Third Window continue their gradual releasing of director Shinya Tsukamoto’s filmography with his early feature known as Hiruko the Goblin overseas and Yokai Hunter: Hiruko in Japan, after the manga series of which two stories are adapted. Released in between the first two Tetsuo films that first made his name, Hiruko was Tsukamoto’s first studio project, or as he describes it, his first experience with a professional film crew.
As such, it has generally been considered an outlier to Tsukamoto’s more hardcore independent work. The plot is simple though convoluted with the titular Hiruko escaping from its tomb to wreak havoc with only Mr Heida, an archaeologist, and Yabe, a student, to stop it. With a brisk ninety minute run time, it doesn’t hang about, jumping into goblin hunting within the opening ten minutes and several kills swiftly and gruesomely executed.
As our heroes enter the ancient tomb of Hiroku, the horror-inflected-adventure stylings of Indiana Jones are impossible to miss. The storytelling is big, bold and unsubtle with character depth communicated through expository dialogue in between set pieces. This is a film designed for a mass audience that it didn’t quite get on release, a monster movie that is just a bit too weird for the mainstream crowd.
There is as much Evil Dead as there is Indiana Jones in the film’s DNA, most notably through the great monster POV shots racing along the ground towards its victims.
While this effect made it a commercial failure, it allows Tsukamoto’s personality to shine through and avoid falling into the trap of an inventive director being hampered by studio constraints. Tsukamoto himself says in an interview on the disc that Hiruko is closer to his personal style than what he was known for, having made 8mm films prior to Tetsuo though he doesn’t specify in what way this is so.
There is as much Evil Dead as there is Indiana Jones in the film’s DNA, most notably through the great monster POV shots racing along the ground towards its victims. With gory self-decapitations and human heads on spider bodies or floating independently, there is plenty of horror imagery to keep things freaky. From its opening scene of a professor and his student being attacked in an underground tunnel, to the spider creatures with human heads, there is plenty of horror spectacle to entertain.
Supplements are slim on this release with an enthusiastic audio commentary from Tom Mes, short features on Takashi Oda who made the Creature Effects based off Tsukamoto’s drawings, and two interviews with Tsukamoto from 2021 and 2000, with some repetition across both interviews. The film, Hiruko the Goblin, is the star of this release and is well worth seeking out now it is readily available, whether you are a fan of Tsukamoto or looking for an entry point to his work.
Hiruko the Goblin is available on Third Window Films Blu-Ray
Mike’s Archive: Hiruko the Goblin (1991)
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