This is a kamishibai film, which is similar to the paper theater in Japanese street theater. The kamishibaiya or narrator uses a set of illustrated cards to tell the story. This form of theater is where Ōgon Bat started.

In this short film, instead of a stage that was used to shift the cards, camera moves do pans across the artwork and there is sound design.

Written, produced, painted and narrated by Naoyuki Niiya, this is an examination of the murders of women near Hitokui-Yama, which is the Man-Eater Mountain. A police officer investigating these crimes, Haido, meets and falls in love with a young girl outside the village named Haruko. Yet with a mountain named in this way, you know that things will not be good. “Made to swallow slugs and worms, a yam shoved in my ass,” go just some of the lyrics to the song that is sung in this — an old traditional song from the village! — and once you hear a woman sing that, I mean, you have to realize that you’re probably going to be murdered. I don’t know, I’m not a character in a Japanese folk horror and perhaps I can see things with a bit more perspective.

Spoilers from here on in, but if you walk into a cave that’s shaped like a woman’s anatomy and hear demons laughing the entire way up a mountain, do not be startled when you walk right into a demonic orgy and you get turned out on top of a mountain of skulls by a giant bear while zombies eat feces all around you and get drunk on fermented blood.

Man-Eater Mountain is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2.

You can order this set from Severin.