Hideo Kojima, the highly-revered figurehead for Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, got a turn in Criterion’s famous closet and picked some classic Japanese cinema.
Kojima explained that there are not a lot of physical copies of films from the 50s and 60s in Japan, so he took the opportunity to highlight some choice examples in the closet.
Among the nine picks, four were horror films, and Kojima’s love of them mainly stems from how they impacted him in his youth (which has been the start for many a horror fan).
You can find his picks on the Criterion site.
Solid Picks
For the horror picks we had Kwaidan. Masaki Kobayashi’s venture into horror is regarded as one of the greatest horror movies ever—a rapturously stylized quartet of ghost stories. Featuring colorfully surreal sets and luminous cinematography, these haunting tales of demonic comeuppance and spiritual trials, adapted from writer Lafcadio Hearn’s collections of Japanese folklore, are existentially frightening and meticulously crafted.
Onibaba was another horror pick. Kojima tells us it’s the film he and Guillermo Del Toro discussed when they met. Both love it, and one of Pacific Rim’s monsters is named after the film.
Deep in the windswept marshes of war-torn medieval Japan, an impoverished older woman and her daughter-in-law murder lost samurai and sell their belongings for the most meager of sustenance. When a bedraggled neighbor returns from battle, lust, jealousy, and rage threaten to destroy the trio’s tenuous existence, before an ominous, ill-gotten demon mask seals their horrifying fate.
Ugetsu by Kurosawa’s idol Kenji Mizoguchi is a ghost story that Kojima admits scared him as a child. Moving between the terrestrial and the otherworldly, Ugetsu reveals essential truths about the ravages of war, the plight of women, and the pride of men
Then we have Jigoku. When a young theology student flees a hit-and-run accident, he is plagued by both his own guilt-ridden conscience and a mysterious, diabolical doppelgänger. But all possible escape routes lead straight to hell—literally
Also among Kojima’s picks were Masaki Kobayashi’s highly-revered Hara-Kiri, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s surreal and erotic Woman in the Dunes, Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring and Tokyo Twilight, and Akira Kurosawa‘s police procedural High & Low.
Hideo Kojima is currently working on Death Stranding 2, and helping out on the movie version as well.
