ONIBABA

"Onibaba" is one of the cinema's masterpieces of horror, perhaps because the horrors it depicts are appallingly real and because the director, Kaneto Shindo, has succeeded in making a film that is truly a work of art. It is set in 14th century Japan where two women, a mother and her daughter-in-law, kill wounded samurai, steal their armour and bury them in a deep hole in the middle of a sea of grass.

It's a visually stunning film, shot in widescreen and in black and white by the great cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda and death permeates almost every scene, (either death or sex and here they are intrinsically linked). The women are monsters but only because war and the male-dominated society in which they are forced to survive has made them so. Shindo's extraordinary film is as much a critique of medieval Japan as it is an outright horror film. Praise, too, for Hikaru Hayashi's tremendous score, which like the best scores in the best horror films, adds considerably to the sense of dread.