Jigoku

• Jigoku was the last film Shintoho ever released. Studio boss Mitsugu Okura, a former sideshow showman who pushed the company into cheap, lurid sensation pictures aimed at young men, ran it into the ground; Shintoho went bankrupt in 1961, making this gore landmark a dying studio's final gamble.
• It was the capstone of an eight-horror-film run that director Nobuo Nakagawa made for Shintoho. Nakagawa is widely credited as the father of Japanese horror cinema, with earlier classics like The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959) and Black Cat Mansion (1958) to his name.
• The notorious final 40 minutes stage the Buddhist Eight Hells on a shoestring using stagecraft tricks: green greasepaint and tinting over the whole underworld, practical smoke, in-camera dissolves, double exposures, distorted lenses, mirrored floors and rotating sets to fake an infinite inferno, most of it accomplished with lighting on a shadowed soundstage.
• The dismemberment, flaying, sawing and skin-peeling predate Western splatter by years; the hell sequence's graphic torture is far gorier and more colorful than anything in Psycho, which hit the same year (1960).
• Criterion rescued the film from decades of obscurity with its 2006 DVD (spine #352), which included the 40-minute documentary Building the Inferno featuring screenwriter Ichiro Miyagawa, actor Yoichi Numata, and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
• The ending turns on the Buddhist Wheel of Life: in Limbo, Shiro learns his dead fiancee Yukiko was pregnant with a daughter, Harumi, and makes a desperate leap to save the spinning soul of the child he never knew existed.

Tamura isn't a person at all. He's Shiro's damnation given a face. He appears at every fatal hinge, never bleeds like the others, and his identity stays deliberately unresolved. Read him as a Poe-style 'William Wilson' double or the literal devil; either way every death he triggers is just Shiro condemning himself on the installment plan.

The earthly first two-thirds and the hell finale aren't two stories but one continuous descent. Every character is already morally dead before the car ever swerves, so when the cascade of accidents kills them all off, it just makes literal what was spiritually true the whole time. Hell isn't a destination they're sent to. It's where they always were.

The lotus-petal finale is a salvation that may not be real. Shiro leaps for his daughter and is shown failing to reach her, yet Yukiko and Sachiko appear smiling under falling petals. The film leaves it open whether he saved her or whether the vision of purity is just one last torment dangled in front of a man who will keep reaching forever.

A theology student named Shiro lets his sneering shadow-self Tamura talk him into fleeing a drunk-driving kill, and from that single dodge the bodies pile up: fiancee, parents, in-laws, gangsters, the whole rotten cast wiped out in a chain of guilt. Then Nakagawa drops the floor out. The final third abandons earthly melodrama entirely and marches every sinner straight into the Eight Hells, where wardens saw, flay, boil and dismember the damned in glorious color while Shiro chases a soul he never knew was his.