Shintōhō production. For the scenes which take place in hell
, the cast and crew used Shintōhō's largest soundstage and put dirt over it. In a recent documentary, a crew member said that normally it would be just the crew helping to build the sets, but because it was Shintōhō's last production, all the extra
s were helping. Mamoru Morita said that Nobuo Nakagawa tried in many ways to make Jigoku different from other horror
films from the time.
In 1979, the acclaimed Nikkatsu
Roman Porno director Tatsumi Kumashiro
remade Jigoku for Toei
.
1960 in film
The year 1960 in film involved some significant events, with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho the top-grossing release in the U.S.-Events:* April 20 - for the first time since coming home from military service in Germany, Elvis Presley returns to Hollywood, California to film G.I...
Japanese horror film
J-Horror
Japanese horror, or J-Horror, is Japanese horror fiction in popular culture, noted for its unique thematic and conventional treatment of the horror genre in light of western treatments...
, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa
Nobuo Nakagawa
was a Japanese film director, most famous for the stylized, folk tale-influenced horror films he made in the 1950s and 1960s.-Career:Born in Kyoto, Nakagawa was early on influenced by proletarian literature and wrote amateur film reviews to the Kinema Junpō film magazine. He joined Makino Film...
and starring Utako Mitsuya and Shigeru Amachi. Jigoku was re-made in 1970 by Tatsumi Kumashiro
Tatsumi Kumashiro
was a Japanese film director best known for his critically acclaimed, award-winning Roman Porno films, such as Ichijo's Wet Lust and The Woman with Red Hair...
, and later re-made again under the title of Japanese Hell by Teruo Ishii
Teruo Ishii
was a Japanese film director best known in the West for his early films in the Super Giant series, and for his films in the Ero guro subgenre of pinku eiga such as Shogun's Joys of Torture . He also directed the 1965 film, Abashiri Prison, which helped to make Ken Takakura a major star in Japan...
in 1999.
Jigoku is notable for separating itself from other Japanese horror
J-Horror
Japanese horror, or J-Horror, is Japanese horror fiction in popular culture, noted for its unique thematic and conventional treatment of the horror genre in light of western treatments...
films of the era such as Kwaidan
Kwaidan (film)
is a 1964 Japanese portmanteau film directed by Masaki Kobayashi; the title means 'ghost story'. It is based on stories from Lafcadio Hearn's collections of Japanese folk tales. The film consists of four separate and unrelated stories. Kwaidan is the archaic transliteration of Kaidan, meaning...
or Onibaba due to its graphic imagery of torment in Hell.
Jigoku was released on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
in North America from the Criterion Collection on September 19, 2006.
Plot summary
A young Tokyo theology student, Shirô (Shigeru Amachi), is set to marry his girlfriend, Yukiko (Utako Mitsuya), the daughter of his professor, Mr. Yajima. After announcing the engagement, Shiro's dark and unsettling colleague, Tamura (Yôichi Numata), drives Shirô home, suggesting that Shirô had been sleeping with Yukiko for some time. Taking a side street at Shiro's request, Tamura hits and kills drunken yakuza gang leader, Kyôichi. Though Shirô wants to stop, Tamura keeps driving, stating that it does not concern him and that ultimately, the murder is Shirô's fault for asking him to drive down the street. Unbeknown to either of them, Kyôichi's mother (Kiyoko Tsuji) witnessed everything and resolves to find and kill them.Though Tamura feels no guilt for the murder, Shirô does and attempts to go to the police. After telling Yukiko of what happened, Shirô insists that they take a taxi cab to the police station, despite Yukiko's pleas to walk instead. While in the cab, Shirô hallucinates that Tamura is driving the cab, and it crashes, killing Yukiko. After her funeral, Shirô seeks solace in the arms of strip bar worker and Kyôichi's grieving girlfriend Yoko (Akiko Ono), who discovers Shirô's culpability for the hit-and-run after sleeping with him and, with Kyôichi's mother, plots revenge.
