Onibaba DVD
Onibaba is a 1964 horror movie based on a Buddhist parable. Directed by Kaneto ShindÅ, the film is set in rural Japan in the fourteenth century Nanboku-chÅ period and features Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura as a woman and her daughter-in-law who attack and kill passing samurai, strip them of their valuable armor and possessions, and dispose of the bodies in a deep pit.
A neighbor named Hachi who went to war with the woman’s son/daughter-in-law’s husband returns and reports that he was killed in combat. Hachi starts to help the two women to kill passers-by and take their possessions. Hachi begins blatantly lusting after the daughter-in-law, who quickly is seduced and starts to sneak out of her hut every night to have sex with him. Soon, the mother-in-law, herself sexually frustrated, learns of the relationship. She first tries to sleep with Hachi and then pleads with him to not take the daughter-in-law away since she cannot kill without her help. Hachi agrees not to marry the daughter-in-law, but says she’s going to do what she wants.
One night, while Hachi and the daughter-in-law are together, a lost samurai in a frightening demon mask corners the mother-in-law and forces her to take him to the road. However, the mother-in-law tricks the samurai into plunging to his death in the pit where the women dispose of their victims. The mother-in-law climbs down and steals the samurai’s possessions and, with great difficulty, his mask. Despite the samurai having boasted that he was “beautiful”, she finds him to be badly disfigured underneath the mask.
The mother-in-law begins to play on the younger woman’s fears of ghosts and punishment for sins of the flesh in what are, at first, seemingly banal conversations. At night, the mother-in-law pretends to be the demon by donning the samurai’s mask and frightening the girl to run back to their hut and away from Hachi. One night, during a torrential storm, the mother-in-law again terrifies the girl with the mask, but Hachi finds the daughter-in-law and again has sex with her in the grasses as the old woman watches from afar.
Later that night, Hachi returns to his hut to find a starving samurai, much like those they’ve killed, in his hut wolfing down his rice. The samurai kills Hachi. At the same time, the mother-in-law discovers to her horror that, after getting wet in the rain, the demon-mask is stuck to her face and is impossible to remove. She reveals her scheming to the younger woman and pleads with her to help take off the mask, promising to never again meddle in her relationship with Hachi.
Though reluctant at first, the younger woman enthusiastically takes on the task of removing the mask when she discovers that it causes pain to her conniving mother-in-law. Eventually the younger woman uses a hammer to violently break off the mask, revealing the older woman’s now ravaged features, similar to that of the samurai who had worn the mask earlier. Now she really believes that her mother-in-law has turned into a demon due to her disfigurement and runs from her in the grasses. The two women jump over the pit housing their victims, their fate left unclear as the film ends.
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Onibaba (film)“.