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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DOGRA MAGRA (1988)

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ドグラ・マグラ

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DIRECTED BY: Toshio Matsumoto

FEATURING: Yôji Matsuda, Shijaku Katsura, , Eri Misawa

PLOT: Waking in a sparse cell, a young man tries to piece together the reason for his confinement, assisted—and thwarted—by adversarial psychologists.

Still from Dogra Magra (1988)

 

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: From the get-go, the viewer is in for disorientation and dismay, spiked with foetal philosophizing and sinister slides.

COMMENTS: Conspiracy, by its nature, is insidious—lurking in the background until the moment of impact. Consider the conspiracies of history: events from over a millennia ago, aging and festering, awaiting their catalyst. The conspiracies of society can blossom into a nefarious constellation of constraints and crucibles. And perhaps most perfidious of all, there is the conspiracy of the mind, wherein the dark elements of the subconscious band together to wreak havoc on waking life.

So imagine all these conspiracies themselves colluding, and you can glimpse the terrible fate of Ichirô Kure (Yôji Matsuda). He awakens to a blurry yellow light, rising from the floor in troubled wonder, unable to remember his name, his past, or even his face. Enter an older gentleman, going by the name Professor Wakabayashi, who shares with the young man a tale set 1100 years prior. This dark narrative of a mad artist who wishes to capture decomposition, a fixation beginning with the corpse of his murdered bride, is related by one Professor Masaki, hissing out from a phonographic record from beyond the grave.

Or is Masaki actually dead? Director Toshio Matsumoto depicts his protagonist’s madness with seamless aplomb, but that by no means makes things any clearer. Poisoned flashbacks shudder coherency, as do imagined encounters that appear all too real. Kure is a brilliant student, or was, who had begun groundbreaking research of the mind—we observe him lecturing to a gallery peopled by asylum inmates, with none other than Professor Masaki joining the growing chaos chanting an “Ahodara Sutra” (or “Fool’s Prayer”) as he traipses merrily through the classroom. Or maybe Kure is just lecturing to himself in his cell. As with the cryptic prenatal visions, little is clear aside from these facts: Kure’s mother was killed; Kure’s fiancée was killed; and the two professors observing the fellow gravely overstepped their ethical bounds.

Intriguingly for a film engrossed by narrative slight-of-hand and the malleability of memory, the truth can be found in the film within-the-film. Professor Masaki records the wards of his care, all undergoing a “freedom” regiment akin to the inmates chronicled in Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” A chance encounter with a janitor leads to a projector in an abandoned storage room, its information triggering a cyclonic hallucination. The elements swirl and bombard the pitiable Ichirô Kure, as the three agents of conspiracy crash down together on his consciousness.

He awakens to a blurry yellow light.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[A] puzzling work that blends reality with fantasy. I expected a horror movie of sorts. While that classification does kind of work, labelling it as such doesn’t do the film any favors. This is one of those movies that defies genre classification.” — Bret Oswald, Irish Film Critic

Dogra Magra

Dogra Magra

  • A man wakes in an asylum with no memory. Dr Wakabayashi helps him to recall his past in which he killed his bride on their wedding day

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS, RALLY IN THE STREETS (1971)

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Sho O Suteyo, Machi E Deyou

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DIRECTED BY: Shuji Terayama

FEATURING: Hideaki Sasaki, Masaharu Saito, Yukiko Kobayashi, Fudeko Tanaka

PLOT: An angry, aimless young man drifts along in search of purpose, despairing at society’s shallowness and cruelty.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Terayama’s filmed essay defies traditional elements such as narrative or a consistent point of view. It is, instead, a howl of righteous anger using a cinematic techniques to depict a society in chaos and an individual’s profound isolation.

Still from Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)

COMMENTS: A legend that has arisen over the years about philosopher Henry David Thoreau focuses on a single night in 1846 when he was arrested and jailed for failing to pay taxes, a stance he took to protest government policy on slavery and the Mexican-American War. In the story, his friend, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, discovered that he had been imprisoned and rushed to visit him. As dramatized by playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, a despairing Emerson asks, “Henry, what are you doing in jail?” Thoreau, fueled by his righteous commitment to civil disobedience, replies indignantly, “Waldo! What are you doing out of jail?”

