Edogawa Rampo is in many ways, Japan's answer to Dashiell Hammett, or Raymond Chandler. But that description is also inaccurate, because while Rampo spent most of his life writing detective mysteries, his stories also contain elements of fantasy, horror, and erotica. Sadly, most of his work has not been translated into English. However, dozens of his stories have been made into films over the years, including Horrors of Malformed Men, Watcher in the Attic, and Black Lizard. My introduction to the bizarre world of Rampo, was Tai Kato's Beast in the Shadows, which is widely considered to be one of the best adaptations. When a popular mystery novelist meets the beautiful wife of a rich industrialist, he is drawn into a tangled web of intrigue of sadistic passions and murderous intrigue. The woman, Shizuko, has been receiving threatening letters from an old boyfriend, promising to take his revenge on her for dumping him some years ago. This writer also happens to be the protagonist's rival, and object of his frequent ridicule for writing lurid and sexually-charged stories. Taking a cue from giallo, Kato brings the story to life in bold, lush colors that pop off the screen, and frequent use of low-angle shots create a world of dread and arousal. Some of the sequences in this one are the sexiest I have seen on screen in a while, but it is that elegant sexy, the kind hidden beneath reserved and polite manners. Beast in the Shadows combines the suspense of Hitchcock and the fatalism of Lang to a startling effect; despite being based on a literary work, Kato's direction of this tale is something that only the cinema can provide. He takes the voyeuristic nature of the cinema to an extreme here, the audience is a peeping tom, seeing things no one should be seeing, always eavesdropping, lurking were they should not be lurking. Beware.
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