Harlot and the Beast continues dark horror of Terra Drake saga

 

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In author Dean Patrick’s The Harlot and the Beast, TWB Press, large swaths of people move deliberately to a demonic gathering/concert. It’s a celebration of perversion and evil, presided over by the beautiful Terra Drake, once known as Lilith, Adam of the Bible's other wife.

In Patrick’s Terra Drake novels, this demon is with us in these latter times, and searching for converts. Grotesque images converge toward the crowd. Demons supporting Terra Drake – most with multi personalities and names – pay homage to her empire. Cain, Jack the Ripper, Adrian Kane, Rex Brody, Mr. Boogie, serial killers galore, an emaciated hag that haunts roadside gas ‘n gulps, and many other obscenities, all are there, entertaining the deceived, hyponotized-like masses.

That’s just one of many descriptive, intense scenes Patrick provides in this superbly crafted novel. To Patrick, a recovering alcoholic, Terra Drake’s empire is in league with modern-day depravities and horrors. It’s her goal to draw and suffocate people in these dysfunctions, and lose their souls.

Writer Patrick draws from terrible, dysfunctional episodes in his addiction past to convey to readers the horror of his tales. One of his settings is rural Duncan, Utah, which represents Morgan, Utah.

Terra Drake destroys people, families, communities, and the culture. A horrific mix of sex, peer pressure, addiction and violence fuels her bloody reign. Patrick’s two previous novels in the Terra Drake trilogy, The Lady Mephistoles, and Terra’s Sabbath, charted her path of enslaving humanity. In the first novel, a brave but doomed addict named Steve Paul gave his best effort against Terra.

When he died, his brother Marion Paul, a police officer, takes on the fight. Marion is a stronger man, and he’s full of righteous anger. He can cause wounds to Terra and her crew, but he’s still overmatched in numbers and power. In The Harlot and the Beast, he also has other major stresses. He needs to rescue the woman he loves, and his daughter, both captured by Terra Drake and lost in New Orleans.

Marion Paul is a strong, admirable hero to root for. He reminds me of Gary Sinise’s character in the TV adaptation in The Stand. In Stephen King’s novel, Sinise’s Stu Redman is ultimately the most influential adversary of Satan against those allied against him. So is Marion Paul is Patrick’s trilogy. Despite setback after setback to the “good people” in The Harlot and The Beast – including a memorable, heartbreaking scene outdoors among Paul’s extended family – Marion Paul never gives up fighting evil. His sanity is stretched, but never breaks.

You can purchase The Harlot and the Beast via Amazon here. You can follow Dean Patrick at Amazon here. Also Patrick’s author website is here. TWB Press website is here. A video teaser for The Harlot and the Beast is here. Chats with Dean Patrick are here, here, here, and here.

-          Doug Gibson

Plan9Crunch Review: Drakulon Creature of Doom

 

By Joe Gibson

 

Introduction

 

Every Halloween season, I watch a specific episode of Johnny Sokko And His Flying Robot/Giant Robo 1967-1968. I find it to be the perfect package of everything the show provides with an added Halloween festivity. I mean that, of course, in terms of tone and subject matter: this episode, Drakulon, Creature of Doom, released 03/25/1968 as the penultimate episode of the entire show, with the actual Halloween season occurring between the airing dates of episodes three and four. This episode introduces space vampire and definite Guillotine subcontractor (and likely fellow Gargoylian) Drakulon as he turns an entire town into vampires. Being the second to last episode, this premise necessitates high stakes and intrigue. Arguably, this is Johnny and Jerry’s greatest challenge up to this point in the series, and it is now time for us to explore exactly why.

 

The Cold Open

 

At the start of the episode, a frantic woman in a white dress emerges onto the road unexpectedly, interrupting a UNICORN agent’s patrol. This particular image is fairly common to horror scenarios, and, without knowing too much of its origin, the use of the trope is still worth recognizing. The UNICORN agent attempts to console her and interject rationality to her claims that the entire town is at risk of death, and his costume is just as important for different reasons. By this point, episode 25, in the show, we have witnessed many UNICORN agents dying in all sorts of horrific ways. While their brightly colored uniform is iconic to set our main cast apart, Johnny, Jerry and Azuma all regularly wear suits as well, so the UNICORN outfit is tantamount to the Star Trek Red Shirt. Since this agent is none of those three or Mitsuko or Mari, the tropes of Johnny Sokko condemn him to an early grave.

 

The woman leads him into the town, where a whole host of people remain on the floor, stiff and unmoving. The sudden camera zooms and merely decent dubbing duel over an atmospheric or goofy tone, but the agent examines the remains, turning his back to the woman and then returning to her for more information. She claims she woke up and found them all like this, and he trusts her as she clings to him when a door creaks.