Thoreau would find common cause with Eimei, our guide through this kaleidoscopic tour of 1970-era Japan. Eimei opens the film angry… at us. He’s been standing by as we’ve sat through a couple minutes of a solid black screen, and he has had it. He castigates us for mindlessly tolerating the nothingness like an audience of sheep. Don’t be offended, though. We will soon see that he has much to be angry about. He has little money, no respect for his family, his community is obsessed with sex and lacks any other ambition, and his culture is becoming uncomfortably Americanized and subsumed by rapacious capitalism. By the end of the film, he dabbles in a small-scale dream of his own, only to be attacked and robbed. He ends screaming his hatred for Japan—but no one truly escapes his wrath.

We see the subject of his ire first-hand. Eimei wanders through a series of scenes with an air of disconnection, not because he doesn’t care but because he can find no way in. The local school does nothing but practice soccer, where Eimei lamely offers to tidy up the locker room. Showcasing society’s whacked-out priorities, the coach happily takes him down to the local prostitute for a chill-out deflowering, which does nothing for him at all. His grandmother, knowing she’s about to be kicked out of the house, lies to strangers about her dead family in a bid for sympathy. Eimei’s father, who fought in the war, is a shiftless layabout whose only profession is molesting young women. Most tragic is Eimei’s flighty (and possibly mentally compromised) sister, who initially has an unhealthy attachment to her pet rabbit until her grandmother arranges to have the animal killed, which somehow leads to her terrible assault at the hands of the entire soccer team. It’s an extraordinary set of circumstances, but the film in no way sensationalizes or finds dark humor in the accumulation of miseries. Imagine living in a world where each day brings not just bad news, but a completely different kind of bad news (if you can even picture such a scenario), and you get a sense of the struggle Eimei has just to get up each day.

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets is reportedly adapted by Terayama from his own play, which is an extraordinary notion, because the movie feels in no way tied to the stage. Terayama has a vivid and far-ranging approach to visual storytelling. He mixes film stocks, employs surprising framing and shot angles, toys with film tinting and superimposition, and stages scenes with the eye of a Surrealist. He also has a solid appreciation of the power of sound, often staging scenes with repetitive sound effects or scoring transitions with proto-punk anthems to soundtrack Eimei’s oppressive surroundings. Interspersed among the scenes of Eimei’s world are staged interviews, fantasy sequences, and dream-like images of early pioneers of flight. This is one of Terayama’s first films, emerging the same year as his controversial Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and it mixes a newcomer’s urge to play in his new sandbox with an experienced storyteller’s confidence in abstract and nonlinear storytelling.

There are no rallies in Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets. There are barely even books (although urgent quotes are graffitied across the landscape). That title isn’t a synopsis but a call to action, a demand from Terayama. Look at your world. Why do you tolerate this? Aren’t you going to do anything about it? Given what he shows us, it’s not hard to understand his contempt. If we’re not rallying in the streets, just what are we doing?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a surreal psychedelic experience like no other… Many of the bizarre, dreamlike sequences that act as short interludes or scenes of escapism for the adolescent at the heart of the film elicit the traits of a Jodorowsky film.”–Tom Bielby, Film Bantha

(This movie was nominated for review by Adam. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DECORADO (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Alberto Vázquez

FEATURING: Voices of Asier Hormaza, Aintzane Gamiz, Kandido Uranga (original Spanish); David Goldstein, Marissa Parness, Peter Giles (English dub)

PLOT: Arnold, a mouse, feels like he’s trapped in an artificial reality.

Still from Decorado (2025)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Decorado combines two seemingly out of place aesthetics—cute cartoons and psychodrama—but also uses an Orwellian dystopia as camouflage to discuss themes that are far more existential in nature.

COMMENTS:  Alberto Vázquez’s animations distinctly combine the cartoonish with a heavy dose of pessimism and existentialist dread. His latest feature effort, expanded from his eponymous short film, is no different. What is new is the ambiguous nature of the surrounding environment, a perfect metaphor for the confusion and angst of these anthropomorphic animals. But let’s start from the beginning.

