Jigoku

Shiro is a university student. One night, in a car driven by his friend, they hit a drunk man and do not stop. The man dies. Shiro can tell nobody, and from that day his life comes apart. A guilt of some kind emerges about everyone around him: his father, his fiancée's family, his teachers, the journalists. The deaths follow one another. In the second half of the film they are all in hell. Nobuo Nakagawa directs. It is a Shintoho production. The last forty minutes rest on Buddhist depictions of hell: boiling rivers, bodies being flayed, people sawn in two. For 1960 these images are extremely explicit and nothing on that scale had been shown in cinema before. The production coincides with the studio's financial collapse; the budget was low and the hell sections are built on nearly empty sets, with light and colour. That necessity gave the film an abstract look. The first half is a story of guilt and the second a tableau of punishment; the transition between them is abrupt. It was forgotten for years and was later reassessed as one of the key works of Japanese horror. Who it is for: viewers who follow classic Japanese horror and formally unusual films. Who it is not for: the first half is scattered, the acting is melodramatic, and the hell sections are disturbing.