The Snake Girl and The Silver-Haired Witch [dir. Noriyaki Yuasa]

Hoo boy, if I had seen this movie as a kid, I would have peed my pants and been afraid to ever sleep again. Snake Girl... is loosely based on a Manga by Kuzuo Umezu (it was called Scared of Mama), in which a schoolgirl discovers that her mother has been replaced by a snake woman.

The film adaptation's script changes the plotline a little, possibly because having the mother figure be an evil character would have been a much harder sell. So while the mother is still an oddball (attributed to a recent serious accident which affected her memory), she is not the snake girl of the title. Also, the film's protagonist little girl is adopted from an orphanage. Played by child actress Yachie Matsui, the girl Sayuri is cute and plucky, and thankfully just short of cloyingly goody-goody. She is delighted to find herself with a set of new parents and have her own room with scads of new clothes. Never mind that mama seems somewhat distracted...and Daddy's going to Africa on business for some weeks...there's someone else in the house that mama wants to keep a secret from Daddy...there's something very fishy about this person, no wait, make that scaly...and there's a scary witch too...and snakes...and spiders, hundreds of big hairy spiders.

In the feature commentary track included on the Arrow blu-ray for this film, horror film expert David Kalat laughs at what he considers Sayuri's impossible optimism, her cheerful good-nature even when she is being openly frightened and harried and her own mother seems helpless to intervene. But that can be attributed to this orphan's desperation to be part of a home and family. The family is decidedly strange, keeping the kind of secrets that would be impossible for any normal family to keep. But this also works to the film's advantage, perversely generating in the domestic space an oppressive alienating mood, where Sayuri finds herself unable to depend on what most children automatically rely on, their parents. The several scenes where she must face various freaky or terrifying sights are very well captured in the shadowy B&W cinematography (Akira Uehara). The creature models (when they aren't using real snakes) and other VFX are not super-convincing from a realism standpoint, but they are scary as seen from a child's POV. Kalat makes a very good point about it, that a large portion of the film can be something that we experience through Sayuri's perspective (there are also a lot of voice-overs where we hear her thoughts) and that she may not always be a reliable narrator.

Snake Girl...'s resolution does not tie up all its threads, and will induce in viewers some major "Hold on, that doesn't explain..." moments. But it is a lovely dark fairy tale with a personable child heroine (although as an audience very young children themselves may be too spooked by it), and some memorable scare scenes.

A few words about the blu-ray disc from Arrow Video:

The opening scenes on the film feature some significant amount of hair thin scratches, and I was wondering if this would be the experience throughout. Thankfully not, the bulk of the film is in pretty good condition. Good justice is done to the many night-time eerie elements. The Japanese mono soundtrack (DTS-HDMA) is clear enough and the spooky theme music (Shunsuke Kikuchi) comes across nicely. On-disc extras are limited but substantial. Apart from the aforementioned entertaining commentary from Mr. Kalat, there is a very nice half-hour introduction from an enthusiastic Mr. Zach Davisson to the influence of the Brothers Grimm, origins of Japanese manga, the work of Kazuo Umezu, the source manga and its differences from the film script, and comments on the film itself. A theatrical trailer and image gallery. I haven't yet gone through the booklet (limited to the first pressing), but it's a slim affair with just a single essay padded out with stills. As with their release of Sailor Suit & Machine Gun, my copy came with a slipcover that features the newly commissioned art, so I flipped the actual case cover to show the original poster art.