REVIEW: Jigoku (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960) and Hell

Jigoku is not a great movie from beginning to end, but its end is so bloody (and bloodily) insane that the film grows unforgettable.  The first hour rotates around a man named Shiro (Shigeru Hamachi), whose life crumbles to the ground after his friend Tamura (Yoichi Numata) accidentally hits a Japanese gangster with Shiro's car and flees the scene.  As the gangster's family draws up their plans for revenge, Shiro's lover Yukiko (Utaku Mitsuya) suffers a tragedy of her own, and before you can say "moshi moshi," everyone's sinning so damn much that Hell might be a redundancy.  Still, they all fall into the bowels of eternal punishment, and the film transitions into a vivid catalog of grotesquerie and sadism.  Can these characters escape?  Should they?  The film has little interest in hope, and there are even hints that the story's "real world" is in question (Nate Yapp of sadly defunct Classic Horror has a fascinating take).  What's not in question is the blackly triumphant finale, which lifts the film from a worthwhile exercise into an imperative.

RATING: B+

In fact, the finale is so crazy that I want to show some of it to you.

Before we head out, though, a few words.

Firstly, Naraka is temporary, not permanent.  If your soul regains enough peace, you can leave Naraka for a better realm.  If you're enlightened enough, you can skip the whole cycle for total consciousness (which is nice).  Secondly, and I can speak only to Tibetan Buddhism on this, Naraka is representative judgment.  The images are meant to suggest a state of being that's beyond Earthly description, and to help followers reflect on the ripple effect of immorality; the punishments last so long because the impact of sins is so much greater than we immediately realize.  The text links on this page comes from the well-sourced About Buddhist Hell, and the inset artworks come from a series of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "hell scrolls."

Got it?  Ready to go?  Excellent.

SPOILERS / GORE

The journey begins at the shore of a river.  The Sanzu, or maybe the Vaitarani.  Both are similar to the Styx, which shows up in Greek myth and Dante's inferno.

This is a bad start to the afterlife.  Apparently, being pierced by stakes mean this poor sap's not even in Hell yet.

Naraka's realms are either freezing or boiling.  The rock-stacks seen here (sometimes called cairns) may evoke the wishes of the damned, but they may also refer to stupas, Buddhist burial mounds.

The wooden clapboards some souls wear are called cangues, and they aren't a punishment so much as a way to brace more resistant souls before judgment is rendered.

Now that we've passed the way-stations, it's time to visit some of the hells of punishment.

Body-horrors are the name of the hell-game.  Along with this woman's severed head, souls (in bodily form) get sliced in half both horizontally and vertically, hands get cut off, and of course everything can grow back, so the soul can experience that pain again and again.

Because clearly this man has not learned his lesson.

Poetic justice, a la Dante in The Divine Comedy, doesn't seem as important an idea in the realms of Naraka, where the sins are more generalized and sometimes overlap between different levels.  

At first I thought these souls were being boiled for soup.  Horrible, delicious soup.  Instead, this is Avici, where people are burned in a boiling cauldron of either iron or oil.  For a hundred million years.

This scene could represent either the "knife hill" that awaits thieves or Ksuramarga, the "road of razors," which is less a kind of punishment than just part of the scenery.

After witnessing all these hells, Shiro, ultimately chases his child Harumi onto an enormous wheel.  The wheel's eight spokes are reminiscent of the dharmachakra, which represents the Buddhist eightfold path.  The image more specifically matches Naraka's Wheel of Fate, which spins the soul back into the cycle of rebirth.

And with that, we're back.

Jigoku's violence is remarkable, as the film was released the same year as Psycho, Black Sunday, and Peeping Tom, horror films considered to be game-changers in terms of on-screen violence, and none of them as gory as Jigoku.  Of course, none of them have such a significant cultural background.  Ironically, it's because of Jigoku's connection to religious history and iconography that it can get so brutal.  If you find that unlikely, remember that one of the most violent movies of the last decade was The Passion of the Christ.  Talk about your torture films.

If that isn't enough Buddhist hell for one day, I encourage you to re-watch Big Trouble in Little China.

Jack: "What does that say?"

Wang: "Hell of boiling oil."

Jack: "You're kidding."

Wang: "I am, it says keep out."