POSTSCRIPT

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Or actually, an explanation of the dedication.

Most fans of outré cinema should be familiar with the film Horror of Dracula, produced in Britain by Hammer Films in 1958. Along with the previous year’s The Curse of Frankenstein, this classic helped fire a worldwide boom in horror films, and, in addition, served as the first inspiration for this humble horror novelist. I’ve seen quite a few horror and suspense movies, but no film before or since accomplished what this one did—to send me racing out of the theater in the middle of the show. Though most will find this information superfluous, Terence Fisher directed it, Jimmy Sangster wrote the script, and Bernard Robinson was the production designer. Surely the film’s stars, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, require no introduction. The whole incredible showdown between Count Dracula and Professor Van Helsing—from the fiend’s appearance in silhouette at the top of the castle’s staircase, to the finale where sunlight and the cross reduce him to dust—is something horror movie fans will be talking about until the end of time. I hope it’s made available on video as soon as possible.

At present, Kazuo Umezu could be regarded as the leading man of horror manga in Japan, but so far as I know, the only male manga artist in the past with such a distinct horror style (I don’t know about female manga artists) would be Osamu Kishimoto. But rather than aiming to produce more of the same Japanese-style horror that had preceded him, this man created a gothic mood in the Western tradition. Whether it was a weird western-style mansion standing right in the middle of the city, with coffins resting in its stone-walled basement and a horde of creepy inhabitants, or the logic of the conflict that runs through all his stories (such as the cross against vampires or the power of Buddhism against kappas), the way he succeeded in bringing his creatures to life in a field like Japanese horror manga, where they were so sorely lacking, was, in a word, refreshing.

It would be most unfair if someday someone were to write a history of horror manga in Japan and dismiss Osamu Kishimoto as merely one more author of sci-fi and adventure manga. Even now I get goose bumps as I recall the short tale about the kappa that turned itself into a beautiful woman when runoff from a factory polluted its lake, and later took up residence in a brother and sister’s house, as well as many other tales. Lately I haven’t seen much work by him, but I sincerely hope to see him in better health and producing new stories in the future.

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Hideyuki Kikuchi

December 6, 1982, watching Horror of Dracula