Sightlines · reception
How Onibaba was received
1964 · Kaneto Shindō · Onibaba on Sightlines
The arc
A hit in Japan but sniffed at by some Western critics as lurid erotica when it traveled, Onibaba has since been fully canonized — Criterion treatment, endless 'greatest horror' lists — as art-house horror's great grass-field fever dream.
What’s debated
The perennial Letterboxd squabble: is it really a horror film at all — and is it better or worse than Shindō's own Kuroneko?
Its footprint
That hannya demon mask is one of cinema's most referenced faces — William Friedkin has said Onibaba's mask inspired the demon visage in The Exorcist — and the whispering susuki grass has become shorthand for elemental dread.
Where it stands
A load-bearing pillar of the Japanese horror canon and a Criterion-cinephile rite of passage, reliably resurfacing every October in Hooptober-style horror challenges.
Did you know? Shindō based the film on a Buddhist parable his mother told him as a child, about a jealous woman punished with a demon mask that wouldn't come off — and the cast and crew shot for months living in huts built amid the real reed marshes.