 

Investigating the door, he enters a Gothic old dark house (I hope you understand why I call this the Halloween episode of the show), complete with cobwebs, miscellaneous set decorations, a secret passageway and, incidentally, a blue-faced vampire attempting his best Hungarian accent (I still find it more convincing than Gary Oldman’s Bela Lugosi accent in Coppola’s Dracula). The vampire has shaggy white hair and is dressed in a rather crude tunic. When the agent fires on the vampire, it has no effect, and the woman enters the house too. Determined to save the woman, the agent tells her to leave, and she cackles as she reveals herself to be another vampire with a slightly less blue face (most likely suggesting she was once human and not Gargoylian). The woman feasts on the man, returns him to his car for a young bicyclist to find, and our cold open is over.

 

This vignette introduces some key concepts we should keep an eye on for the rest of the twenty minutes. The vampires are not sensual, but repulsive (in the case of the older gentleman Drakulon) or deceptively sympathetic (the woman in white), the house has tricks up its sleeve with secret passageways and decorations, and, of course, there is not just one or two vampires but implicitly an entire undead town and maybe even a vampirized UNICORN agent.

 

The Town

 

After an autopsy during which Johnny and Jerry are in UNICORN garb, Azuma sends Johnny and Jerry to investigate the scene of the crime in plain clothes to see if it is the work of the Gargoyle Gang. Interestingly, Azuma’s objection to vampires as the cause of death is that it is 20^th century Japan (“in this time and place?”), which could suggest some form of vampire is native to this Earth. More likely, it is a poorly chose expression or dub error, since Azuma assumes it is the work of Gargoyle anyways.

 

We get a brief interaction between Jerry and Johnny in the car of reassuring each other before they exit the car and begin talking to one of the main corpses focused on in the cold open, a man with glasses. The show is now engaging some level of dramatic irony for the tension, since we know he is a vampire, but the characters do not. He denies hearing of anything, and the shot lingers on his vampire neck mark. The woman in white now is wearing green and approaches Johnny and Jerry, seemingly to attempt a different play than last night to lure these agents to Drakulon. She refers to the vampire as her “daddy,” and says he heard a car around the time Johnny asks about. Of course, Johnny and Jerry respectively each gave a different time of occurrence to the woman and the bespectacled man (3:00 A.M. vs midnight). Though it does not pay off outside of the two being a bit more on their guard when entering Drakulon’s old dark house, it is nice to see that they do not make it easy for Gargoyle agents to confuse them.

 

I have been relaying the plot, but for the next scene to hit as hard, I should spell out the “oh crap” moment that I glossed over. It has been daytime the whole time Johnny and Jerry have been in this town, and two vampires have been walking around just fine. One of the few safety nets of vampire fiction is explicitly gone, so when Drakulon, in human guise laughs himself into blue form to attack our leads, escape is not as simple as breaking the windows in. Actually, we will see it takes quite a bit to kill our Drakulon.

 

The rotating wall secret passageway reveals the vampire woman, and the two back our heroes into a corner, where they correctly guess Drakulon’s Gargoyle leanings and the vampires taunt them. Both vampires express desperation to taste the blood either through a breathy pant (Drakulon) or a petulant statement of wanting the blood (his bride/daughter), but Drakulon reins himself in for a suave delivery.

 

Now, it is important to ascertain why this old dark house is even here if Drakulon is from space. I would argue the main reason is just for the Gothic atmosphere, as this episode isn’t even done milking this location for all the horror imagery it can provide, but if there has to be an in universe reason, this is one of the most elaborate plans of Guillotine for very little reason. It makes sense to keep his lieutenants secret from UNICORN; it keeps UNICORN on their toes, and we see how effective it can be in their little cold war to switch between subcontracting with Spider to Dr. Botanus to Fangar to Dr. Snake to Dr. Hydra to Metron to Terrorman, etc. But building lodging for Drakulon in a far off town raises all sorts of logistical questions. It is possible he truly fed on them one by one offscreen over the course of the show, but we get nothing more in this episode to flesh that out.

 

Drakulon himself resembles Dracula in more ways than just the name and accent. He first appears to Johnny and Jerry as a very slow, calculating but very weird old man, like the dynamic Dracula has with Harker in the early chapters of that book. The racial component of Harker’s discomfort with Dracula comes in with Drakulon turning out to be an inhuman of the Gargoyles (pinning down what the average Gargoylian should look like is difficult, but the Gargoyle Gang is, at the very least, a cultural identity). And, like Dracula, Drakulon first appears as this disgusting and unkempt old man but reveals surprising vitality as the story progresses. I called attention to the costumes of the major characters before this, and Drakulon is no exception since he will drop the shabby clothes and sport a full noble warrior getup during his battle with the robot at the end. We will get there soon.

