Movie of the month: Jigoku (dir. Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960)

Image source: Criterion Collection Jigoku (translated as Hell) initially seems to share a kinship with PSA films like Reefer Madness. A timid theology student named Shiro (Shigeru Amachi) is accidentally party to a hit and run when his disreputable friend Tamura (Yoichi Numata) accidentally runs over a low-level gangster, Kyoichi (Hiroshi Izumida). As if the guilt weren’t bad enough, Shiro’s entire world begins to unravel as everyone around him starts to die in increasingly bizarre fashion. His pregnant girlfriend Yukiko also dies in a car wreck. Yukiko’s go mad with grief and kill themselves. Kyoichi’s vengeful moll (Akiko Ono) goes after Shiro, only to die as the result of a freak accident. The entire old folks’ home where Shiro’s mother is housed dies of food poisoning. Shiro’s own demise is quite impressive– he chokes someone else to death while Kyoichi’s enraged mother chokes him, resulting in a homicide conga line. So basically, we have a bunch of characters behaving badly then…