Ikeuchi Junko, who rose to stardom at Shintoho for her pure, fresh-scrubbed image, was cast in Namiki Kyotaro’s horror pic Vampire Bride (Hanayome Kyuketsuma, 1960) as a sort of punishment by studio boss Okura Mitsugu. She had married against his wishes - and had to suffer the consequences when the marriage failed and she returned to Shintoho.
Ikeuchi plays Fujiko, a student at a buyo (Japanese dance) school who is friends with four other girls: Eiko (Seto Reiko), Kiyoko (Amakusa Hiroko), Rie (Mita Yasuko) and Sanae (Yashiro Kyoko).
Eiko, however, becomes jealous when Ota (Takamiya Keiji), a newspaper reporter she likes, transfers his affections to Fujiko. Rie, who is crazy about Ota’s colleague Mitsutake (Terashima Tatsuo) starts to hate Fujiko when Mitsutake falls for her too. Then, when Fujiko is cast in a movie, beating out Kiyoko, guess who else is unhappy.
Her three rivals conspire to push the unsuspecting Fujiko off a cliff - but she miraculously survives, if with a horrific facial scar. Her dreams of stardom shattered, Fujiko is given a further shock when her mother commits suicide. Desperate for relief from the pain of her life, she visits a sorceress (Satsuki Fujie) in the mountains. After undergoing a ritual that results in her temporary death, Fujiko returns to life as a fanged, hairy monster.
Not long after, Kiyoko, now a film star, and Eiko, now a model, encounter a girl, Sayoko, who is the spitting image of the presumed-dead Fujiko. Sayoko, it soon becomes apparent, is not a double, but the original in a new guise.
But as much as Sayoko wants to live a normal, peaceful life, she cannot control the monster within her, who wants payback against her tormentors.
The transformations from woman to monster are hardly high-tech, accomplished as they are through repeated fade-outs and fade-ins, with Sayoko growing more fur each time. More interesting is Ikeuchi’s psychological transition from gentle-spirited woman to implacable monster. At first she reacts with horror and disgust to the changes in her body - but once transformed she revels in her new power.
Ikeuchi disliked the role, but it stretched her beyond the formulaic nice-girl characters that had first made her a star and remains among her most memorable.
Mark Schilling