Vamp or Not? Aragami

Aradami was brought to my attention By Leila, wanting my view as to whether the film fit into the vampire genre – she had erred to ‘no’. It is a 2003 film by Ryûhei Kitamura, who is known to TMtV for the Spear of Longinus but, to me, his film Versus was a benchmark production.

This film was part of the Duel Project Kitamura and fellow director Yukihiko Tsutsumi had both finished their contributions to an anthology film and so they were challenged to create feature length films, featuring two actors, one setting and a battle. Tsutsumi’s film was 2LDK, Kitamura this (though there are, in total, 5 actors, the majority of the film concentrates on the two primaries). This is also known as Aragami: The Raging God of Battle.

arrival

It begins with knocking on a door. A woman (Kanae Uotani) walks to it and opens the door. Framed in the doorway are two samurai, one (Takao Osawa) carrying his friend (Hideo Sakaki) who is gravely injured. She steps back and allows them to enter the temple. Over the threshold the samurai drops his friend and we see that he is gravely injured also. He passes out.

Kanae Uotani as the woman

The samurai awakens, he is cleaned up and in clean robes. He looks around the temple and a man (Masaya Katô) addresses him, offering food. The samurai tries the food, it is good, he then wolfs it down. he asks about his friend and the man admits that the wounds suffered were too deep and he has not survived. The temple, he admits, was derelict when he came to it and he lives there as he is not sociable and the mountain location means few visitors.

wine

He convinces the samurai to stay and have a drink (French wine and crystal cut glasses are produced, a boon from the man’s wandering). He then tells him the legend of the ‘long nosed goblin’ or tengu, a supernatural creature that haunts the mountains and smells the blood of men and eats of their flesh. He says the tengu is really called Aragami. When asked if he is not afraid of the temple being attacked he confesses not – he is Aragami and he wants the samurai to kill him as he has lived too long (he later suggests that he was also the famous samurai Miyamoto Musashi).

fighting

Not believing him, and not wanting to fight the man who saved him, the samurai refuses. Aragami starts to tell him of a mad Lord who would kidnap babies to use for immortality and, whilst the lord was mad, it is true that there is power in human flesh – the liver especially potent. He essentially tells the samurai that he ate his friend. They fight and the samurai is run through with a sword, but Aragami says it is a scratch and he sees the wound has healed. It must be take the head or pierce the heart.

Masaya Katô as Aragami

It is suggested that the samurai, like Aragami, was born human but is not. It is also suggested that not all flesh will prolong life and aid rapid healing – it depends on the chef. Now I was reminded of the eating of flesh in Ravenous but the specific persons needing the right sort of cook made more sense than the carpet cannibalism of the earlier film. So, Vamp? What we have is longevity and healing (and not aging) through the consumption of human flesh and a need for beheading or piercing the heart to kill and, thus, we do have the use of tropes. But what of the tengu itself?

the woman is something other also

The tengu is sometimes deemed a form of yōkai (some of which may be vampiric) or a kami (Shinto gods) and the two primary depictions are of bird like (often crow) creatures or the long nosed humanoid variant who wear clothes similar to the yamabushi. Bane lists the karasu (crow) tengu as a vampire type, suggesting that the crow and yamabushi varients eventually became one and the same. Ashley in the Complete Book of Vampires includes tengu in the vampires from around the world section of his book.

There are certainly, as pointed out, tropes used. However, the inclusion in Bane and Ashley does not necessarily make something reproduced in film vampiric. In this case Aragami was born human (but somehow different) and waged bloody war until something triggered him to become an immortal creature who will never age. He can smell blood and distinguish between human and beast blood. Due to this I am airing towards vampiric, if not a vampire, and certainly of genre interest. However, beyond anything else, it is a great film.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK