PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological*
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Though I'm utilizing the same "umbrella title" seen on a DVD collection of these three Japanese vampire films, I re-watched all three separately on streaming, so this is not a review of the DVD package.
There's no shared internal continuity between the trio, only a common marketing strategy: an attempt by Toho Studios to mimic some aspects of Hammer Studio's vampire movies. All three films were directed by Michio Yamamoto and co-written by Ei Ogawa, so that all three films also share the authors' attempt to translate the mythology of the European vampire into the context of Japanese culture.
While all three films deliver the goods in terms of basic vampire thrills, as hybridizations between Eastern and Western horror-tropes they're all failures. This may be because, even before the advent of cinema, Japanese culture had a very rich tradition of scary stories, and Japanese cinema of the post-WWII era was not slow to exploit that propensity in attention-getting "art-films" like the 1953 UGETSU. By contrast, a country that had no strong horror-traditions in literature or cinema-- and here I'm thinking of Italy-- found it comparatively easy to mine the mythoi found in England and Germany and produce films strong with supernatural-Gothic associations.
First up is THE VAMPIRE DOLL, also known as LEGACY OF DRACULA (though none of the films contains a character comparable to Dracula, in the grand tradition of Hammer's BRIDES OF DRACULA). The basic structure is the old chestnut wherein a monster kills someone's relative and that someone spends the movie trying to figure out who's covering up the relation's disappearance, and why. In this case, a man named Kazuhiko, out of the country for some months, goes to a small village looking for his girlfriend Yuko. Shortly after Yuko's mother tells the young fellow that Yuko was killed in an accident, the viewer sees Kazuhiko attacked by a weird female figure. The audience rightly suspects that Kazuhiko's gone for good, but when his sister Keiko and her boyfriend Hiroshi investigate, the late Yuko's mother tells them that the brother left on his own.
Nevertheless, the duo hang around the area, talking to the locals about suspicious disappearances in the area. One of the script's best fake-outs takes place when the protagonists consult with the local doctor, who claims to be a man of science but claims that he's seen real supernatural phenomena in the past. A Japanese Van Helsing, the reader may well think. But no, he's part of a conspiracy that made the missing Yuko into a predacious vampire-- albeit one who never fangs her victims, but rather cuts victims' throats with a knife and then drinks the blood. The backstory emphasizes that before her quasi-death Yuko had a great deal of anger at events in her life, and my first thought was that Yuko was more in the vein (pun intended) of a Japanese "angry ghost." The doctor used a form of hypnosis to keep injured Yuko alive because he's actually (ta da!) her secret father, but in due time it turns out he's not able to control the "vampire doll" he created. (There's a loose symbolic connection between undead Yuko and a doll that was immured in her grave, but it's not particularly compelling.) The greatest attraction here is the gruesome makeup for the Asian blood-drinker.
Psychologically LAKE OF DRACULA, which quickly followed the box-office success of DOLL, is a little more layered. As in DOLL the director teases the audience with a protagonist's encounter with a horror, but quickly cuts away from identification and lets the rest of the film fill in the blank spaces. This time the protagonist is a child, Akiko, who follows her fugitive dog into a old house near the titular lake. What happens to Akiko, and how does she escape to become mature young woman Akiko? She herself does not recall, having suppressed the experience, though she still has uneasy quasi-memories. On the whole her life with her doctor-boyfriend Takashi seems stable, though Akiko's younger sister Natsuko constantly chides her onee-san, showing signs of covetousness toward Akiko's beloved and trying to embarrass her in one way or another.
It's eventually revealed that one of the beings in the old house was a vampire, and that after he tried to vampirize little Akiko his non-vampiric father imprisoned the unnamed bloodsucker. Some time Akiko has reached adulthood, Lake-Dracula breaks free, kills his dad, and decides he wants Akiko to be his bride. But he vents his thirst on other victims first, and in the tradition of Stoker's count one of his first converts to vampirism is envious Natsuko, the "Lucy Westenra" of the story.
The monster-ization of Natsuko is much more interesting than the vaguely delineated backstory of Lake-Dracula. While Doctor Boyfriend stolidly investigates the remains of persons slain by blood loss, Akiko has to undergo a sort of anamnesis, a recollection not only of her brush with vampirism but the way in which the near-catastrophe affected her relationship with her parents, who made her their favorite and thus inculcated Natsuko's invidious feelings toward her elder sister. The psychological connection feels tenuous, but it's no worse than one gets from one of Yamamoto's purported influences, since Alfred Hitchcock gave viewers an equally strained psychological wrap-up in 1945's SPELLBOUND. The mystery gets wrapped after Lake-Dracula is slain and Natsuko succumbs to the grave, allowing Akiko and Doctor Boyfriend to return to normal.
EVIL OF DRACULA, released roughly three years after LAKE, is the most ambitious of the three, in part because the script practically broadcasts its intention to transport European vampire-tropes into a Japanese context, via a European Christian who's stranded in Japan of the 1700s.
But of course the film begins by setting its mystery in modern-day Japan of the 1970s. Shiraki, a young teacher of psychology, accepts a position at an all-girls school in a remote Japanese village. But Shiraki's advent is given a grisly accompaniment; the wife of the school's (unnamed) principal dies in a car accident. The principal chooses to keep his wife's corpse at the school, ostensibly to grieve, but this is only a slight oddity next to the principal's disclosure that he plans to groom Shiraki to be his replacement, despite Shiraki's lack of experience.
Since Shiraki's a good looking young dude, three of the young ladies are pleased at his installment. However, from conversation with them the new teacher learns that the girls aren't so pleased when a spooky language teacher watches them afar. Shiraki talks to the man, who shows European leanings when he quotes Baudelaire. Shiraki also learns that one female student has mysteriously disappeared, and he has a weird dream about being attacked by two female specters, one of whom he associates with the principal's dead wife.
Fortunately for Shiraki, a local doctor has compiled a history of weird old legends of the region, and this time, the helpful physician really does serve as Van Helsing Lite. According to legend, a Christian priest was shipwrecked on a nearby shore. However, some locals persecuted the priest for his foreign religion, torturing him until he renounced his faith and spat on his cross. This blasphemy, loosely comparable to a similar vampire-genesis in BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA, transforms the European into a bloodsucker, one who abducts a local Japanese woman and converts her to vampirism too. In yet another departure from European tropes, the duo learn how to take on new forms, so the European morphs into a Japanese man, who eventually takes the job of girls' school principal in order to have access to nubile females. (The language teacher is more or less the principal's "Renfield.")
With the help of Kumi, a student who has a strong romantic interest in Shiraki, the teacher unearths the vampires' depredations-- which somehow involve putting flowers in the rooms of prospective victims. If this visual trope was given an explanation I must have missed it, though given the mention of Baudelaire I suspect this was a learned reference to the poet's most famous (and horror-tinged) poetry collection, FLOWERS OF EVIL. There's a lengthy fight between Shiraki and the principal while the reborn principal's wife tries to fang Kumi, and of course the vampires are defeated and the potential romance of teacher and student is left as an open possibility. In one other respect these three Nipponese vampire-flicks resemble a lot of Hammer films, for in both sets of films the female protagonists are almost entirely incapable of defending themselves, even at the most basic level.
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