Bakemono in film
I might be out of school, but I'm not done studying these things. (For those of you who are new to my blog, bakemono translates to 'monsters' in Japanese and is one of my favorite topics which I studied during my year abroad.) Netflix happened to have two interesting films for me to view: House and Hiruko the Goblin, both of which feature malevolent creatures preying on humans.
House was released in 1977, not to be confused with the 1986 American film with the same name. As Oshare finds that her dad's new girlfriend is just too creepy to spend the weekend with, she heads over to her aunt's house with several other friends. Of course, instead of a calm weekend, they begin dying horrifically/comically. Many viewers find the film to be a trippy, confusing tale with absurd levels of gore, but that might be due to a cultural misunderstanding of the nature of the beast.
While the film does offer a super-creepy motherly matron and a haunted house, the true foe is really the cat. Well, that's not quite true, either; they're up against a bakeneko, 'monster cat.' Here, take a look at the entry from the Obakemono Project page...
http://www.obakemono.com/obake/bakeneko/
House's antagonist acts as a bakeneko with some powers of a nekomata: assuming identities of the dead, manipulating corpses, flame manipulation, and odd occurrences, all of which plague our hapless heroines. It's obvious that the cat was involved somehow but its role is never explained in the film. Based on the techniques used to trick humans (allowing for generous artistic interpretations), this classification seems the best match. Having identified the spook, I also realized the heroines were completely screwed; plucky girls are no match against this thing, as the film proceeds to demonstrate. Without this bit of knowledge the film becomes an odd haunted house flick, but with it... well, it's a weird monster flick that makes just a tiny bit more sense.
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Hiruko the Goblin features an archaeologist, a cursed boy, a host of sooon-to-be-dead friends, and a school built over a gate to hell. (No, not Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but close.) Hiruko is the spider-goblin, and after being freed from a burial grave site it intends to open the gate of Hell so the rest of the spider-goblins can come into this world. It turns out that Hiruko is the term used for all of the human head-stealing, spider-like beings in this film; no specific name is ever given for their race aside from "hiruko" and "bakemono". While the Obakemono Project had nothing on these particular beings, it did have this...
http://www.obakemono.com/obake/jorogumo/
Spider bakemono come in a variety of forms ranging from prostitute spider women to rock-like earth spiders to dog-headed spiders, but all of them have horrific metamorphosing powers. It's clear that the basis for the monsters in question are spiders, but sadly my best classification comes down to "fugly-face-stealing-hell-spider-demons", which doesn't really do us any good. Thankfully, they're represented as vulnerable to most contemporary attacks: electricity, fire, blunt force trauma, chainsaws, and ritualistic magic. Clearly it's best to just seal them back in Hell and destroy the gate, as that's what happened here in this far-too-convenient plot.
I recognize that often the bakemono were/are created to explain misunderstood phenomena in the natural world or sometimes even to represent an undesirable societal element, but they all should have some reason to exist; a monster without a purpose is no monster at all, and these the spiders from Hiruko just seem like repressed creatures seeking only to escape and wreak havoc. This undermines the whole point of the antagonists, lessening the movie as a whole.
Do I recommend watching them? Well, House is a trip, but Hiruko falls a bit flat. Grab some friends, prepare some popcorn, and MST3K your way through them while soaking in a touch of monster mythology.
House was released in 1977, not to be confused with the 1986 American film with the same name. As Oshare finds that her dad's new girlfriend is just too creepy to spend the weekend with, she heads over to her aunt's house with several other friends. Of course, instead of a calm weekend, they begin dying horrifically/comically. Many viewers find the film to be a trippy, confusing tale with absurd levels of gore, but that might be due to a cultural misunderstanding of the nature of the beast.
While the film does offer a super-creepy motherly matron and a haunted house, the true foe is really the cat. Well, that's not quite true, either; they're up against a bakeneko, 'monster cat.' Here, take a look at the entry from the Obakemono Project page...
http://www.obakemono.com/obake/bakeneko/
House's antagonist acts as a bakeneko with some powers of a nekomata: assuming identities of the dead, manipulating corpses, flame manipulation, and odd occurrences, all of which plague our hapless heroines. It's obvious that the cat was involved somehow but its role is never explained in the film. Based on the techniques used to trick humans (allowing for generous artistic interpretations), this classification seems the best match. Having identified the spook, I also realized the heroines were completely screwed; plucky girls are no match against this thing, as the film proceeds to demonstrate. Without this bit of knowledge the film becomes an odd haunted house flick, but with it... well, it's a weird monster flick that makes just a tiny bit more sense.
---
Hiruko the Goblin features an archaeologist, a cursed boy, a host of sooon-to-be-dead friends, and a school built over a gate to hell. (No, not Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but close.) Hiruko is the spider-goblin, and after being freed from a burial grave site it intends to open the gate of Hell so the rest of the spider-goblins can come into this world. It turns out that Hiruko is the term used for all of the human head-stealing, spider-like beings in this film; no specific name is ever given for their race aside from "hiruko" and "bakemono". While the Obakemono Project had nothing on these particular beings, it did have this...
http://www.obakemono.com/obake/jorogumo/
Spider bakemono come in a variety of forms ranging from prostitute spider women to rock-like earth spiders to dog-headed spiders, but all of them have horrific metamorphosing powers. It's clear that the basis for the monsters in question are spiders, but sadly my best classification comes down to "fugly-face-stealing-hell-spider-demons", which doesn't really do us any good. Thankfully, they're represented as vulnerable to most contemporary attacks: electricity, fire, blunt force trauma, chainsaws, and ritualistic magic. Clearly it's best to just seal them back in Hell and destroy the gate, as that's what happened here in this far-too-convenient plot.
I recognize that often the bakemono were/are created to explain misunderstood phenomena in the natural world or sometimes even to represent an undesirable societal element, but they all should have some reason to exist; a monster without a purpose is no monster at all, and these the spiders from Hiruko just seem like repressed creatures seeking only to escape and wreak havoc. This undermines the whole point of the antagonists, lessening the movie as a whole.
Do I recommend watching them? Well, House is a trip, but Hiruko falls a bit flat. Grab some friends, prepare some popcorn, and MST3K your way through them while soaking in a touch of monster mythology.