Onibaba is an erotic horror story. It is about an old woman and her daughter-in-law living on the fringes of life, hunting down soldiers returning from the battle or killing embittered and emaciated warriors. They stash away the belongings of those who they kill to sell it to a local merchant who gives them sake and millet in return. The old woman’s son has gone to fight in the battle but has not returned. A few days later the son’s friend returns from the battle and informs the women that the son has been killed. The younger woman who is the stronger of the two is now a prize possession for the old woman and she is near to psychotic about keeping her with her.
The soldier who has returned sets up house nearby and starts stalking the daughter-in-law. She is a little reluctant at first, but her repressed sexual energy, waiting for an outlet maddens her.
She starts leaving the hut in the middle of the night, running through the wild grass paths to meet her lover and enjoy the pleasure of fornication.
Desperate to wean her away from this new distraction, the elder woman warns her and tries to instill a sense of fear, telling stories of hell and purgatory. She even goes to the man offering sexual pleasure in lieu of her daughter-in-law.
One day the older woman meets a samurai warrior, returning from the war lost in the grass paths. But he is wearing a scary, terrifying mask. He seeks her assistance but gets killed in a freak accident. The old woman is now in possession of this scary mask and wears it to terrify the daughter-in-law by confronting her in the grass fields in the dead of the night.
One rainy day after 2/3 futile attempts to meet her lover thwarted by the scary masked, old woman, the daughter-in-law dares to remain, instead of fleeing, calls out to her lover to save her from the demon. He arrives as the demon vanishes and they make wild love in the grass.
Sensing her defeat the old woman comes home, acknowledges her treachery to the girl and asks her to remove the mosque but it would not come off. The rain has stuck the mask to her face.
The old woman pleads to be rid of it. Unable to remove it, the girl breaks the mask with a hammer. When it ultimately breaks up the old woman has turned into an ‘Onibaba’ Demon woman.
The daughter-in-law curses the mother-in-law to have deserved this fate for she had acted like a demon. The film ends on this note with the hint that the daughter-in-law and her lover are going to make out together. The demon-woman remains; her existence erased behind a battered, scaring face.
The film draws from its milieu portraying the dark, somber mood of nature all around. The raw and rugged energy gets conveyed in the characters who are bare and daring, stripped of sophistication. Want and selfishness have no excuses. The only love that binds people is the love of the flesh. In carnality, they are one.
The narrative structure as well as the dialogue adds strength to the film making it a modern classic.