Demons
1971 · Toshio Matsumoto
Tells the story of the samurai Gengobe, who seeks revenge after falling prey to the schemes of a geisha and her husband.
dir. Toshio Matsumoto · 1971
After the delirious drag-world pop art of Funeral Parade of Roses, Toshio Matsumoto swerved into period drama and emerged with one of Japanese cinema's blackest visions. Shura — released in English as Demons or Pandemonium — follows Gengobe, a disgraced samurai saving to buy his way back into the famous vendetta of the forty-seven ronin, until a geisha and a swindle strip him of money, honor, and finally humanity. Adapted from a nineteenth-century kabuki play by Tsuruya Nanboku, the film keeps the theatre's cruelty while dismantling its distance: Matsumoto, a pioneering experimental filmmaker working under the Art Theatre Guild's radical umbrella, splinters the revenge plot with fantasy inserts, replayed scenes, and imagined outcomes, so that Gengobe's fevered mind keeps rehearsing violence before committing it. Made the same year as Kurosawa's humanist ebb, it plays like the genre's exorcism — a samurai film with no code left to betray. Most striking is the darkness itself: shot almost entirely at night, its blacks are so total that faces and blades surface like apparitions, the frame a void that swallows whatever honor was left.
Lines of influence
- Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) — Matsumoto's own preceding feature, whose fractured nonlinear montage, repeated/reenacted actions, and jarring subjective inserts are transplanted from Shinjuku demimonde documentary into Shura's kabuki-revenge frame.
- Harakiri (1962) — Established the flashback-structured revenge tragedy that weaponizes samurai honor against itself, with austere low-key compositions and a nihilistic view of the bushido code that Shura pushes to abstraction.
- Kwaidan (1964) — Model for painterly, overtly theatrical set-bound chiaroscuro in a supernatural jidaigeki, treating darkness as designed pictorial space rather than location.
- Onibaba (1964) — Inky high-contrast night photography where black voids and reeds swallow the frame, staging dehumanization through figures dissolving into surrounding darkness—Shura's chiaroscuro-void aesthetic.
- Kuroneko (1968) — Vengeful-ghost jidaigeki staged against pure black backgrounds with isolating pools of light, blurring the boundary between the corporeal and the phantasmal.
- Ugetsu (1953) — Pioneered the seamless fantasy/ghost insert that slides into and out of realistic diegesis without a cut-marker—the perceptual ambiguity Shura exploits between real and imagined killings.
- Throne of Blood (1957) — Imported Noh-derived stylized performance, mask-like faces, and fog/emptiness staging into jidaigeki, legitimizing extreme theatrical abstraction of a period setting.
- Kamikakete Sango Taisetsu (Tsuruya Nanboku IV) (1825) — The kabuki source play Matsumoto adapts—its structure as the sordid underside/parody of the Chushingura supplies the ironic Forty-Seven Ronin backdrop the film corrodes.
- Double Suicide (1969) — Companion ATG bunraku/kabuki adaptation that foregrounds theatrical artifice—black-clad kurogo stagehands, painted flats—as an anti-illusionist device in stark monochrome.
- Woman in the Dunes (1964) — Defining ATG avant-garde monochrome: abstracted high-contrast textures and existential entrapment that dehumanize the body into pattern, the movement's formal vocabulary Shura shares.
- Death by Hanging (1968) — ATG anti-genre Brechtian deconstruction built on repetition and reenactment, breaking narrative naturalism to interrogate the genre's premises rather than fulfill them.
- The Sword of Doom (1966) — Centers a morally void swordsman driven by pure nihilism through expressionist night duels, prefiguring Shura's protagonist as an agent of meaningless slaughter.
- Blind Woman's Curse (1970) — Contemporary stylized supernatural revenge jidaigeki using theatrical color-and-shadow tableaux and tattoo/ghost motifs to push period melodrama toward the phantasmagoric.
- Lady Snowblood (1973) — Extends the nonlinear, chaptered revenge-tragedy jidaigeki with stylized flashback interpolation and punctuating bursts of aestheticized, near-abstract violence.
- Taboo (Gohatto) (1999) — Late deconstruction of bushido using candlelit low-key chiaroscuro and near-void staging, treating the samurai milieu as a claustrophobic theatrical chamber of desire and death.
- Gemini (1999) — Revives kabuki-inflected expressionist staging—doubling, garish theatrical artifice, and blackened interiors—to render a period tale as a psychological hall of mirrors.
- Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011) — Restages the anti-honor revenge tragedy with deliberate slow-burn austerity and desaturated low-key interiors, inheriting the flashback indictment of the samurai code.
Appears in courses