“I am bringing Hell to everyone”
The Inferno (1979) is one of those rare films by Tatsumi Kumashiro that isn’t overtly erotic or a sexploitation film. The Inferno finds the filmmaker working at the peak of his powers. It is, in many ways, superior to Jigoku (1960) which served as its inspiration. What Kumashiro improves upon are the visuals and characterization, bringing together both the melodrama and horror genres in a film of intergenerational trauma and revenge.
Kumashiro shoots on sound stages for both the scenes in the rural mountains of Japan and those scenes set in Hell. Every shot is meticulously designed to showcase the set which itself has been carefully coordinated to accent the subtext of the drama. Even for those sequences not set in Hell, The Inferno is a film of the fantastic. The manic, unhinged performances embrace the unreality of the image to create something akin to poetry.
The Inferno is a film that, despite being narratively driven, is wholly abstract. Every seduction and every betrayal transcends details like motive to become a pure cinematic gesture of sound and image. The Inferno is an epic tableau of set pieces that study the nature of suffering. Without dialogue and plot details The Inferno would lose none of its power to move and operate as undiluted cinema.
By design the film forms a closed circuit, ending as it began. Suffering is eternal and constant in The Inferno. Aki (Mieko Harada), after finding her mother in Hell à la Dante Alighieri, reverts back to her infancy. Life and death are a circuit and Hell exists when that circuit is broken or stalled.
The scenes set in Hell are by far the most memorable and gorgeous in The Inferno. Screenwriter Yōzō Tanaka’s imagination pulls from a myriad of sources to conjure his own personal vision of Hell that Kumashiro renders with his expert hand. No other film in my experience has done Hell quite like The Inferno. It’s no wonder that films like What Dreams May Come (1998) so blatantly imitate it.
The fact that a masterpiece like The Inferno has gone unnoticed for so long in the west is a shame. If ever a film proved that Kumashiro is a master filmmaker this is it. Few films are as gorgeous from start to finish nor are they as committed to a singular cinematic expression. The Inferno belongs in the same canon of Japanese masterpieces as Vengeance Is Mine (1979), and In The Realm Of Senses (1976).
