‘Demon Pond’ is An Eerie and Off-Beat Kabuki Film [Criterion Blu-ray Review]

One of the key components of Masahiro Shinoda’s 1979 film Demon Pond is the way it plays with our understanding of anachronism. The film is an adaptation of Kyōka Izumi’s 1913 kabuki play–a work in many ways emblematic of the transitional nature of Japan’s Taishō period. But Shinoda is staging this text from a headspace over a half-century removed. Shinoda was born in 1931, and is therefore reckoning with a history that predates his person, dealing with a work that itself is reckoning with the ways that myth and cultural understanding are carried through changing times. Watching it in 2024, on the other side of the planet, is something of an uncanny experience.

Shinoda’s adaptation hinges on a shift in style and tempo at the midpoint of the film that presents something of a reverse “portal fantasy”. The story of a traveling teacher who encounters an old friend in a strange small village is suddenly intruded upon by characters who look and feel like the products of an earlier, more arcane, and terrifying time. Demon Pond is a film that resembles many of the Japanese new wave works of this era (think Ōshima, Obayashi, or even the more formally restrained Yoshitarō Nomura), so it is something of a forceful gesture to have it populated with forms that seem derived from 17th and 18th century kabuki.

Another compelling element of Shinoda’s anachronistic disruptions is the usage of a score by electronic pioneer Isao Tomita. While Tomita’s modus operandi was the arranging of established works in the western classical canon for cutting-edge electronic instrumentation, here he undertakes something of a sibling endeavor: underscoring a period piece with enchantingly “futuristic” musical accompaniment.

Demon Pond is a surreal effort.

Demon Pond is likely to prove impenetrable to audiences who are fully unfamiliar with many of the forms that Shinoda is evoking. The film is paced leisurely, and has a dreamlike tone. Shinoda’s style is more restrained than those of many of his contemporaries, but his recurrent employment of traditional forms of Japanese theatre most likely makes his films less accessible to western audiences than some of the more overtly experimental works of directors like Shuji Terayama and Yoshishige Yoshida.

While not strictly a horror film, Demon Pond is a film of the fantastic. It is a work that aims to (among other goals) unnerve an audience. With the increased interest in re-framing films within a “folk horror” categorization, Shinoda’s film should have its clear admirers. The whole thing thrives off of the mystique of passed-down oral myth, rural urban legends, and the treacherous entrapment of tradition. It can also be seen as something of a sibling film to Shinoda’s earlier Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees, another supernatural folk tale with memorable stylistic flourishes.

The special features and bonus content on this re-release of Demon Pond don’t disappoint.

Criterion Collection’s new presentation of Demon Pond is as respectable a home video offering as we have all come to expect from the company. There is often much hemming and hawing online about their film selection–some of it valid, some of it patently ridiculous–but either way, films like Demon Pond represent their most exciting and desperately needed curatorial work. Despite their brilliance, the works of many of the finest Japanese filmmakers of the 20th century remain less-than-readily-accessible–among them those of the aforementioned Nobuhiko Obayashi and Shuji Terayama, as well as those of (to name just a few) Kei Kumai, Katsu Kanai, Yasuo Furuhata, many works by the great Kon Ichikawa, and (maybe most egregiously) the brilliant films of the masterful Yuzo Kawashima. It is worth celebrating every time Criterion–or a distributor of similar integrity–is able to provide another selection to help amend this situation.

Demon Pond is available now in 4K UHD + Blu-Ray Combo, Blu-Ray, and DVD editions from Criterion Collection.