 

A subtle moment for Jerry’s humanity creeps in as he refers to the fallen UNICORN agent as his friend and fires on Drakulon; Jerry is a simple creature, intensely loyal and brave but a little stupid. Jerry actually manages to push off Drakulon during a minor wrestling match but walks right into the vampire horde trying to warn them. Jerry fights to his utmost to protect Johnny from all these vampires that are moving so slowly and groaning like zombies. Once they get to shelter inside the house, the vampire horde pounds on the windows. Johnny phones for help, and Mari answers, but the vampirized UNICORN agent is in place to kidnap her, as the vampires start to break through the window.

 

The next “oh crap” moment happens when Jerry tells Johnny to call the robot, but it turns out the wristwatch came off in the tussle with the vampires. This is feasible given the distance they had to cover, the sweat that would be on his arm in that trench coat and the grabbiness of the vampires. With the vampires in the house, Jerry removes his coat and fights off the horde, leading to Jerry’s best moment in this entire series: Jerry tells Johnny to get the watch and sics the entire vampire horde on himself, referencing how he used to do the hundred yard dash. Dancing around casually like an idiot, Jerry faces the highest danger in this entire show just to buy Johnny some time, as the entire vampire horde chases him.

 

Drakulon confronts Johnny at the staircase with the watch on it, revealing the kidnapped Mari, threatening to turn her into a vampire if he calls the robot. From a writing standpoint, this is good, since it communicates that Drakulon is not as mindless and stupid as his minions and was working on his own plan while ordering them to chase the agents down. From a plot standpoint, this is bad since now the vampires have captured Johnny, Mari and Jerry, who runs back over once he sees that Johnny is near the wristwatch, bless his soul.

 

Drakulon’s daughter/bride is eager to drink their blood, but Drakulon stops her to launch into the next phase of his plan: making Johnny order the Giant Robot to obey Drakulon and destroy the UNICORN headquarters in Japan. If Johnny refuses, the UNICORN vampire will kill Mari, and, rather amusingly, the way the vampire chooses to administer this threat is by holding a gun to her head as if his teeth were not already the threat Drakulon had made. That and the Jerry chase scene from earlier tempt me to appoint this a horror-comedy, but in any case, there is no tonal issue because the humor is in character for a brain-dead monster and Jerry’s unique personality respectively.

 

Johnny has only five seconds to decide, and, as one of his best character moments in this show, he manages to outsmart Drakulon to win the day. Claiming to test the mechanism, Johnny speaks backwards to tell the robot not to obey the order and then relays Drakulon’s order. Jerry calls Johnny a traitor, because he is also misled by this. It is one of Jerry’s dumb moments, but we really should think of this from his perspective. He just risked his life to save Johnny after losing one of his other friends. Moreover, I would argue that Johnny is almost the reason for Jerry’s intense loyalty to UNICORN.

 

Obviously, Jerry is one of their best agents and was before the show began, but, in episode one, Jerry was rather irritated with Azuma, and the partnership with Johnny gave Jerry something to enjoy and protect. Their partnership also nets him at least twenty high-profile cases closed in this show to where Johnny and Jerry are the dependable agents to send out on these cases, the ones that survive everything Gargoyle throws at them, and, for a moment, it seems like Johnny is throwing that all away. If you think I am reading too far into Johnny’s role in Jerry’s loyalty to UNICORN, that is fair, but I will also remind you of UNICORN defector Hunter from an earlier episode who left due to disdain for Azuma and did not have a Johnny-like influence to temper his tempestuousness.

 

With Johnny, Jerry and Mari all tied up in coffins, the camera pans across the faces of the dead around them, and regardless of your views on the quality of this show, the idea behind this shot and the execution would not be out of place in a real horror movie. The dynamic cinematography style of a kaiju of the week show lends itself well to peril, and, as I hope to have demonstrated, this episode was uniquely focused on implementing horror imagery into its shots.

 

As Drakulon grips Johnny and pants like a dog, the Giant Robot arrives, and Jerry springs into action to free Johnny from his bonds, either quick to realize what Johnny actually was up to or just relying on muscle memory of “save Johnny first.” What happens next is interesting. Drakulon turns himself Giant and faces off against the robot with a sword and shield in a knight costume with a cape. The fight is actually unlike any that we had seen before. Drakulon fights like an acrobatic human, and his sword carries with it an explosion when thrown. Then, something baffling happens.

 

Johnny recalls that Drakulon should not be able to stand the cross, so, first, the robot T-poses in front of the setting sun, and then obeys Johnny’s order to “throw the cross,” at which point, a flaming cross appears and launches at Drakulon. If you are lost, I do not blame you. This seems like the most egregious Deus ex Machina in the entire show. However, I think I can mount a cogent defense of it.

 

The first thing to keep in mind is that this move is never used elsewhere, so the viewer does not know it is an option going into this episode. That’s why it is a Deus ex Machina (a literal God the Machine), but, answer me this: why would this move be used anywhere else? It is a time-consuming move to muster, and Giant Robo has both flame breath and Mega-ton punches to exercise far more readily and efficiently (not to mention the finger missiles and eye lasers). No other monster has a unique weakness to crosses, flaming or otherwise.

