Last Updated on March 16, 2024 by Andrew Crump
The question we must ask of any overlooked film left to gather dust in timeโs implacable advance is this: โHow was this one forgotten?โ In the case of Noriaki Yuasaโs The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch, the answer is simple: โOh. Thatโs how.โ Not that The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch isnโt good, or at least one worth putting eyes on. Yuasa directed the picture three years after working on Gamera, his sophomore effort and the movie heโs best remembered for today; watching an FX-oriented director like him pivot from kaiju to yลkai at the start of his career is fascinating if nothing else.
The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch, available on Blu-ray for the first time this December courtesy of the folks at Arrow Video, is certainly more than just fascinating, but part of the fascination lies in where the movie fits in Yuasaโs filmography. The rest lies in the filmโs successes and failures outside the context of its director. Take a glance at what Yuasa made after shooting The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch. Here, have a hint: It starts with the word โGamera.โ From 1968 to 1980, Yuasa directed Gamera vs. Guiron, Gamera vs. Jiger, Gamera vs. Zigra, and Gamera, Super Monster, his final film, largely made up of stock footage cannibalized from all the Gamera movies before it. Maybe Yuasa really liked Gamera. Then again, The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witchโs modest box office probably didnโt give his Daiei Film bosses much incentive to let him try his hand at anything other than monster blockbusters.
A shame, that. The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch is a compelling curio both within Yuasaโs filmography and without. On paper, the movie sounds like a wild ride, Japanese genre cinema at its wackiest: A nure-onna, a palette-swapped yลซrei, a spooky old house littered with peepholes in the walls and ceilings, murder-by-snake, bizarre dream sequences, and comical tonal mismatches. If weโre playing free association games without watching the movie first, then The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch may read like a spiritual sibling to Hausu, but this is incorrect; very little in the annals of any nationโs cinema exists on the same batshit plane as Hausu, and so the standard that film sets is impossible for most others to meet.
Itโs more correct to treat The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch as a Scooby-Doo mystery instead. When Sayuri (Yachie Matsui) is whisked away from the orphanage she has called home for her whole life by her birth parents โ Goro (Yoshirรด Kitahara) and Yuko (Yรปko Hamada) โ she assumes her lifeโs about to take a turn for the better. Why would she think otherwise? Sheโs finally reunited with her parents! Dad! Mom! Sure, itโs a little weird that Yuko calls her โTamamiโ to start off, and itโs an odd coincidence that just before Sayuri moves in, the family maid kicks it courtesy of a heart attack, too; her nightmares featuring an apparent nure-onna (โwet woman,โ or, for our purposes, โsnake girlโ) donโt help, either. But at least Sayuri has a room of her own!
Then she meets the real Tamami, the plot thickens, and suddenly the olโ orphanage doesnโt look too bad after all. At least there, the nuns will ostensibly protect her from being eaten by her half-reptilian โsister,โ who isnโt Sayuriโs sister at all, and also treats her like moldering garbage. In Tamamiโs defense, sheโs relegated to living in the attic like Bart Simpson at the end of โThe Thing and I.โ Thereโs a reason to feel at least a little resentful of Sayuri. But of course the resentment is taken way too far, and thatโs before Sayuri is stalked by a hideous silver-haired witch, too.
For all The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witchโs tantalizingly strange promise, itโs shockingly middle of the road verging on tame. Sayuri, who communicates with Yuasaโs audience through voiceover as much as through spoken dialogue, takes every revelation with surprising and frankly incongruous grace, as if itโs a rite of passage for kids to find out that their amnesiac mother has been stowing away a heretofore unknown sibling in a crawlspace. Her vivid dreams should cause her more alarm than they do, too, though being as the dream sequences comprise the best scenes in the movie, maybe we can let it go that Sayuri takes her increasingly batshit visions in stride. After all, when youโve had one dream about your new sister turning into a fanged, hideous monster, havenโt you really had them all?
In Sayuriโs dreams, chatter is kept to a minimum. Yuasa lets his imagery do the talking; Tamami shows off her fangs for the audience against transporting and funky backgrounds. Sayuri crosses swords with menacing snakes like a stalwart knight doing battle with dragons. Yuasa might be trying to lull us into a mesmeric state with the hypnotic spirals he uses in every shot for these sequences. The surreality of these beats deliver on The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witchโs promise as a horror film and a showcase for a filmmaker drawn to the production specifically by mythology and the chance to expand his talents for storytelling through special effects. Itโs the standard mystery plot and whodunit elements that clash with the movieโs aesthetic genre values.
Itโs these pieces that make The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch such an oddity rather than the demonstrably odd details. How could a movie where a character rips a toad in half with her bare hands and where the protagonist nearly meets her end in an acid bath bother being so stiflingly normal the rest of the time? Itโs a big ask for Yuasa to operate on the level of Hausu, and no one should walk into The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch expecting that (but again, no one should walk into any movie expecting Hausu). But Yuasa hits such hypnagogic peaks when Kimiyuki Hasegawaโs screenplay, based on Kazuo Umezuโs book Hebimusune to Hakuhatsuki, lets him cut loose that itโs hard not to imagine โwhat if?โ Maybe thatโs an unfair expectation, too. If Yuasa went bugnuts for the entirety of the filmโs duration, it might not be Hebimusune to Hakuhatsuki at all.
Think of The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch not as a near-miss but a near-hit. The triumph of the movieโs practical FX and the collision between its blend of family adventure and theatrical horror is impossible to look away from. Thereโs nothing like a good puppet show to help horror graduate from merely โcreepyโ to โscary,โ and these scenes are scary in the best way. Letting The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch get under your skin is a delight, just as much as considering the place the film occupies in Japanese horror traditions, as well as Yuasaโs body of work, is instructive. You can learn a lot from a movie that doesnโt quite get there. Thatโs The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch, a movie of bungled opportunity with plenty to say about the era it was made.
The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch is available on Blu-ray (for the first time ever!) December 14, 2021. Pre-order your copy now.
