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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

This is Rob Lamb.

And this is Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be talking about the 1979 Japanese fantasy drama, Demon Pond, directed by Masahiro Shinoda, with music by Issa Otomida.

Yeah, this is a film that had been on my radar for quite a bit. And I was eager to cover it when you brought it up because in my memory, I had watched a good chunk of this film on a flight maybe a year or so ago. Turns out, I realized this once I started rewatching it. Oh, I actually watched the whole thing on the flight. But it might have been a red eye. I don't remember. But, you know, it was one of these flights where I'm coming in and out and watching the film, you know, either there's some sort of distraction or I'm falling to sleep. And this is not a dig on this movie at all, but this is a very, very easy film to fall asleep, too. It's a film that invites transference into the dream realm because it has such an elegant soundtrack that's very

soothing in many of its stretches. It also has this dreamlike visual vibe. Everything feels like,

the world feels like it is in a constant state of twilight or gloaming.

So it is a sleepy film in all the best ways. It's a film that convinces you that you may already be

dreaming. Yeah. So it's a little bit easier to slip into the actual state. We were talking just before we started about, I, for a moment, was trying to make the case that, you know, it's got to be easier to fall asleep during the first half of the movie before all the goblins show up and things get really crazy, you know, when it brings in all of the fantasy kabuki elements.

But not really. Even once all of the wildness starts, I think it's in all of the fantasy kabuki elements. But not really.

Even once all of the wildness starts, I think it still kind of wants to pull you into dream world.

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Now, you mentioned already that you could classify this as fantasy romance.

I've also seen discussions of it as a work of folk horror.

But I think at the end of the day,

this is one of those films, it's just so much more than any classification. We could just,

you know, bust out and throw at it. Much has been written about exactly what demon pun is and where it stands in the history of Japanese cinema.

But I guess in broad strokes, it's essentially a film adaptation of a very, this was a, what, a 78 film, no, 79 film.

It's a 79 adaptation of a 78 staging of a 1913 Kabuki play.

Yeah, which is interesting because this is also considered part of the, I guess it would be coming at the tail end of this, but part of the Japanese new wave cinema movement.

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