The story revolves around mouse Arnold and his wife Maria. They live in a town structured like a miniature capitalist system, where a major corporation named ALMA governs everything. Both mice are social outcasts. Arnold remains unemployed for years, while Maria struggles to build a career as a graphic designer. Feeling exhausted by this way of life, Arnold wants to believe there is something more, a figurative and/or literal way of escape. A dark forest surrounds his hometown, and he can’t stop wondering about what might exist beyond that. Perhaps somewhere beyond lies the ideal world of absolute freedom and truth that he desperately desires.

The parabolic tone of this plot is clear. Arnold lives in an Orwellian nightmare where extensive surveillance is the norm, everyone takes medicines to stay calm and happy, and class differences are tremendous. As Arnold rebels, he finds companionship in an eclectic variety of characters, but at the same time he pays a price, by discovering the true nature of his cage.

This is not a social parable, even if it starts like one. It existentialist—almost nihilistic—in nature. Later revelations recall The Truman Show (1998), as the line between what is real and what is a facade starts to blur. That film, however, had a clear ending and catharsis, offering a concrete explanation for its world. Here, no easy answers are given. As the owl-guardian of the forest says, in this case “the (whole) World is a stage” and, perhaps, there is nothing beyond that other than the vastness of a cosmic void.

From a philosophical standpoint, Decorado has some parallelisms with Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s The Holy Mountain (1973): both movies deconstruct ideas regarding salvation and a ultimate truth by constantly reminding us, in a Brechtian way, that everything is  artificial, props and cardboard cutouts on a theatrical stage. Decorado is undoubtedly darker in tone, however, and not so explicitly didactic.

Decorado‘s narrative also works as a portrait of psychopathology. Vázquez’s works are always interested  in exploring the world of the mentally ill. In Birdboy (2015) a teenage boy shows symptoms of schizophrenia; Unicorn Wars (2022) studies the mindset of a sociopath. Here, Arnold’s wife struggles with depression—in the form of a Tinker Bell-like fairy that follows her around—while he is diagnosed with derealization disorder. Clinically defined, derealization (also known as depersonalization or dissociation) is a sense of detachment from reality—a gut feeling that something is off about the world. Decorado can therefore also be interpreted, through a strictly psychological prism, as an externalization of Arnold’s disorder. A work of art can be read in many ways, after all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This paranoid and dystopian vision of life under capitalism is grim but funny—surreally cartoonish yet filled with sarcastic adult ennui, like Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat In Space punctuated by a dose of Happy Tree Friends‘ goofy gore, eventually approaching something fearful and self-referential enough to evoke the existential absurdity of Charlie Kaufman.”–Jacob Oller, AV Club (contemporaneous)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: VENUS IN FURS (1969)

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The third installment in the “Pete’s Perverted Pix” series.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: James Darren, Maria Rohm, Barbara McNair,

PLOT: A trumpet player becomes obsessed with a woman after witnessing her murder and finding her body washed up on the beach, then watches as she comes back to avenge her death.

Still from Venus in Furs (1969)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Venus in Furs is at least twice as surreal as ’s Vertigo, while telling a similar story of a man obsessing over a woman who might be anything from a dead ringer for the deceased to a ghost to a tulpa. On top of that, it gets way freakier between the sheets than most giallos, and tops itself off with psychedelic audio and visuals like the Summer of Love never died. All that, and it also has piss-all to do with the novel.

COMMENTS: Hang onto your lids, folks, because you’re in for a surprise. More than likely you came to Venus in Furs, as did I, expecting a hedonistic wallow in the giallo end of the Eurosmut pool. After all, this is Jess Franco making an erotic thriller with the same name as the 1870 novel whose author, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, gave masochism its name. With those credentials, you would expect a kinky, sex-crazed fetish festival that would make The Story of O look like a high school prom episode of the “Brady Bunch.” At least that’s what I’d expect, having first discovered Franco via the gory Bloody Moon (1981) and working through his horror pieces from there. What, nobody gets their brain buzzsawed this time? Awwww…

Color me surprised to find what has to be one of the tamest movies in Franco’s catalog—and also a class act that deserves to be better known. There’s little full nudity until act three, and even the topless shots are sparse, while gore is barely whispered. There is no particularly graphic cuffs-and-whips action going on. In fact, it’s hard to tell what the hell is going on at all, since the entire movie is told in random scenes shuffling through flashbacks, dreams, and memories. Franco (who also wrote the screenplay) throws away everything of Leo’s novel but the name of one of the characters and the title. Like many of our favorite surreal movies here, the plot’s open to interpretation, including the possibility of a circular narrative.

