Use of Tropes: Black Cat Mansion

Vampiric cats and ghost cats are a staple part of Japanese horror, reaching back to folklore and the yōkai bakeneko, or changed cat, we can also cite stories such as The Vampire Cat of Nabéshima. In cinema there are films such as Hiroku kaibyô-den and the remarkable Kuroneko.

This 1958 movie by Nobuo Nakagawa (who would go on to direct Onna kyûketsuki, released the following year) has a nested storyline with black and white scenes for the present and near past and colour for the distant past and the story would seem to take some of its story inspiration from The Vampire Cat of Nabéshima. It is told in the first place by Dr. Tetsuichiro Kuzumi (Toshio Hosokawa), who is in a darkened hospital due to a power outage. He recalls an odd tale, regarding his wife, Yoriko (Yuriko Ejima). He had moved her out of Tokyo for respite care due to her tuberculosis, into an old mansion her brother had secured for her.

strangulation

The place started being visited by an old lady, who seemed to appear and disappear and who upset their dog whenever she was present. As things go on, she attacks Yoriko twice – by strangulation. Now that doesn’t seem overly vampiric but, of course, Slavic vampires were as likely to strangle their victims as they were to suck their blood. Yoriko has dreamt of cats biting her. Tetsuichiro is taken to a temple, where a monk recalls the story of how the mansion is said to have become haunted – the scenes of this part of the film are in colour.

lapping blood

This has a story of a dishonourable Samurai named Shogen (Takashi Wada) who murders a young Samurai, Kokingo (Ryūzaburō Nakamura), after he accuses the older man of cheating at a game of Go, hides the body and tells Kokingo’s blind mother, Lady Miyaji (Fumiko Miyata), that her son has gone to the city to get further tutelage in the game. Kokingo’s spirit, however, tells her the truth and Shogen then rapes her. She curses him, through a cat, and kills herself. The cat laps her blood and is the embodiment of the curse against Shogen and his lineage. The cat takes on the form of Shogen’s mother (Fujie Satsuki), whom it has murdered and also becomes an anthropomorphic cat often.

cat ears

The cat doesn’t do much that we would class as vampiric, the blood drinking solely at the point when Lady Miyaji’s blood is licked up. However, that does mean there is some blood drinking and the story feels like The Vampire Cat of Nabéshima, in as much as the cat takes the form of a person it has killed, though in this case it is to hide and murder, rather than steal life’s blood – although it kills a maid by biting the neck. It is around these points that we get the primary trope usage and it is certainly of genre interest, along with the throttling of victims and the connection of the modern victim suffering from tuberculosis worth mentioning.

The imdb page is here.