 

Okay, so the usage of the weapon makes sense, but why does it exist? People are quick to forget that UNICORN did not invent the robot; Guillotine did. Guillotine’s master plan in the show involves growing to giant size to threaten the Earth, but it takes a lot of energy to get him there. Drakulon is one of the only other Gargoylians that can grow in size, and he can do it so much faster. Guillotine baits the audience throughout the show by constantly saying his underlings will die for their failures but never delivering; by episode 17, he proves that, actually, he has no issue with killing his underlings for their failure. It seems like an obvious insurance policy to me to ensure that his most dangerous subcontractor cannot beat what Guillotine initially planned to be his main weapon. Is the flaming cross too fantastical for a sci-fi show? Too bad, the evil emperor pirate space squid probably ordered the robot that way, and frankly, it’d be dumber if he didn’t.

 

Okay, so why does Johnny know about it? By the beginning of episode two, UNICORN has studied Giant Robo and all his weapons and abilities. From there, Johnny spends at least five months on these missions with Jerry and the robot (if you use the airing dates), so Johnny would eventually discover that the robot can, for some reason, generate flaming crosses. But do you remember the start of the episode when Azuma assumed that any vampire activity was likely tied to Gargoyle? Or the middle of the episode when Jerry, upon realizing guns did not stop the vampires, told Johnny to summon the robot? Those moments make more sense if UNICORN knows the robot can do this, and then of course we see when Johnny remembers. I do not think I am reaching here; this feels like pretty basic inferences that do not cause any problems with the rest of the show. When I review media, regardless of if I love it or hate it, I intend to operate within the best faith possible, to steelman each stimulus because the flaws will win out anyway if it really is bad, and this is fine.

 

Conclusion

 

Especially given the contrivances one expects from this show, this episode stands out not only as an experimental episode of tokusatsu but as a pretty well written one for its high concept. The Deus ex Machina makes sense in context, Drakulon is legitimately a threatening character for his intelligence (unlike whatever Fangar was doing half the time) as well as his strength, and this episode shows off some of the best displays of the characterization of Johnny and Jerry that keeps me coming back to this show and this episode.

 

This is not the only Halloween-styled episode of Johnny Sokko; The Terrifying Space Mummy aired just a month earlier. (Maybe we should talk about that one next year). This is not the first time we at Plan9Crunch have discussed Johnny Sokko And His Flying Robot and hopefully will not be the last. Links to a blog post and podcast episode are below. Happy Halloween and Happy Johnny Sokko Day.

https://youtu.be/4G1jbizjHiY?si=BrhwylHKVy9fWTJw

https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2013/05/johnny-sokko-and-giant-robot-in-movie.html

Plan9Crunch Review: The Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch

 

By Joe Gibson

 

Introduction

 

According to David Kalat’s film commentary on the Arrow release of The Snake Girl And The Silver Haired Witch, this film melds together the genre conventions of Japanese horror throughout the century (from the Classic ghost tales to middle of the century monster horror), but the most important genre influence comes from manga artist Kazuo Umezu, who wrote the source material for this film: Reptilia. While Kalat argues that this is not a children’s film due to the dark subject matter and frequent scares but instead a slipstream horror that only appears childish because it stars one and was made by childish director Noriaki Yuasa, I would argue that books/films such as Coraline prove first that children’s media can carry dark subject matter and second that subgenre classification is usually still possible for those works. Because it draws so much from Umezu’s works in the manga medium, this film corresponds to the tropes of Shojo horror. (And this extends to Kalat’s reasoning for his classifications since Snake Women are frequent in Classical Japanese horror but also in Umezu’s shojo horror…).

 

If you are unaware of the different types of manga, the simplest way I can explain is that intended audience often is the name of each genre (Shonen manga is intended for young boys, seinen for older boys). Shojo manga is manga directed towards young girls, and Shojo horror would be a subset of that.  As Elliot Michel Weber’s thesis defense from the Florida State University Libraries (https://repository.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:854133/datastream/PDF/view) argues, Shojo manga mostly utilizes themes pertaining to the life and development of women, with the horror reflecting body dysmorphia during puberty and the influences that mothers have on their children. The Snake Girl And The Silver Haired Witch, starring two young girls whose rivalry begins from developmental beauty and ugliness while also contrasting two different types of mother figures, is a near perfect fit for this. (Coincidentally, Coraline, a portal fantasy story, also stars a young girl figuring out her place and role in society while encountering two different types of mother figures, and the difference in end result is something I would attribute to cultural differences between the creatives.  This is also why I resist the recent pop culture push to classify any culture's Other World stories under the similarly vague Japanese term Isekai, since neither shojo nor portal fantasy seemed to cross the sea in popular discourse.)