Shirô receives a telegram that his mother, Ito, who lives in a country-side retirement community run by his father, Gozo, is dying and rushes to see her. There, he meets the other residents including a disgraced painter, Ensai, who is painting a portrait of Hell, a former reporter, Akagawa, a corrupt detective, Hariya, and the community doctor, Dr. Kasuma. He meets Sachiko (also played by Mitsuya), a nurse and the Ensai's daughter, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Yukiko, and the one taking care of his mother. During his stay, Shirô and Sachiko become close while each of the residents' sordid activities are revealed: His father carries on an open affair while his mother lays dying and also cheats the community of its money by cutting corners; the painter is wanted for a crime in another city; the detective threatens to turn the painter in unless he gives her Sachiko to marry; and the doctor knows his diagnoses are wrong, but feels seeking a second opinion too cumbersome. Both Mr. and Mrs. Yajima, both despondent after Yukiko's death, arrive by train to pay their respects to Shirô's mother. Ito dies, and Ensai blames Gozo; decades ago, he and Ito were lovers before Gozo came between them and married her leaving her unhappy. Inexplicably, Tamura appears and reveals that each of the residents has some complicity in a murder: Mr. Yajima killed his comrade during the war, stealing his water for himself; both the detective and reporter framed or slandered innocent men who then both committed suicide; and the doctor knew his diagnosis of Ito's condition was wrong, but chose not to tell anyone.
Yoko tracks Shirô down and meets with him on a rope bridge in the area. There she reveals her identity and attempts to shoot him while Kyôichi's mother watches from the trees, but she trips and falls to her death. Tamura appears, and the two struggle over the gun, and Tamura also falls into the gorge. Shirô stumbles back in time for the community's tenth anniversary party, where Gozo has knowingly allowed cheap, rancid fish to be served to the residents. As the party descends into debauchery, Mr. and Mrs. Yajima both decide to leap in front of the train, killing themselves, and Gozo's mistress falls to her death following an altercation. The residents die from consuming the tainted fish, and Kyôichi's mother sneaks into the party, poisoning the remaining residents' wine, killing them. Tamura, near death, stumbles into the party and shoots Sachiko, while Kyôichi's mother strangles Shirô to death and then commits suicide.
in Limbo, Shirô encounters Yukiko, who reveals that she was pregnant with his child, a baby girl named "Harumi", but has sent her floating away on the river of the underworld and begs Shirô to save her. Shirô enters Hell and is sentenced to punishment in the Eight Realms of Hell by Lord Enma for his sins. While running through Hell to find his daughter, he encounters each of his acquaintances, who suffer, in gruesome fashion, a variety of punishments for their sins, such as being boiled and burned alive, dismembered and flayed, or cut apart and beaten by ogres, only to be revived to suffer anew. Meanwhile, Tamura taunts Shirô, saying there is no escape from Hell, before being butchered for giving his soul over to evil. In a realm filled with needles and spikes jutting from the ground, Shirô finds Sachiko, but their reunion is interrupted by Shirô's mother, who shamefully reveals that Sachiko is his sister: Shirô is actually Ensai's son, and Sachiko is actually her daughter, also a product of her later affair with Ensai. Shirô is disgusted with his family, and continues searching for his daughter, determined to live and save her. While caught in a vortex of damned souls, he finds his baby daughter helplessly rotating on the Buddhist wheel of life. Lord Enma gives Shirô one chance to save his daughter, otherwise she too will suffer for all eternity in Hell. As Yukiko, Sachiko, and his mother call to him, Shirô leaps onto the wheel, but cannot reach his daughter.
The moment is frozen in time, revealed to be nine o'clock: the exact time that everyone at the party has finally died, including Ensai, who has hanged himself after completing his portrait of Hell and set it on fire. In a final scene, both Sachiko and Yukiko stand smiling in peaceful light, calling to Shirô as lover and sister, respectively, with lotus petals falling around them, symbolizing mental and moral purity.
Cast
- Shigeru Amachi as Shirô Shimizu, a young theology student who is guilted by his involvement in a hit-and-run on the night of his engagement to his girlfriend.
- Yôichi NumataYoichi NumataYoichi Numata was a Japanese film actor. He appeared in 27 films between 1949 and 2001.-Selected filmography:* The Princess Blade * Ring * Jigoku * Man in the Storm...
as Tamura, Shirô's dark and sociopathic classmate, who inexplicably knows everyone's sinful past, and who drove car during the hit and run. - Utako Mitsuya as Yukiko Yajima, Shirô's loving girlfriend.
- and Sachiko Taniguchi, a young nurse who looks uncannily like Yukiko, and the daughter of a disgraced painter at a retirement community.
- Hiroshi Izumida as Kyôichi 'Tiger' Shiga, a gangster hit and left for dead by Tamura and Shirô.
- Kiyoko Tsuji as Kyôichi's Mother, who witnesses the accident and vows revenge.
- Akiko Ono as Yoko, Kyôichi's girlfriend who swears revenge on Shirô.
