this surreal horror fever dream from in-house 
Daiei director Noriaki Yuasa (the Gamera series) is an almost indescribable experience told from the point of view of a young girl experiencing an endless parade of flights of fancy. Never released on home video outside of Japan but a real stunner in its handful of U.S. repertory screenings, the film by the manga of Kazuo Umezu (The Drifting Classroom) manages to cover a lot of Japanese horror bases including monster mythology (both snake women and white-haired witches), the Gothic horror formula of an endangered orphan in a spooky house, and the psychedelic approach that would explode in the '70s, most famously now with House. Much has been made of the questionable attempts to pigeonhole this as a children's movie (given that it features multiple violent murder scenes and some simulated but shocking animal mayhem), though it's not so off the mark if you consider it as a wilder cousin to titles like Coraline, The House with the Clock in Its Walls, or the murder-happy entirety of Lemony Snicket's 
A Series of Unfortunate Events. The difference here, of course, is that the film itself is 
gloriously out of its mind.
the strange occurrences that soon explode into homicide and a lot of dark family 
secrets. 
in both the U.S. and U.K. with a high-
definition scan that makes for a great way to make this film's acquaintance. The source element has been kept in very good shape with only some minor damage here (mainly some brief, easily ignored hairline scratches in the opening orphanage scene). The LPCM Japanese mono audio is also satisfying and does justice to the wild theremin-heavy score by Shunsuke Kikuchi (Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell), with optional English subtitles provided. The film can also be played with a new audio commentary by the always welcome David Kalat, who's full of info about the film including some amusing tidbit about Yuasa's obvious Uzumaki-style obsession with stripes and spirals that spills over dramatically into this film as well as his own personal fashion choices. He also does a fine job of tying this film to other Japanese genre trends while anticipating the J-horror wave that would explode with Ringu and its successors. The big video extra here is "This Charming Woman" (27m40s) with manga and folklore scholar Zack Davisson covering the film's somewhat confusing authorship from page to screen and the story's use of European narrative tropes similar to the Brothers Grimm, albeit inverted here a bit with its depiction of maternal figures. Also included are the subtitled Japanese trailer and an image gallery, while the packaging features artwork by Mike Lee-Graham and, in the first pressing only, an insert booklet with an essay by Raffael Coronelli.