 

Disclaimer

 

I have an ulterior motive for discussing this particular fine example of Japanese Shojo horror: it has the potential to be the missing piece in my ongoing Jungian analysis of Gamera vs Guiron (Link here: https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-jungian-exploration-of-gamera-vs.html).  Indeed, from what sources analyzing it I could cite when I wrote that previous article, this seemed to interplay uniquely with the pieces of my argument, but I still could prove no outright connection between Noriaki Yuasa, Christianity, Jung or portal fantasy (despite the textual analysis of Gamera vs Guiron that seemed to imply such connection).  Much of this review will be devoted to furthering that connection.  However, this film is so unique (to my Western sensibilities where a film like Coraline is designated as portal fantasy not Shojo horror), surprising, etc. that this review will also have to go over the film on its own merits.

 

The Film (on its own merits)

 

This is a very well-directed film, to start. Noriaki Yuasa is seen as a lesser director of a lesser series compared to Ishiro Honda and Godzilla, but the major issues that affected the directorial quality of Yuasa's first Gamera film were inexperience and creative differences with Daiei over if the film should be more adult or more childlike.  By the third Gamera film onward, Yuasa and his team crafted a consistent tone and consistent acting until the budgets ran out.  The Snake Girl and The Silver Haired Witch shows us Yuasa adapting a more serious subject matter focused on horror, so the acting is less comedic.  The atmosphere needs to be just as meticulously Gothic as it previously was goofy, so from the opening scene casting Tamami's murder of the house servant in darkness, this film is noticeably effective in building suspense.

 

Tamami is, of course, the titular Snake Girl, mostly masked through dream sequences or obscured by scenery at the beginning of the film, with some snakelike characteristics.

 

The film is unclear and contradictory on a few key details, namely if Tamami is actually a snake woman outside of the dream sequences, if the silver haired witch is actually magic and capable of turning invisible and what age relationship Sayuri, the lead, has with Tamami.  The ambiguity is effective because your reading of the film and its themes will be different depending on what you pay attention to.  Most importantly for right now, Tamami has a facial deformity directly proportional to the evil in her heart, and some of the most interesting imagery of this film is the idea of her skin mask being just a very thin veneer to hide her monstrousness (though the degree of her affliction depends on the focus of the scene).

 

Ultimately, the main point of this story is to contrast lead Sayuri Nanjo, a paragon of good spirit with the unfair world around her, best exemplified through Tamami, the Snake Girl, the Silver Haired Witch, unfair housekeeper Ms. Shige and inconsistent mother Yuko Nanjo.  None of this would work if Yachie Matsui could not adequately sell Sayuri’s good nature as she gains the family she had wanted for so long being within a Catholic orphanage and then loses it piece by piece (first, her father is called away for his snake research, and then Sayuri loses the attentiveness of her mother when Tamami starts her plan, loses the support of secondary guardian of Ms Shige and even loses her bedroom to Tamami, having to sleep in the attic where the witch and some animals accost her).  Once Sayuri first sees her room in the Nanjo household, she says, “God, if this happiness is all a dream, please don’t ever let me wake up!” and from that point on, the film proceeds as a warped dream, where scenes connect more through the feeling and tone than strict cause and effect (a clever metatextual layer to put on a horror film, since that is the point of the direction of the genre).  There are very many dream sequences in this film, distinct for their swirling imagery and more overt supernatural happenings, but some of these dream sequences occur during the day in the middle of scenes.  Let us put a pin in what the supernatural ambiguity means for the themes of the film.

 

Before we proceed, it may be important to clarify what separates a paragon from a simple one-dimensional character, so that we all view this movie in the best possible faith interpretation.  One-dimensional characters (for whatever reason two-dimensional characters are described the same way even though I feel there should be a gradient between one and three dimensions) are generally flat characters that do not undergo growth or development.  I would submit that if we are following the name, one-dimensional characters, as they lack complexity, we should regard as a straight line, acting based only on one or so impulse, theme, trait, etc. at any given moment.  (From this, a two-dimensional character would actually be a 100 percent improvement, hence my ire at conflating them.)  This is necessary for many tertiary characters that only exist to fill the world or unsubtly foreshadow a theme, but it is a challenge to make that work for a more important character.  Characters need not be active to circumvent this; the more personality and context a character has, the more complex they are.  Static characters are one example of this (where an unchanging character proves the theme to the world around them the way only that particular can), and paragons are the epitome of whatever single trait defines them, framed often through conflict with the world around them.  Sayuri’s character works because we see her outlook challenged constantly and she has to draw on whatever strength she can from whatever sources she can to not only survive but remain optimistic about it.  

 

Tatsuya Hayashia is one such source, an older male from the orphanage appointed to help ease Sayuri’s transition to living with the Nanjos and attending school.  He trusts her, does everything he can to help her, and gives her a doll that briefly helps Sayuri conquer her fears about Tamami.  When Tamami’s animosity escalates (and again when The Silver Haired Witch actively tries to kill Sayuri), he makes a distinct effort to help her and figure out what is happening.  It is through his character’s growth (of accepting the pseudoscience of Tamami’s inner ugliness causing her condition) that we first understand the movie’s theme, and Tatsuya is the only consistently dependable character for Sayuri in this story, raising the stakes when he is separated from her in the climax.

