Geharha: The Dark and Long-Haired Monster (2009) & Death Kappa (2010)

Japan is another country where giant monster movies are produced. Did any of you know this?

In the gaps between major kaiju films, you can always expect to see alternative sources pick up the slack, including fans. The late aughts and the early 2010s were one of those gaps, and while neither of the two subjects I’m covering here, one a short film that aired on television and the other a feature-length film that comes off as multiple short films cobbled together, are technically fan-produced, they certainly feel like they are. They carry with them the same loving attempts to recreate classic tokusatsu effects (utilizing veterans of the field), and the same desire to fill as much of the cast with recognizable faces from other tokusatsu productions—all things we saw in previous site subject The Great Buddha Arrival, which is an actual fan-made film. In this case, both are also affectionate parodies of the genre, capturing the technical craft while making light of their cliches—with that in mind, another one of their major similarities to each other might be their oddly uneven approach to spoofing the form.

Sakuya: Slayer of Demons (2000)

How long has it been since I wrote about a yōkai movie? Clearly, far too long.

I’ve already written quite a bit about the long history of tokusatsu depictions of Japanese spirits and monsters, which bridge the traditional stories and the modern kaiju and kaijin material that take inspiration from them. Considering that deeply-rooted connection, you can understand why some tokusatsu production lifers would eventually choose to make something yōkai-related—and Sakuya: Slayer of Demons (Japanese subtitle Yōkaiden) is a prime example of just that. Director Tomoo Haraguchi’s “tokusatsu lifer” status is inarguable: he started out working on models and make-up as far back as Ultraman 80 in the early eighties, eventually working on to previous site subject Ultra Q The Movie and the the nineties Gamera trilogy (more recently, he has some credited design work on Shin Ultraman.) The movie he produced is a smaller scale project that showcases some of what classical effects could do in the new millennium, one set of traditions nestled within a story based on a much older set of traditions.

The Great Yokai War (2005)

Being so inundated with Hollywood blockbusters for so long, it’s nice to see how other movie industries go about it—what you find is often eminently familiar in their storytelling and reliance on special effects, but in a way that makes their idiosyncratic approaches and cultural differences all the more noticeable. The Great Yokai War is ostensibly a big budget remake of previous subject Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, but in effect the films are barely connected—instead, it takes Japan’s beloved spirits and monsters and puts them in a big special effects extravaganza and a children’s adventure story with your standard “learning to be brave” character arc for the pre-adolescent hero. An even more important difference is that unlike Daiei’s Yokai trilogy, this is set in the modern day and actually grapples with some of the spiritual underpinnings of yokai myths as they apply to a current consumerist culture—all in the name of broad action and comedy, mind you, but it’s still an angle on yokai that I haven’t seen in a movie.

Cryptozoo (2021)

Now it’s time to highlight some of the new monster-based entertainment released over the prior year, because they still make those things, you know. Sometimes, those new ones are really quite different from what we’ve seen before. Case in point:

Indie comics artist Dash Shaw released his first animated film, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, a few years ago, and last year’s Cryptozoo was his follow-up. While very different in subject matter, it maintains the experimental, hand-crafted style evident in both that first movie and his own comics work. Every moment in this film is a multimedia burst of painterly colour, with lush backdrops, collage elements, and characters who look like they walked right out of a sketchbook, all mingling in visually innovative ways (many of the backgrounds were painted by Shaw’s comics contemporaries like Benjamin Marra, Frank Santoro, and former Adventure Time showrunner Jesse Moynihan.) As for that subject matter, well, it’s pretty much tailor-made for me: what if all the creatures of mythology and folklore were real things hiding out in the world, and how would modern civilization deal with that? This is a story that takes a fantastical premise and uses it as a springboard to explore the concept of social progress, of wanting to protect the strange and wonderful things from a world of prejudice and exploitation, and whether the strange and wonderful want to be protected at all. For as quirky and painterly as the world of this movie is, it also pulls no punches and offers no simple conclusions.

Yokai Monsters: Along With Ghosts (1969)

The third and final Yokai Monsters movie opened three months after Spook Warfare (apparently on a double bill with Gamera vs. Guiron, and it’s difficult to imagine a more contrasting pair than that), and after that lighthearted romp, Along With Ghosts returns to the folktale morality horror that defined the first movie in the trilogy, and fittingly it also marks the return of 100 Monsters and Daimajin director Kimiyoshi Yasuda (who is co-directing with Spook Warfare’s Yoshiyuki Kuroda.) As seen in both those other movies, Yasuda’s take on these Edo-period fantasies is to emphasize atmosphere and an idea of the supernatural as an unstoppable natural force that punishes those who cross the moral line, and places it in the context of the samurai genre trappings that he used in his non-fantasy period pieces. In particular, Along With Ghosts makes our favourite group of vengeful spirits seem to be even more connected to their environment—all those empty country backroads and skeletal forests—and even more mysterious, without even the folklore aspect of the first movie to tie them more directly to human culture. I’m not sure if that’s what the subtitle is getting at (the Japanese title is the more descriptive The Haunted Journey Along Tokaido), but the yōkai in this movie do feel more ghostly.

Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters (1968)

If you recall, around Halloween time last year I reviewed the 1968 Daiei classic Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, and briefly mentioned that it was the second film in a “quickly-produced” trilogy—actually, I don’t think I said it was “quickly-produced” that time, but I should have, because all three of those movies premiered within a twelve month span (so, slightly longer than the Daimajin trilogy.) Daiei was all about striking when the iron was (potentially?) hot. Whereas last week’s post was about a sequel to a tokusatsu classic, this week’s is about a prequel—100 Monsters (AKA One-Hundred Yōkai Tales, which is a more fitting title because there definitely aren’t one hundred monsters in this movie) released nine months before Spook Warfare, and despite utilizing a lot of the same suits, it’s actually a very different movie. Where the second Yōkai movie is definitely meant to be the more lighthearted and fun take on Japan’s native supernatural creatures, this is a moralistic pseudo-horror film…very much like Daimajin, actually, right down to the corrupt authority figures who anger the paranormal forces and get their comeuppance. Would it surprise you that this was directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda, director of the the first Daimajin film? He brings a more foreboding character to this movie, whose set design and tone feels more in line with the actual yōkai stories themselves.

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (1968)

The only real difference between the Japanese yōkai, the multitude of spirits that inhabit the country’s traditional stories, and the mythological creatures of other nations is that there has been more of historical trend towards treating yōkai as a collective group of popular characters rather than just creatures in various stories. Although they originate in tales that are often meant to be scary (or at least creepy), most yōkai have ended up becoming more like weird but lovable mascots than figures of terror, and despite often coming from different contexts, they’ve also been treated as one big group for even longer. Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (called The Great Yōkai War in Japan) is an example of how they’ve come to be used in culture—the second in a loose trilogy produced by Gamera/Daimajin studio Daiei (just to further solidify the connection between this and Daimajin, this movie is directed by that movie’s cinematographer), the only thing that seems to connect the three movies are the yōkai themselves, a whole host of them brought to life with sixties tokusatsu ingenuity. Considering that most kaiju films, and Japanese media about monsters in general (even later when you get to stuff like Pokémon) are heavily indebted to depictions of yōkai, it seems rather obvious that they’d get some movies made about them in this style. It’s an homage to where much of the monster movie tradition in the country originated.