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Live-Action The Snake Girl Film Blu-ray Will Be Released on September 20
posted on by Andrew Osmond
On September 20, Arrow Films will release the 1968 live-action Japanese film The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (Hebimusume to Hakuhatsuma) on Blu-ray. Directed by Noriaki Yuasa, the film is an adaption of the 1965 manga Reptilia by Kazuo Umezu, who would go on to write The Drifting Classroom. Umezu has a cameo role in the film.
The film is also available on Arrow's VOD service. Arrow will also release the film on North American Blu-ray on September 21.
The director Noriaki Yuasa also directed the first appearance of the giant turtle Gamera, Gamera the Giant Monster in 1965, and went on to direct six further Gamera films.
An English-translated edition of the Reptilia manga was published in 2007 by IDW Publishing, but is now out of print.
Arrow Films describes The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch in its listing for the title:
"What do you get when Noriaki Yuasa, director of Daiei Studios' much-beloved Gamera series, makes a monochrome film adaptation of the works of horror manga pioneer Kazuo Umezu (The Drifting Classroom)? The answer is 1968's The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch, a fantastically phantasmagorical slice of twisted tokusatsu terror ostensibly made for children that will irreparably traumatise any child that sees it.
"A young girl named Sayuri is reunited with her estranged family after years in an orphanage – but trouble lurks within the walls of the large family home. Her mother is an amnesiac after a car accident six months earlier, her sullen sister is confined to the attic and a young housemaid dies inexplicably of a heart attack just before Sayuri arrives… is it all connected to her father's work studying venomous snakes? And is the fanged, serpentine figure that haunts Sayuri's dreams the same one spying on her through holes in the wall?
"Making its worldwide Blu-ray debut and its home video premiere outside Japan, this rarely-screened, nightmarishly disorienting creepshow not only displays a seldom-seen side of kaiju auteur Yuasa, but its skilful blending of Umezu's comics (published in English-language markets as Reptilia) arguably anticipates many of the trends seen in J-horror decades later."
The Blu-ray edition will contain a commentary by film historian David Kalat, and an interview with manga and folklore scholar Zack Davisson. The first pressing of the Blu-ray will also include an illustrated collectors booklet featuring writing by Raffael Coronelli.
Grateful thanks to Jordan Scott for the heads-up.
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