 

In case you still disbelieve that this film’s trials are enough to make Sayuri a compelling character via her resilience, the Silver Haired Witch tries to kill her by making her fall from a high place twice (stopping short of total defenestration to be more of a Mufasa in the Lion King situation).  Sayuri survives both attempts, but upon the latter one, the witch beats her hands, drawing a lot of blood.  As I already mentioned, the supernatural is only debatably real in this film, and it is important to note that much of the horror of the original source material by Kazuo Umezu was from the villain being a warped maternal character, so the film’s ultimate twist, that Ms Shige is the Silver Haired Witch trying to inherit the family’s money in a Scooby Doo-type scheme, works as a marriage of the realistic horror and the fantastical.  The Silver Haired Witch is the greatest danger within the house: some mysterious grownup with authority over Tamami and the animals that can turn invisible to spy on and torment Sayuri.  Compare this to Ms Shige: the totally innocuous housekeeper that can carry out her evil plans unnoticed and, even after witnessing Tamami order Yuko around to persecute Sayuri, can still justify mistreating Sayuri.  I think the stakes of the Real and Other map well onto each other in this film, which is a compliment to the film’s storytelling.

 

Ahead of this Halloween season, I recommend you watch this movie.  Even respecting Noriaki Yuasa as I do, this film still surprised me with its quality.

 

Symbolism 

 

From our discussion with Andi Brooks on Japanese folk horror (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGGPJlevPXg), we know that the Buddhist monk as a villain is a common trope, and I find it very interesting that the Catholics in this story are all good guys in honest action and with clear sight, while Buddhist ritual masks the secret of The Snake Girl (the participants involved being either misguided or evil).  However, this is ultimately a film that values different perspectives, since Sayuri is not only aware of traditional Buddhist rituals (even if she disbelieves early on) but attributes her mastery of the film’s theme of inner vs outer beauty to Tamami and not Tatsuya at the end.  (This is significant because it is Tatsuya that spells out said theme in conversation with Tamami near the end, so, it is possible to attribute the lesson to either individual.)  

 

Hair is usually an important symbol in Japanese culture (this very movie emphasizes silver hair as a characteristic of the witch), especially in shojo manga, but I have been unable to figure out why Sayuri (the sister said to be beautiful) has short hair rather than long (which is the symbol of status as a woman). That is the kind of creative choice that must be intentional, but I cannot figure it out.

 

From there, we have to get more specific into what symbols come from which creative.  What of this film is due to Kazuo Umezu and what is due to Noriaki Yuasa?  (As Kalat points out, some stuff such as the swirls and eyeball imagery in the dream sequences is important to both styles.)  The source manga for this film is innovative and celebrated due to the main idea of having a sinister mother figure at the heart of the horror for the young girl to deal with.  I figured the quickest way to be somewhat educated on the discourse around shojo horror and Umezu would be Wikipedia, so according to the page on the source text for the movie, Reptilia and its reception, this was due to benevolent mothers being a staple of Shojo horror, so the subversion is more interesting and raises the stakes.  It also lines up with Jung’s idea of the Evil Mother archetype, but Umezu represents this with Snake women (which in Japanese culture are associated with witches, mask themselves as human and try to turn others into snake people to build a warped family, while Jung regarded snakes as representative of the duality of man and the basis for unconscious thought), which does not match Jung neatly as far as I am aware. (How deep anyone should read into Jung is up for debate, and we should not expect a writer using one of Jung’s concepts to demonstrate all of them; I just mean that the Jungian subtext of Umezu’s works has been read in by critics and so requires more evidence than the claim itself.)

 

Another significant Umezu trope is the eyeball in the ceiling hole, which Tamami uses to spy on Sayuri in this film and drop snakes on her. Those instances also correspond to the idea of Sayuri as an unreliable narrator where there is ambiguity as to how much of the events of the film actually happen. Because the main character voicing doubts in Sayuri’s stories (Mrs. Shige) turns out to be the villain, and the rest of the film proceeds as if each supernatural event happened in some capacity (even if Tamami was not a Snake Girl that violently murdered a human-sized version of the doll, Tamami did still break Sayuri’s doll), I think it is fairest to take Sayuri’s side.  According to Weber’s thesis, shojo manga frequently does explore systemic lack of trust and respect in women, so the doubt cast on Sayuri’s story may just be trying to simulate that, in which case I assign that feature to Umezu, the trailblazer in shojo manga.

