It’s the Autumn season and I’m back to discuss a new slew of films for the Halloween season. If you’ve been following me for a good while, I create a collection of the preceding decades’ best horror films and the ones you’ve never seen before. Cliché to state that it’s something that’s cool for me seeing how the genre started to where it is now. With a spider’s web of sub-genre’s, proto-genre’s and unorthodox approach to tell a scary story. I always get a kick of what was thrilling of how the modes of scaring changed as time goes on. Of all places, this film in particular is set in Japan in the 1920s and I got a kick out of it.
1. Asylum
As I was searching for films to talk about for the whole month, I’ve still decided to go way back nearly 100 years ago. I wanted to at least branch away from the American and European silent cinema to go look at something completely different. I think what got me piqued was the poster for the film. While it wasn’t the one used when it came out, but after the fact nearly 70 years later. It catches your eyes since it’s a Japanese mask of a face that is in despair with the mouth that’s smiling in a Joker-esque style.
I really had no idea what to expect from this one. Watching the cut that was available to stream, it was apparent that there was no intertitles of dialogue. More so that it’s a very kind of experimental silent horror film. In a sense where there’s no looming threat or malevolent force of darkness, but just one man attempting to free his wife from a mental institution. And how the whole ordeal has driven him mad.
And that’s really what the whole film is about. We follow a custodian for the institution who sees his wife in one of the cells. He attempts to break her out but the doctor and patients stall him. To say that this film is very straightforward is only partially right. We see everything play out, albeit in only 1920s cinema can offer. It has some trippy imagery and I think without any sound and the black and white footage makes it feel very grounded.
Let’s talk about the custodian since he’s our main guy in the film. We see him doing his duty as he cleans the hallway and pass by the different cells. He’s like our audience representative since what he sees is what we see. One patient in particular is a dancer. Her character is interesting since we see her dance, to the point where she drops down in exhaustion. There’s a lot of mystery with the patients and how exactly they got in there.
With our guy, there’s a sense of guilt and redemption for him to try to rescue his wife. With the cut that I’ve watched online, there seemed to be no reason as to how she ended up there. More so that it’s a quest for him to do it and potentially have a normal life. Of course with a movie that’s mostly experimental with how it told a narrative with no audible or visual dialogue, it doesn’t end like that. It gets to a point where he becomes obsessive with how to pull off the maneuver to the point of murdering a doctor.
This is where the horror element comes in. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no external threat or a personification of doom per say but maybe horror’s underutilized mode of scares. The human mind is a powerful thing, and with how we see the representation of insanity is creative for the time. One of my favorite shots in the film is mostly a perspective shot where we see what the patient sees. A distorted shot of the person’s face that basically tells us that point of view of the person isn’t very normal. Very blatant on how I phrase it but that’s an interesting idea that the film has.
Near the end is when it really amps up where the custodian’s mind and vision blurs the line between reality and fantasy. For example, in one of his visions he passes out masks to the inmates as he wears one for himself. It’s very freaky and of course the whole aesthetic with the context makes it even more creepy. In one way, the scenes involving his hallucinations perhaps mean something more than just his wife and personal life. Prior to that, he dreams of a parade of traditional customs and then we get a series of shots of modernity and maybe that’s what scares him.
2. Damaged Silent Film
As I researched the film on what made it different from it’s foreign contemporaries, it was interesting just how different Japanese silent cinema was to the American style. For ours, the basic idea of the silent film was that the actor’s had to use their body language to convey the feelings of the characters. There was no audio, so the audience at the time had to pay attention to what the actor’s were feeling with what was going on. There was even a live orchestra that would enhance the mood for the film to get the audience enraptured dramatically speaking.
With A Page of Madness, just watching it or it’s surviving cuts is almost like you’re getting just half the show. Little did I know was that the reason as to why it had the trippy imagery and no dialogue cards was that there were stage actors that would mirror the actions that was being shown. Also, a narrator would tell the audience what was happening and what the characters were doing. Basically, giving commentary to the audience who couldn’t follow the action on screen. Unfortunately, we don’t have that luxury so sometimes the film can be confusing when viewing it.
It's really something to commend given that the technology just wasn’t there at the time that made the audience pay attention to what was happening audibly. Like most films from the past, it was deemed lost for awhile. Some lost films are even deemed destroyed due to the flammable material that the reels used. Probably in an act of happenstance where the director found a surviving reel inside a rice barrel. Albeit the film is lacking a section for the third act making what I saw and anyone wanting to see it one of the surviving print.
3. Overall
While mostly a footnote in terms of horror, A Page of Madness is one of the most interesting Japanese horror films
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