Editorials
Home ‘Sweet Home’: The Kiyoshi Kurosawa Film that Inspired ‘Resident Evil’
Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s most recent film, Before We Vanish, was released here in the states only a few days ago and has been garnering rave reviews. Of course, a positive reception is something the 62-year-old director should be accustomed to by now. Many horror fans regard 2001’s Pulse as a bonafide J-horror classic. However, things weren’t always so rosy for the filmmaker. In fact, there’s one film on his resume that he’d prefer you forgot, and quite frankly – most have. To double down on the timely nature of this specific topic, we also recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of one of the most groundbreaking games ever, Resident Evil 2, and are still fervently speculating on its potential remake. Just what in the hell do a highly acclaimed Japanese filmmaker and a twenty-two-year-old survival horror franchise have in common? Quite a lot, it turns out.
Sweet Home – The Film
Kiyoshi Kurosawa was still an upcoming name in the film biz with only a handful of credits to his name when he penned the script for Sweet Home (AKA Sûîto Homu). It was a haunted house tale, steeped in its own creative mythology with plenty of opportunity to insert crowd-pleasing frights. It was shepherded into production by actor/director Juzo Itami who’d acted for Kurosawa several years earlier in the musical/sex/comedy The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl. Itami came on board as producer, ensuring a role for his wife, Nobuko Miyamoto. The film even scored distribution through Godzilla production house, Toho.
The plot is reminiscent of a number of spookhouse classics. There are shades of The Haunting and the more relevant for its time, Poltergeist. A film crew decides to crash an old, rickety mansion with a terrible history (always a regrettable decision). The house once belonged to Ichirō Mamiya, a famously tortured artist. Their hopes are of discovering long-lost fresco’s painted throughout the cavernous estate and recording it all for a potential documentary to boot. The cast is made up of the lovable oaf director, Kazuo, with not so hidden feelings for his lovely producer, Akiko, who helps him take care of his teenage daughter, Emi. The rest of the crew are mostly canon fodder for the evil spirits lurking within the walls. The film works exceptionally well at allowing time for the audience to bond with our core trio without ever feeling like the pace is dragging.
Once the shit does hit the fan, the story falls into your standard haunted house groove. Someone gets possessed by the long-suffering spirit of Mamiya’s wife, mournful of the son who died too young in a tragic accident, and a [literal] dark force seeks to claim the lives of those trapped inside. The story is much less important than the stylish, colorful set-pieces and effects that begin to unfurl scene after scene. Despite the goofy tone of the first half, things get decidedly grim as the film charges towards the climax.
It’s a damn-near injustice that Sweet Home has turned out to be so obscure. It’s quite the entertaining thrill-ride that would excite fans of large-scale 80’s horror. Far removed from the quiet creeping dread of Kurosawa’s later horror efforts, Sweet Home is an unabashedly fun, often comedic, effects riddled haunter. Even gorehounds can get a kick out of this one. Bodies are melted, axes are lodged into skulls, dismembered torsos manage to crawl on their own. The pièce de résistance, however, is a climactic battle with a towering animatronic-puppet demon that is truly awe-inspiring for its sheer presence on screen. This should come as no surprise, though, as effect master Dick Smith was flown to Japan to handle the brunt of the effect work.
So, why is Sweet Home so barely seen or talked about? Ultimately, it was never released outside Japan, and except for a rare AF laserdisc, the film lived and died on VHS. Even worse, producer Itami was apparently displeased with some of the creative choices Kurosawa made with the film. After the initial theatrical run, Itami shot new scenes and recut it in order to make it even more mainstream. That version is the only cut that exists today. Kurosawa’s cut never saw any type of release on home video. It reportedly still exists, locked away in a Toho vault…just waiting for someone like Scream Factory to go dig up. Just sayin’. Kurosawa has publicly disowned the film in its current state, and who knows if we’ll ever get the chance to see theatrical version again.
Sweet Home – The Video Game
Oh, yeah, this has something to do with Resident Evil too, right? Yep! Sure does. In a fairly genius marketing move, the film was released in tandem with a Famicom (the Japanese Nintendo) video game of the same name. In fact, the film and the movie were advertised together as well, which caused confusion as to exactly which came first. It seems the film was the chicken before the game’s egg…or the other way around. Whichever. Released by Capcom, the game was directed by video game designer Tokuro Fujiwara. Fujiwara was coming off the horror arcade hit Ghosts n’ Goblins and was given extreme creative freedom from Kurosawa who wasn’t concerned with him strictly adhering to the film’s plot.
Ultimately, much of Sweet Home the game remains the same in story. It’s a top-down RPG (think original Zelda) where five filmmakers get trapped in a ghost, zombie, haunted stuff mansion and have to collect items and solve puzzles to survive. What was groundbreaking about the gameplay was the necessity to play as each character in order to solve a puzzle specific to that character’s unique skill. Once someone dies in the game, they’re out for good! Every choice you made would culminate in one of several different endings. The game, much like the film, was never released on US soil. Many believed Nintendo held off on a US version due to the transitions and numerous cut-scenes that greeted the death of a character; they were far too graphic for American audiences at the time.
Despite the limited availability, Fujiwara was confident that horror would become as bankable for gaming as it was for the film industry. Years later, in 1993, a remake of Sweet Home began development at Capcom with Fujiwara acting as producer. In an interview with GlitterBerri, he stated his intention with mounting the remake:
“The basic premise was that I’d be able to do the things that I wasn’t able to include in Sweet Home. It was mainly on the graphics front that my frustration had been building up. I was also confident that horror games could become a genre in themselves.”
The game went onto be directed by Shinji Mikami. It was retitled Resident Evil and one of the longest-running, most successful horror franchises was born. The two games share a number of marked similarities from multiple playable characters, different decisions dictating various endings, limited inventory management, and the use of haunting notes to drive the narrative forward. Without Sweet Home, there would be no Resident Evil.
To this day, there is still no American release of the film, and until some wonderful Blu-ray company gets their mitts on it, we thankfully at least have janky VHS rips floating around the YouTubes. As far as the game goes, indie developer Gaijan created an English mod that anyone can play if they so choose.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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