 

The pamphlet included in the Arrow release of this film includes an essay by Raffael Coronelli, who claims Yuasa was very enthusiastic about Japanese folk stories, even as the reason for his views about animals and humans being the same in capacity for motivation and thought or for there being divinity in things the West would label as monstrous. This would bring deeper meaning to the scenes of snakes and spiders in this movie, since they would not just be props but actual characters. Based on the film, I think there are more areas Yuasa diverged from Umezu, since this film downplays the evil mother relationship, and demotes the Snake Girl to a child shadow of the main character rather than the symbol of the mother’s evil.

 

This takes us to the doubles relationships in the film.  There is nothing so outright Jungian as in Gamera vs Guiron (where the Terans actually work better as the warped Animas to the main boys than as foils to their parents), but there are a lot of shadow relationships.  Tamami ultimately represents a warning to Sayuri about what would happen if she prioritized her looks over her heart.  Sayuri goes through similar scenarios and tests as Tamami (namely having to live in the attic), but her positive qualities show her handling the situations differently.  Similarly, while Mrs. Nanjo is a weak but caring parent, and Mr. Nanjo is a strong and caring one, Ms. Shige plays the role of the weak but cruel housekeeper while being the dominant and manipulative Silver Haired Witch. The introductory pamphlet mentions that Yuko Hamada (the mother in this film) also plays a domineering mother in Gamera vs Guiron, and, as I have kept saying, there really is not that much to connect Akio’s mother to the Terans, while here (especially because of Kazuo Umezu’s input) there is a direct line of comparison between Yuko Nanjo and Mrs. Shige.  

 

This suggests a different focus in the doubles relationships that exist and also probably proves intentionality in those doubles relationships (since my understanding of Kazuo Umezu’s version of this story is such that it would have condensed Tamami, Mrs. Shige and Mrs. Nanjo into the same false mother character). Separating the Good Mother And the Evil Mother is a coincidental similarity to Coraline, but, more than anything, it indicates that Yuasa, independent of Umezu, has some understanding of double relationships. My initial comparison of this film to Coraline was based on all the incidental similarities (Other Mother symbolism, ambiguous reality, living doll, prominent male friend in the film version), the same way David Kalat’s commentary track brings up the similarities between pure Sayuri and the American slasher Final Girl trope, but those are coincidental similarities because again the relevant cultures as so different and divorced that the comparison here is primarily to help you, the audience member, understand what this movie is similar to not what it is.

The presiding view on Gamera vs Guiron, as argued by Kalat in his Arrow video film commentary for the Gamera collection, is a fairy tale (where the proposed punishment from Mr. Kondo toward Tom manifests as the Terans shaving Akio’s head, but this film and other fairy tales remain focused on the same protagonists and same antagonists for the subtext.  If Noriaki Yuasa intended Gamera vs Guiron as a fairy tale, he failed in ways he did not for the movie that directly preceded it in his filmography). As I argued, in my Jungian analysis of Gamera vs Guiron, the film fits closer to the beats of Portal Fantasy (condemnation of technology and prominent imagery of Sweets, specifically candies or pastries) than Grimm’s fairy tales, but this film The Snake Girl… actually uses the kind of Grimm allusions people ascribe to the later film.

 

I was going to go through the tropes of Grimm fairy tales to compare with this film one by one but just referencing the film’s plot points will be sufficient to say my piece on that.  Especially during the dream sequences, traditional Grimm fairy tale imagery is leveraged as part of the horror.  First, Sayuri’s doll takes on a Fairy Godmother role, growing in size and transforming Sayuri’s pajamas into nice clothes; The Snake Girl invades the dream and murders the Fairy Goddoll. (Some critics like Kalat attribute this sequence as a reference to the Nutcracker, but that is not in their better interests; The Nutcracker and The Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffman, the original version of that tale, is an early example of portal fantasy, which would make it possible for Yuasa to be aware of those tropes when he was making Gamera vs Guiron.) Next, once Sayuri is forced into sleeping in the attic (becoming a princess locked away in a tower like Rapunzel), she has a dream where she is menaced by a large snake and must fight it with a sword (not necessarily a specific allusion I can think of but the more generalized idea of a fairy tale scenario that lacks any portal fantasy confounding tropes).  And of course, rather than slaying the dragon, it turns out she has, in the dream, killed Tamami, who she at this point is sympathetic to, once again subverting the fairy tale imagery (and foreshadowing Tamami’s later death).

 

Most importantly, another notable common trope is the major theme of both this film and the Grimm tale The Maid Maleen, where someone’s beauty is proportional to the goodness in their heart (in this case where monstrous ugliness has a pseudoscientific explanation).  It is not perfect adherence to all of The Grimms’ tropes, but neither is any individual story from their collections.  I hope the existence and distribution of this film disproves the notion of Gamera vs Guiron being a Grimm fairy tale based only on the presence of violence and childlike whimsy, because, even if Noriaki Yuasa didn’t put these allusions in here, following his work on this film, he would know how to make these allusions and what the common tropes are and look like.  Yuasa’s filmography getting less fairy tale-like over time should be very telling, but I should again tie this back to the conclusion that The Snake Girl… is a very Grimm tale (if it is possible to find these same messages in Japanese folklore, I will encourage this conversation to continue along those lines. I am just presenting the argument my research supports).

