The Living Skeleton

Nautical Gothic stories have been a staple of the horror genre for decades and are perhaps embodied most famously in the supernatural fiction of William Hope Hodgson (particularly his 1909 novel The Ghost Pirates) and a handful of films, like John Carpenter's The Fog (1980). Japan's most significant contribution to the subgenre, The Living Skeleton (1968), took years to find appreciation from English-speaking viewers at large due to its general unavailability outside of Japan apart from limited, fleeting U.S. distribution in 1969. Many monster-loving kids were tantalized by stills from the film depicting an alarmed starlet in front of a William Castle-style menacing skeleton, which placed this at the top of the heap of much-desired genre fare from venerable Japanese studio Shochiku alongside titles like Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968) and The X from Outer Space (1967). The competition at the box office was fierce when this film opened around the same time as yakuza hits like Outlaw: Gangster VIP (1968), the wild The Green Slime (1968) and the horror classic Kuroneko (1968), but its appropriation of old school horror tropes sets it apart from the more flamboyant modern fare that was ruling the box office at the time. There's a bit of a literary pedigree to this film courtesy of the screenplay co-written by two novelists; Kikuma Shimoiizaka was a prolific thriller and horror writer who had turned to screenwriting in 1960 with Yoshio Inoue's The Bad Ones, while Kyûzô Kobayashi had also served as one of the writers on Goke. The plot of The Living Skeleton is a macabre grab bag complete with a violent curtain raiser involving a massacre at sea by vicious pirates, a seaside malediction involving a ghost ship, twin sisters persecuted by the oceanside town's grisly past, a dollop of Catholicism and, of course, those uncanny skeletons beneath the waves. One of only two directorial credits for longtime Shochiku jack-of-all-trades Hiroki Matsuno, the film would seem to fall in the Japanese kaidan tradition of subdued, evocative ghost stories, but in execution it's something far more eccentric and indebted to international horror and suspense classics. The opening massacre has echoes of the brutal opening of Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939), while the concept of the dead lingering by or within the water was a powerful trope in such films as Carnival of Souls (1962), Tormented (1960) and the potent Thriller episode, "The Hungry Glass" (1961). Strangely, Disney even offered its own take on the seaside ghost story around the same time with the more benevolent Blackbeard's Ghost (1968). One of The Living Skeleton's greatest attributes is its black-and-white scope photography, a short-lived but effective approach in horror films that already distinguished such titles as The Innocents (1961) and The Haunting (1963). Though he was never a major name with just barely over a dozen features to his credit, cinematographer Masayuki Katô brings a stark, evocative quality to the film with a range of styles including the sunlight-blasted opener and the eerie images of shackled skeletons lingering in the ocean depths. Also invaluable is the striking presence of star Kikko Matsuoka in the two key dual roles, essentially offering a Japanese riff on the multiple two-role vehicles for Barbara Steele throughout the decade. A budding Shochiku house player, Matsuoka would make an indelible impression around the same time as one of the stars of Kinji Fukasaku's outrageous pulp masterpiece, Black Lizard (1968), for the same studio. Apart from a one-off TV appearance in the '80s, she would retire from the screen only two years later. As mentioned above, The Living Skeleton was a tough sell at the time given that Goke had been given a stronger international push and the market was flooded with Filipino horror titles at the time like Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968). In Japan, it was marketed as the second film in an ongoing "Tales of the Bizarre" with the title Kyûketsu dokuro-sen and promoted with the subtitle Ship of Bloodsucking Souls, and after decades of obscurity, it would go on to win new generations of fans when Criterion released a DVD as part of a four-film box set, When Horror Came to Shochiku, in 2012. Since then, The Living Skeleton has become a staple of spooky international programming and a Halloween favorite for many viewers, proving that you really can't keep a good horror film down for long. By Nathaniel Thompson