Regular horror films immerse us in exaggerated violence and terrifying supernatural encounters that actually protect us from the real world. But some films take us deeper into a too real and frightening world. Expect some spoilers as we consider one of the most shocking movies we've ever seen. Yoshitarō Nomura presents a film so true to life, with possibilities so frightening to consider, that it challenges our ideas of what can be shown on the screen.
Yoshitarō Nomura’s The Demon (1978) is one of the most harrowing films we’ve seen. A mother, unable to care for her three children, leaves them with their father and his wife, printers living in Tokyo. The wife resents their presence and treats them with escalating cruelty. The father, too weak to intervene, allows the situation to spiral. One child dies under suspicious circumstances, another is abandoned in the city, and the eldest is nearly murdered before fate intervenes. At the film’s climax, the father, arrested, broken by guilt, is denied by his own son, leaving us to wonder whether the boy refuses to acknowledge him in order to protect him or whether he has finally come around to question that this man can in fact be his father, as so many have questioned if he truly is the man’s son.
Many horror films focus on external threats. Monsters, killers, supernatural forces abound in all shapes and guises. The classic horror films are like rollercoaster rides where we enjoy creeping up to the very precipice of danger, gazing over the edge into the void, and then falling back in a giggling heap. Fear and ecstasy are so closely intertwined in the experience. The stuff of horror, the slashed flesh, the gruesome deaths, the gurning faces and screaming victims, when you’ve seen enough of it, it becomes a spectacle, a grand carnival of violence so gratuitous that, especially when you’ve seen behind the curtain at how these effects are pulled off on movie sets, you can’t help laughing.
But a movie like The Demon makes a statement about a horror which is much closer to an unspeakable realm. It is the horror of a banal home. It is the horror of neglect, of failure, and of a moral cowardice. The crimes in The Demon are so terrifying to contemplate not because we could imagine ourselves the victims of this kind of abuse, but that the film forces us to imagine how easily we could perpetrate it
The character of a cruel stepparent, in this case a stepmother, is a figure that has long been a symbol of domestic cruelty. The archetype is seen in fables and fairy tales across the world. It seems a convenient stand-in for stories that deal with cruelty against children, since it is so abhorrent to us to think of parents bound by blood treating their children with the kind of abject cruelty this stepmother displays.
And yet it’s the hopeless cowardice and growing malice of the father, who never once denies a natural connection to the children he takes into his care, that forms the shocking core of this story. The stepmother acts unreasonably against the children and is guilty of gross acts against them, culminating in the death of the youngest which might generously be interpreted as neglectful, although the truth hinted at is more sinister. The father’s failure to act is more terrifying than outright malice. He does nothing as his wife mistreats the children, even when others urge him to intervene. After his youngest child’s death, he doesn’t resist the idea of getting rid of the others. The wife’s cruelty is appalling, but his passivity is what lingers.
The father never once steps in to their defence, although he’s given every opportunity to do so. From the point of view of writing and directing, there are some scenes which are so perfectly crafted to maximise audience engagement with the situation. In the background, we hear the stepmother physically abusing the children, while the father lurks by his printing press or else gazes on, caught on the threshold between one room and another, face etched in an agonising mask of paralysis, too weak to stand up for what he knows is right.
Even his employee rescues a child during one assault, while the father watches on, appalled but passive, thrusting the child into the father’s arms and scolding him for not involving himself. For not saving them. But the father has no intention of saving them, as we see from the film’s development. His mind becomes fixed on something far worse. He doesn’t overtly deny the children as his own but the inconvenience of their arrival soon metastasises into an overbearing responsibility. His detachment allows their suffering to continue. His imagination allows him to commit evil.
Finding films like The Demon is rare because such brutality, such honesty pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable much further than the now fully accepted renditions of sex and violence we see on our screens every day. The repetition of choreographed violence and scenes have intercourse have transformed those acts into something pornographic. They’ve become genres in themselves, with their own patterns, plot lines, recognisable beats. But nothing in our culture prepares us for the abuse of children on screen. It is harder to watch than extreme acts of violence because we feel instinctively that it is much more common. We just hope it won’t happen to us and those we love. When it’s happening to other people, we’re quite happy to ignore it.
Nomura presents his tragedy with an unflinching realism. The scenes of abuse are difficult to watch, not because they are exaggerated, but because they feel painfully possible. The most distressing moments come from the quiet calculations of how to rid himself of his children.
The latter half of The Demon follows a more conventional narrative arc, with suspense, confrontation, resolution. Yet, it’s the earlier, quieter moments that leave the strongest impact. The portrayal of passive cruelty is more affecting than any heightened dramatic turn. The film shifts into melodrama when he finally attempts murder and thus loses its power because these final scenes have something too formulaically dramatic or literary about them, but still, by that point, the damage is already done. The horror isn’t in the attempted murder itself, but in the path that led him there.
Regular horror films immerse us in exaggerated violence and terrifying supernatural encounters that actually protect us from the real world. Their aesthetic is too surreal to fear. The extremity of these situations creates a kind of detachment. What we witness is so shocking that it must be fiction. Characters fight for survival and we experience a thrill in imagining ourselves in their place, either as the victim or the hero. The clear delineation between good and evil allows us to take comfort in the knowledge that these horrors are external, something separate from ourselves.
The Demon offers no such comfort. Its horror is not in what is done, but in what is allowed to happen. We do not simply fear the suffering of the children. We fear our own complicity. The father is not an extraordinary monster. He is a far too ordinary and commonplace coward, someone who lets fear and inertia dictate his choices. That is what unsettled us most watching this film: the realisation that we, too, are capable of such passivity. That we, too, might fail when it matters most.
05.02.25
Yes, this! I'm trying to produce a work that seeks to look at the behaviours buried in the personal unconscious that if left un-integrated play out as negative behaviour in the conscious world. The work is then intended to be presented in such a way that the archetypal energies of the collective unconscious confront the viewer and ask them to ask these questions of themselves. I will find this film and watch it as part of the research.