- Hiroshi Hayashi as Gôzô Shimizu, Shirô's lecherous and greedy father who runs a dilapidated retirement center.
- Kimie Tokudaiji as Ito Shimizu, Shirô's sickly mother
- Jun Ôtomo as Ensai Taniguchi, father to Sachiko, and an alcoholic painter, commissioned to paint a depiction of Hell
- Akiko Yamashita as Kinuko, Gôzô's shameless mistress
- Torahiko Nakamura as Professor Yajima, Shirô's teacher and father to Yukiko.
- Fumiko Miyata as Mrs. Yajima, Yukiko's fragile mother
- Tomohiko Ohtani (as Tomohiko Ôtani) as Dr. Kusama, a negligent doctor of the retirement community
- Kôichi Miya as Journalist Akagawa, a resident of the community with a soiled past
- Hiroshi Shinguji (as Hiroshi Shingûji) as Detective Hariya, a corrupt detective who threatens to turn Ensai in unless he gives Sachiko to him for marriage
- Sakutaro Yamakawa (as Sakutarô Yamakawa) as the Fisherman
- Kanjûrô Arashi (uncredited) as Lord Enma, the King of Hell
Production
Nobuo NakagawaNobuo Nakagawa
was a Japanese film director, most famous for the stylized, folk tale-influenced horror films he made in the 1950s and 1960s.-Career:Born in Kyoto, Nakagawa was early on influenced by proletarian literature and wrote amateur film reviews to the Kinema Junpō film magazine. He joined Makino Film...
asked Ichirō Miyagawa to write the script, which was originally supposed to be called Heaven and Hell, under order of producer
Film producer
A film producer oversees and delivers a film project to all relevant parties while preserving the integrity, voice and vision of the film. They will also often take on some financial risk by using their own money, especially during the pre-production period, before a film is fully financed.The...
Mitsugu Okura. Mitsugu Okura read the script
Screenplay
A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...
and angrily said to Miyagawa that "Heaven is nowhere to be seen in this script!", to which Miyagawa jokingly replied that he would write about Heaven in the sequel. Actor Yoichi Numata
Yoichi Numata
Yoichi Numata was a Japanese film actor. He appeared in 27 films between 1949 and 2001.-Selected filmography:* The Princess Blade * Ring * Jigoku * Man in the Storm...
played Tamura in the film, and expressed that he had tried to analyze the role, but couldn't find the best way to play it.
The film was not expected to be well-received, as Shintōhō
Shintoho
was a Japanese movie studio. It was one of the big-6 film studios during the Golden Age of Japanese cinema. It was founded by defectors from the original Tōhō Company...
studio was considered to be a maker of low-budget, gory films. Jigoku was made in a hurry, and was the last Shintōhō production. For the scenes which take place in hell
Jigoku
Jigoku is a Japanese term for "hell". It may also refer to:* Hell Girl , a Japanese manga and anime* Jigoku, a 1960 Japanese horror film* Jigokumon, a Japanese film* Diyu, the realm of the dead or "hell" in Chinese mythology...
, the cast and crew used Shintōhō's largest soundstage and put dirt over it. In a recent documentary, a crew member said that normally it would be just the crew helping to build the sets, but because it was Shintōhō's last production, all the extra
Extra (actor)
A background actor or extra is a performer in a film, television show, stage, musical, opera or ballet production, who appears in a nonspeaking, nonsinging or nondancing capacity, usually in the background...
s were helping. Mamoru Morita said that Nobuo Nakagawa tried in many ways to make Jigoku different from other horror
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...
films from the time.
In 1979, the acclaimed Nikkatsu
Nikkatsu
is a Japanese entertainment company well known for its film and television productions. It is Japan's oldest major movie studio. The name Nikkatsu is an abbreviation of Nippon Katsudō Shashin, literally "Japan Cinematograph Company".-History:...
Roman Porno director Tatsumi Kumashiro
Tatsumi Kumashiro
was a Japanese film director best known for his critically acclaimed, award-winning Roman Porno films, such as Ichijo's Wet Lust and The Woman with Red Hair...
remade Jigoku for Toei
Toei Company
is a Japanese film, television production, and distribution corporation. Based in Tokyo, Toei owns and operates thirty-four movie theaters across Japan, a modest vertically-integrated studio system by the standards of the 1930s United States; operates studios at Tokyo and Kyoto; and is a...
.
External links
Jigoku at the Japanese Movie Database- Criterion Collection essay by Chuck Stephens