Coven: Throne of Blood
Monday, October 28, 2013 at 9:44PM Team Experience is assembling our own coven of preferred witches for Halloween. Here's Michael C on Kurosawa's eery old ghost woman
The Japanese title of Kurosawa’s noh-inspired adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth Throne of Blood is literally “Spider Web Castle”. So in keeping with the films pervasive arachnid imagery, Kurosawa ditches the cauldron and transforms the play’s famous trio of future predicting witches (“Double, double toil and trouble”) into a single, demonic hag, who sits out in the forest like an eerily still, deadly spider, spinning her silk and waiting for prey like Toshiro Mifune’s Macbeth equivalent, Washizu, to stumble into her web.
It’s a stretch to call her evil, seeing as she only sets the stage for her prey’s downfall. The victim still has to do all the heavy lifting. On the other hand the unexplained piles of skulls around her lair do rate a raised eyebrow!
Broom: No. The witch in question punctuates her prophecies by floating straight into the air and vanishing in a blinding white light. The broom business might qualify as overkill, don’t you think?
Favored Spell: This lovely lady’s go-to move is providing misleading, selectively edited predictions of the future. Other pastimes include cackling in your face after you’ve been foolish enough to act according to her predictions and shape shifting into ones enemies so as to goad you into make an even greater mess of things.
Chieko Naniwa in "Throne of Blood"Pointy Hat: You don’t hide witch hair of this magnitude under a hat.
Familiar: She works alone but spider imagery is pervasive.
"Only bad witches are ugly": How to be diplomatic about this. On a scale from Glinda to Elphaba she’s definitely not going to travel by bubble, if you catch my drift. That said, if you can get over her creepy, disconcertingly masculine voice she does lack all the traditional ugly witch traits like warts and a long pointy nose, so she might have a shot with guys who find themselves strangely attracted to the ghost from The Grudge.
Reader Comments (6)
I've never seen thsi one but i love when Kurosawa goes mystical and creepy. so i obviously should
My favorite Shakespearean film, bar none.
My favorite Shakespeare on film, bar none.
I
LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE
this movie.
I think it's his best movie. The best Shakespeare adaptation ever (give or take Welles' Othello). And the his most beatiful black and white movie. Oh boy, the cinematography! Clearly Hit me if your best shot material, and I know by heart the one I'd pick.
And THAT Lady MacBeth! She's Isuzu Yamada, who managed to be in two of the best movies ever in the same year, this one and Yasujiro Ozu's ultra-bleak Tokyo Twilight in a very unlikable role, too.
My favorite Kurosawa as well. And yes, oh lord, that witch is deliciously creepy.
Yes, this is one of my favorite depictions of the witches from Macbeth. This, and the hippies from Scotland, PA. No joke. Oh I also like the garbage men in Shakespeare: Retold.
I guess I tend to find them more effective when they're reinterpreted somehow, and aren't using the original language. The 3 literal witches plus all that 'double double toil and trouble' crap tends to come off more cheesy than anything, but all 3 of these versions in my opinion are genuinely spooky and mysterious.