Bear with me while I piece this thing together. Jimmy (Darren), a jazz trumpet player, plays a gig where he witnesses Wanda (Rohm) murdered by what seems to be a group of aristocrats led by Kinski in what appears to be a snuff party. Jimmy flashes back to these events when he finds Wanda’s knife-scarred body washed ashore on the beach. He then wanders off in a fugue state to Rio during Mardi Gras (note to directors: please set more movies here), where the same woman returns, alive and well. The (ghost? zombie? vampire?) Wanda seduces Jimmy and stalks each of her murderers one by one,

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BACKROOMS (2026)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING:, ,

PLOT: A frustrated furniture-store owner discovers a seemingly infinite maze of mysterious rooms in the back of his store, and invites his therapist to help explore them.

Still from backrooms (2026)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Explore the labyrinths of the unconscious in this ambiguous and terrifying psychological horror.

COMMENTS: Clark is a frustrated, divorced wannabe architect barely making ends meet at his crappy furniture store. He drinks too much and is unhappy enough that he goes to see a therapist, Mary, to vent and role-play his breakup with his wife. While investigating an electricity bill that’s much higher than it should be, Clark discovers he can pass through a wall in his basement to enter a maze of backrooms filled with odd phenomena. Mary is skeptical when he tells her of his explorations, but when he fails to show up at a weekly session, she follows him into the backrooms.

Thirty-something furniture salesmen and female psychologists do not seem like the kind of protagonists 20-year old director Kane Parsons would pick to pilot his feature debut film, but herein lies Backrooms‘ genius. Parson wisely outsourced his script to television writer Will Soodik. Soodik delivers an unexpectedly rich scenario that pries into Clark’s insecurities and Mary’s traumatic backstory without fully explaining them, leaving Parsons free to expend his youthful creativity on designing the rooms themselves. The film’s interlocking chambers feature improbable geometries, optical illusions, out-of-place objects like heaps of stacked furniture, piles of laundry, dead birds, sneakers half-submerged in the floor, and so on. The deeper we penetrate into the maze, the more surreal the objects we find—and eventually, people (of a sort) show up. Everything is built wrong, as if misremembered or imagined by an alien intelligence trying to recreate human artifacts based on a stock photo image library, with little understanding of the ways objects actually relate to each other in the physical world. The constructs recall the uncanny, too-many-fingered visions that AI regurgitated only a few years ago. How and why were these created, by whom and for what purpose? The indeterminate grotesqueness of Backrooms simulacra gives the film uncanny power; the resonance with its characters’ psychological flaws imbues it with meaning.

There are two potential pitfalls with Backrooms. The first is the expectations set by locating the film within the horror genre. Backrooms is at its best when dwelling within its own unease: it does not need (many) monsters, stalkers, jump scares, or scenes of bloodletting to liven it up. These elements do show up, but miraculously, the story survives its chase scenes, ending by circling back to its inexplicable roots. A looming issue, however, may be the audience’s insatiable thirst for “lore,” which, if improperly indulged, can lead to the biggest buzzkill of all: “explication.” Backrooms 2 probably would be—and, I strongly fear will be—a terrible idea. As a standalone work, Backrooms beautifully expands upon the promising but narrow premise of the original shorts, adding depth and forming an ambiguously closed circle. Please, don’t push your luck. At the tender age of age 20, Parsons should still have decades of completely original nightmares to dredge up from his fertile unconscious.

Audience notes: The theater was fairly full for a weekday evening showing in the expensive “Xtreme” format. There were no walkouts (with one exception I’ll mention at the end). There were more teenagers there than I expected, sitting in the front rows for an immersive experience, to boot; I should have been able to predict this knowing of Parson’s YouTube audience, but it still surprised me. One parent brought two boys, estimated ages 7-11. The younger got scared in the middle of the film (during a scene where they discover a Christmas tree in a red-lit room) and his mom had to escort him out (I don’t know if he returned later). The older boy was heard to exclaim “that was scary and weird!” when it was all over. I’m considering adoption.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is ambitious, eerie, frustrating, hypnotic, and deeply weird, a film that would rather haunt the edges of your understanding than hand you a map.”–Doug Jamieson, The Jam Report (contemporaneous)