The Ghosts of the Criterion Collection
As my unwatched movie collection grows closer to the 100 mark, I find that I’m trading in my former obsession with quantity for a new appreciation for quality. And even though I still love hamburgers (or, in most cases, sloppy joes), sometimes I just need to sink my teeth into a juicy steak.
The Criterion Collection usually only releases a horror film once a year or so, but 2006 has seen a bumper crop for creepy films. First there was their Equinox release, which I picked up a little over a week ago, and now they’re getting ready to spring two ghostly tales from foreign lands upon an unsuspecting public, The Spirit of the Beehive and Jigoku.
In a small Castilian village in 1940, in the wake of the country’s devastating civil war, six-year-old Ana attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes possessed by the memory of it. Produced as Franco’s long regime was nearing its end, The Spirit of the Beehive is a bewitching portrait of a child’s haunted inner life and one of the most visually arresting movies ever made.
Shocking, outrageous, and poetic, Jigoku (Hell, a.k.a. The Sinners of Hell) is the most innovative creation from Nobuo Nakagawa, the father of the Japanese horror film. After a young theology student flees a hit-and-run accident, he is plagued by both his own guilt-ridden conscience and a mysterious, diabolical doppelganger. But all possible escape routes lead straight to hell, literally. In the gloriously gory final third of the film, Nakagawa offers up his vision of the underworld in a tour de force of torture and degradation. A striking departure from traditional Japanese ghost stories, Jigoku, with its truly eye-popping (and -gouging) imagery, created aftershocks that are still reverberating in contemporary world horror cinema.
I hope this trend continues and Criterion releases further horror films in the near future, be they esoteric gems or established classics.