Cult Of Criterion: Demon Pond

In Cult Of Criterion, The A.V. Club highlights a new release from The Criterion Collection each month, examining the films entering an increasingly accessible film canon.

A Halloween watchlist doesn’t need to be a bloody romp slicing through a polycule of horny teenagers, nor does it need to be a series of fully defanged narratives slathering horror over inelegant metaphors. It can be somewhere in between, or somewhere so far off in left field that its uneasy fantasy haunts you long after the credits roll. For the latter, you could turn to Demon Pond, the warped 1979 folktale from Japanese New Wave filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda.

Shinoda, whose Double Suicide turned its actors into bunraku puppets, warps Kyōka Izumi’s 1913 Kabuki fable into a trippy film that’s equal parts Universal Horror, Japanese ghost story, and monster opera. Dominated by a captivating crossdressing performance from Tamasaburo Bando, a Kabuki legend making his uncanny film debut as both a powerful spirit princess and her ghostly human foil, Demon Pond flits easily across the barriers of dream and fantasy.

When a wandering scientist (Tsutomu Yamazaki) bumps into his old friend (Go Kato) living with a mysterious woman (Bando) on the outskirts of a dried-up town and condemned to ring a bell three times a day, every day, local mythology is the specter always in the room. Why should this dusty dead-end village die of dehydration when they’re so close to…the Demon Pond? Well, maybe it has something to do with it being called the “Demon Pond.” Why does a local woman attempt to squeeze her breast milk into the protagonist’s irritated eye? Well, because this movie is nuts.

While the campfire story driving the plot is evocative in its own right, Demon Pond really shifts gears at its midway point when, apropos of nothing, aquatic creatures like a crab and a carp spring into human form to gossip about the mystical goings-on happening under the surface layer of reality. Semi-grounded drama gives way to a full genre-hopping fantasy, though the film checks in on the real world every so often to inject a little political anxiety into the cartoon madness, a bit like Time Bandits with a Kabuki bent. 

These excellent makeup and costume effects throw back a decade to the campy, silly, spirit-filled yōkai trilogy that Daiei Film put out in the ’60s (100 Monsters, Spook Warfare, and Along With Ghosts), and that Takashi Miike would revive in his enjoyable 2005 monsterpalooza The Great Yokai War. Those films push past humanity using garish practical FX. With puppets and prosthetics, they bring to life long-necked women, umbrella beasts, and friendly kappas—some of the folkloric inspirations for the Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! monsters, creatures that would go on to capture the imaginations of children stateside. Demon Pond skews a bit more towards the theatrical, draping its catfish-man in long barbels and coaxing a click-clack laugh from its clawed crab-person. 

As an aside, the prolific Miike, who has basically made a movie about everything under the sun, also happened to adapt Demon Pond the same year he made The Great Yokai War, filming a stage version he directed in his first foray into theater. Miike’s work also offers up commentary on contemporary Japan and its relationship with tradition (not to mention religion), and the 30 years between this and Shinoda’s film see the ending shift like the flow of a stream. Even though the actual flesh-and-blood people are less imposing than some of the otherworldly entities on display, they’re no less threatening; a bloviating politician rages through Shinoda’s film like a cannonball in a kiddie pool.

The story of Demon Pond begs for a blend of fantasy and reality, of film and theater. Shinoda goes all out with his lush sets and the surreality with which his characters navigate them, but beyond the hazy, dreamy world—nearly moving with the distorted slow motion you’d find under the waters of a murky lake—is the piercing presence of Tamasaburo Bando. Shinoda frames Bando’s striking white face to pop from the shadows, and allows his shrill voice to cut through both the clamor of an angry mob of townspeople and a rambunctious collection of spirits. When the film’s supernatural elements reach their peak and the waters finally flood in full, Demon Pond evokes classic Japanese psychedelia like House, with Bando as its haunting, hallucinatory centerpiece.