A Film Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa
I was looking for something to watch before bed one night this week and stumbled upon a relatively short film on Tubi that caught my eye with its striking poster image. It was just over an hour long, billed as a landmark Japanese horror film, and the real kicker – it was from 1926. I’ve seen a fair number of classic silent films, but the oldest Japanese film I’d ever watched was probably an early Kurosawa, so trying something this far outside my usual wheelhouse was immediately intriguing. The film was Akuma no Pēji (A Page of Madness), a piece that has an almost equally fascinating production and recovery story as the story in the film itself.
“A man becomes a janitor at a mental asylum to be near his wife, but his own mental state deteriorates as the line between his reality and the patients’ madness blurs, leading to surreal and disturbing hallucinations.”
The movie was a collaboration between director Teinosuke Kinugasa and members of the Shinkankakuha (“New Perceptions”) literary movement, resulting in a work that embraces subjective experience over straightforward narrative. It premiered in 1926 to some success, but like so many silent films, it was neglected in the decades that followed (and a little thing we call World War II). The film was based on a story by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata. Kawabata was the first Japanese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1968.
The Library of Congress has estimated that 70–75% of American silent films are lost, while The Film Foundation puts the global number closer to 90%. Flammable film stock, fires, poor storage, and a lack of foresight doomed much of early cinema. In the case of this film, the studio library that likely housed it, is known to have burnt down at one point. A Page of Madness survived only because Kinugasa himself discovered a reel in a barrel in his personal storage shed in the early 1970s, allowing him to begin a preservation effort.
Even with that extraordinary recovery, the film is incomplete – roughly a third is said to be missing. There’s no record of which parts are gone, and I suspect that the gaps contribute to the film’s bizarre, disjointed structure. In a way, this may even enhance the experience, reinforcing its hallucinatory qualities. Another crucial element lost to time is the benshi, live narrators who performed in Japanese theaters during the silent era. Benshi would explain the plot, portray characters, and sometimes even alter the film’s tone through their performance. With no scripts or recordings surviving, modern audiences encounter A Page of Madness stripped of that guiding voice, leaving the imagery to speak almost entirely for itself.
As a result, the film defies conventional expectations – not just of modern cinema, but even of other silent films. Characters are never clearly identified, and beyond the opening title cards, there are no intertitles to provide dialogue or explanation. Viewers must rely on mood, gesture, and fragmented imagery to interpret what’s happening.
The broad outline, pieced together from scholarship (and likely the original short story), is that a former sailor takes work as a janitor in an asylum where his wife has been committed after attempting to kill herself and their daughter. Though both survived, his wife’s mental state collapsed, and over time, his proximity to her suffering and the atmosphere of the asylum draw him into his own psychological unraveling. His daughter, ashamed and distant, struggles even to look at him, underscoring the immense strain on what remains of the family.
Set entirely within the asylum, the film uses radical editing, distorted camera angles, and surreal visual design to mirror the mental torment of its characters. Few works of the era resemble it, aside from obvious influences like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Its disorienting structure and unsettling imagery make it feel far closer to horror than melodrama. One standout sequence involves a riot in which the patients, whipped into a frenzy by an inmate perpetually dancing, fill the screen with chaotic movement – an image both frightening and mesmerizing.
Watching A Page of Madness today feels like stumbling across the cursed videotape from The Ring. It’s packed with eerie, fragmented visuals and unsettling cuts, resembling at times an avant-garde music video decades ahead of its era. The opening scenes alone would not be out of place on a big screen behind an industrial or metal band during a concert, it’s that crazy and weird. Though lost for much of its history, its rediscovery reveals a film that still feels fresh, unnerving, and startlingly modern. It’s not hard to imagine that countless filmmakers, knowingly or not, have absorbed its influence. For anyone interested in horror, experimental cinema, or the evolution of Japanese film, it remains a strange and unforgettable experience.