Onibaba: The Reed Field and the Demon Mask

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

There is a shot Kaneto Shindo returns to throughout Onibaba — tall susuki reeds filling the frame, rippling in wind, hissing, going on forever with no horizon and no landmark. It is one of the most oppressive settings in horror, and Shindo grows almost his entire film out of it. Released in 1964, Onibaba is a Japanese folk-horror fable set during the medieval civil wars, in which two starving women murder stray soldiers in the grass and sell their armour to survive, until a demon mask enters the story and turns their arrangement inside out. It is lurid, ferocious, and among the most physically sensual horror films ever made.

The Innocents (1961): Ambiguity as the Scariest Ghost

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The scariest ghost in The Innocents might be that there is no ghost at all. Jack Clayton’s 1961 film, adapted from Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, is a haunted-house picture that never once lets you be certain the house is haunted. It hands you two complete and incompatible explanations for everything you see, keeps both alive from the first frame to the last, and lets the friction between them do the work that lesser films assign to a monster. Six decades on it remains the finest ghost film in the English language, and one of the most quietly radical.

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Onibaba: The Reed Field and the Demon Mask

The Innocents (1961): Ambiguity as the Scariest Ghost