Culture as Crucible

Japanese horror films since World War II have returned repeatedly to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a theme, says Jyotsna Kapur, an associate professor of cinema and sociology at SIUC. In Horror International (see main article) she discusses Onibaba (1964), a classic that uses a medieval legend to comment on modern history.

Onibaba might best be translated as "witch." A peasant woman and her daughter-in-law are left to fend for themselves when the woman's son is drafted into war. To live, the women murder lost samurai and sell their armor for food.

One day a war deserter arrives with the news that the son is dead. He seduces the daughter-in-law, threatening the survival of the older woman (there's not enough food for three).

Meanwhile, a samurai disguised by a monstrous mask appears at the older woman's hut. The mask protects his beauty from war wounds, he says. The woman lures him to his death and removes the mask. Shockingly, his face is revealed as the burned, disfigured visage of a hibakusha—an atomic bomb victim.

To frighten the daughter-in-law into staying at home, the older woman uses the mask to pose as a demon. But one night the lovers get together anyway, and she finds that she can no longer remove the mask. She begs the daughter-in-law to break it off with an axe—upon which the older woman's face too is revealed as that of a hibakusha. The younger woman runs away in horror as her mother-in-law shouts, "I am not a demon; I am a human being!"

Kapur first saw Onibaba in 1989. "I couldn't forget it," she says. "It is a visually stunning film. I saw it as a very powerful allegory about the destruction of war, even though the film is set in the supernatural realm."

Onibaba has no cathartic, happy ending. The hibakusha face "jolts you back into the present and forces you to think about reality," Kapur says. The horror, of course, was felt most keenly by Japanese audiences, who understood the visual reference.

Kapur explains that atomic bomb victims were outcasts in Japan for many years, and that by the 1960s their generation was "being left behind by a younger, more Americanized generation that wanted to let go of that past." Hence the poignancy of the old woman's fate.

In a very different context, the power struggle between generations also underlies some American horror films. Remember The Bad Seed, The Omen, and The Exorcist? These movies "gave expression to our repressed anxieties about not being able to control children inside the nuclear, suburban family," Kapur says.

Kapur's recent book Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood (Rutgers University Press) makes the case that the image of American childhood has changed dramatically over the past century. No longer innocents, our children have been "molded" into demanding, knowing consumers with a considerable amount of autonomy. Capitalism inevitably drove this transformation, Kapur says, via corporate marketing, new technologies, and the economic need for dual-income households. The trend really got rolling with TV ads pitched to kids in the 1950s, and has accelerated from there.

Coining for Capital looks at the way children's films such as the Home Alone series reflect this change, depicting children as savvy "little adults" whose parents are foolish or absent. Similarly, the heroine of the children's film Matilda possesses the kind of supernatural powers we see children wielding in older horror films, but the effect here is comedic. "She does the things she does to empower herself," says Kapur. "The message these films give to children is that you've got to take care of yourself."

Onibaba and Home Alone are miles apart in theme, genre, and intended audience, but both illustrate the bedrock principle of Kapur's film criticism: "To fully understand films," she says, "you have to know the culture and history out of which they are born."

—by Marilyn Davis

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