 

Bringing this back around to Gamera vs Guiron, Sayuri is actually a quite similar character to Akio’s sister Tomoko: a young girl that is constantly discredited but singularly innocent and with an older male friend (in Gamera vs Guiron, the policeman Kondo). I find that interesting because the benevolent older males in the Gamera series usually interacted with the male child leads (Kojiro Hongo in his second and third Gamera films). This is not just a movie Yuasa did on the side but one that was very important to his storytelling style (also a film he negotiated to make between Gamera flicks as a palate cleanser), so further analysis into The Snake Girl And The Silver Haired Witch will be necessary to understand Noriaki Yuasa more.

 

Sources

https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/the-snake-girl-and-the-silver-haired-witch-blu-ray-review-yuasa-noriaki-arrow/

https://www.dabblewriter.com/articles/the-innocent-archetype

https://www.ghoulsmagazine.com/articles/snake-girl-and-the-silver-haired-witch-1968-horror-film-review

https://www.ghoulsmagazine.com/articles/junji-ito-monthly-halloween-and-the-rise-of-shojo-horror

https://www.structural-learning.com/post/carl-jungs-archetypes

https://openaccess.wgtn.ac.nz/articles/thesis/_But_I_am_still_a_girl_after_all_A_Discourse_Analysis_of_Femininities_in_Popular_Japanese_Manga_Comics/17019113?file=31475207

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10357823.2017.1370436

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/TheBrothersGrimm

https://www.willamettecollegian.com/post/coraline-movie-vs-book-the-eeriness-of-perfection-and-simplicity#:~:text=Essentially%2C%20Wybie%20being%20present%20in,the%20other%20side%20is%20different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilia_(manga)

https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/04/02/serpent-youtube/

https://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:854133/datastream/PDF/view

 

Review: The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema

 

Review by Doug Gibson

Who remembers the first time they saw a Brian De Palma film during his horror decade? For me it was "Carrie." I was too young to be allowed to see it. No Rs for this early teen, said my wise parents. So, as a late mid teen I viewed the film on a late-night network movie slot, probably on a weekend.

Alone in my room, I loved the film. The split screen action, the doses of high school comedy as a very dark horror plot unfolds, the gothic, oppressive, large tank-like rooms that mom Margaret White forces Carrie to live in. And the horror of the prom and a vicious prank turned into a holocaust.

And, finally, that final scene. For the souls who have never seen it I'll remain silent. But alone in my room, I jumped so high my head almost hit the ceiling. I have yet to be scared like that in a film. That type of scene has been copied too often for nearly 50 years, but no film has matched the intensity and fear De Palma created. As author Laurent Bouzereau notes in his new book, The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens, Running Press, 2024, the finale of Carrie lets the viewer know that teen Sue, who unwittingly sets the stage for Carrie's fury, will never fully recover from the experience. (Buy it from Amazon here).

Just like Carrie's author, Stephen King, who wrote Carrie (a darn good book by the way), De Palma has moved from being a "horror director," which he was known for during the '70s and early '80s, to a mult-genre artist. Bouzereau, a filmmaker himself, does a superb job of capturing how De Palma helped define film evolution generations ago. In movies like Carrie, he captured sexuality and dark horror in teen culture in a believable manner. Carrie, for example, is a tale of a young woman's move toward sexual and emotional maturity. It is cruelly arrested due to a horrific prank. The hitch is that Carrie can move objects with her mind, and the still-young teen gets her terrifying revenge.

Several films of De Palma are explored by Bouzereau. A large amount of actors and crew members on the films, including De Palma, provide insights on "Sisters," "Carrie," "Phantom of the Paradise," "Obsession," "The Fury," "Dressed to Kill," and "Blow Out." Within the recapping, histories and analysis of the films, interesting narratives emerge. The reader learns of the progression of the careers of actors, including Sissy Spacek, Nancy Allen and Betty Buckley. Also, there is the domestic box-office disappointment of "Phantom of the Paradise," but then the happy surprise that it was a hit in France, and Winnipeg, Canada. 

In one passage, actress PJ Soles recounts her audition. She performed for De Palma and George Lucas. The latter was casting for "Star Wars." Soles recalls, "I went in and and I just remember, right away, Brian looking at me. I could just sort of tell that he liked me. And then George Lucas was just kind of stern-faced. Brian turned to him and said, 'I'll put this one on my list.''

I loved De Palma's films as a young adult, and The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema ... brought a lot of great memories. "Carrie," "Dressed to Kill," "Phantom of the Paradise," and "Sisters" are personal classics to me. Bouzereau provides clear evidence that with great, unique filmmakers, there never is a time where you can't learn more about their work. Most of the films in this book are free on online streaming sites. Go see them for the first time or again.