Written by Kikuma Shimoiizaka and Kyūzō Kobayashi
Directed by Hiroshi Matsuno
Starring Kikko Matsuoka, Yasunori Irikawa and Masumi Okada
Japan, 1968
THE LIVING SKELETON is a Japanese horror movie that begins with a gang of criminals hijacking a ship, murdering everyone aboard and making off with a fortune in gold. Three years later, a young woman (Kikko Matsuoka), whose twin sister was among the victims, begins experiencing strange visions involving a ghost ship and its murdered passengers. Naturally, she decides to investigate.
The movie was directed by Hiroshi Matsuno and photographed in beautiful black and white, with some particularly striking images of the ghost ship emerging from the fog. There's also a lot of eerie imagery involving skeletons, underwater corpses and a bunch of bats that seem to have wandered in from a different kind of horror movie. It's an atmospheric picture, and the widescreen cinematography makes it look more expensive than it probably was.
At first, THE LIVING SKELETON seems like a fairly straightforward supernatural revenge story. The dead are apparently returning to punish the people responsible for murdering them, and our heroine finds herself caught up in the proceedings. But as the movie goes along, things get more complicated, and it becomes increasingly difficult to tell exactly what's supernatural and what isn't.
There's a twist involving the twin sisters that I won't give away, but by the end I wasn't entirely sure whether I'd just watched a ghost story. Or at least what kind of ghost story it was. The movie even throws in some mad-scientist business toward the end, because why not?
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