The director of GAMERA turns manga into live action with the ghostly SNAKE GIRL AND THE SILVER-HAIRED WITCH, on Blu-ray from Arrow Video.

Young Sayuri (Yachie Matsui) has grown up in an orphanage without knowing her birth parents until the directress Sister Yamakawa (Kuniko Miyake, TOKYO STORY) announce that they have been found and that she is to go home to live with them. Her father Goro Nanjo (Yoshirô Kitahara, THE SNOW WOMAN), a herpetologist experimenting with the venom of deadly snakes, informs her that her mother Yuko (Yûko Hamada, ZATOICHI THE OUTLAW) was in a car accident a few months prior and has been having memory troubles; indeed, upon meeting her, Yoko refers to her as Tamami. Setting down in the old house across the street from the skyscraper construction site where her mother had accident, Sayuri starts to suspect that they are not alone in the house when she sees her mother leaving food in the house's family shrine but the housekeeper Shige (Sachiko Meguro, WARNING FROM SPACE) thinks she is making things up. When her father leaves for a trip to Africa to examine a rare snake, Sayuri discovers that the mystery occupant of the house is her elder sister Tamami (Mayumi Takahashi, ELEGY OF A GEISHA) who sleeps in the attic out of sight of her father. Yuko asks Sayuri if it would be okay if Tamami lived downstairs with them while her husband is away.

Sayuri is overjoyed to have a sister, but Tamami is moody and cruel, destroying Sayuri's toys and bullying her. Sayuri resolves to remain kind to her sister for her mother's sake, but Sayuri becomes terrified when she sees that her sister has scaly skin and begins to believe that she is actually a snake rather than a human. Sayuri confiding in her teacher's aide Hayashi (Sei Hiraizumi, VIOLENT COP) who learns that Tamami is not the Nanjo's biological daughter, and that she was institutionalized after she tried to use a poisonous snake to bite a classmate of whom she was jealous. While her mother impotently stands by, Tamami insists that Sayuri sleep in her attic room from now on, and Sayuri suffers nightmares in which she is terrorized by a snake, but her waking hours also become horrifying when a silver-haired witch starts menacing her. Shige again believes that Sayuri is just causing a scene, but the witch starts targeting anyone who might help Sayuri for murder.

Not quite a Japanese ghost story or a monster movie, SNAKE GIRL AND THE SILVER-HAIRED WITCH – adapted from a manga comic by renowned horror artist and author Kazuo Umezu – seems at first like a Gothic mystery in the vein of THE VAMPIRE DOLL – the first film in Michio Yamamoto "Bloodthirsty Trilogy" – with the old dark house mechanics seeming less like theatrics because of the childish perspective of Sayuri, the ideal fairytale protagonists who struggles to see only good and benevolence even in the worst of people. Sayuri's nightmare are vividly realized – although not quite as elaborately as director Noriaki Yuasa's GAMERA film – so much so that it becomes a little disappointing when a more commonplace explanation and motive become increasingly obvious; and yet, the film does remain charming for its central child performance and the ways in which is resembles more Western examples of Gothic horror.

Only released in English-subtitled prints to Japanese theaters in the United States by Daiei, SNAKE GIRL AND THE SILVER-HAIRED WITCH has been easier to read about in various Asian horror references than to actually see outside of the bootleg circuit (Video Search of Miami may have had a subtitled VHS). There is no information about the source of Arrow Video's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.36:1 widescreen Blu-ray, but the film shares the glassy look of some of Daiei's best monochrome titles with deep blacks, cool greys, and whites that are free of clipping while the Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track sounding relatively clean but flat apart from some scare effects and music stings. Optional English subtitles are free of any noticeable errors.

The film is accompanied by a new audio commentary by film historian David Kalat who discusses the parallels between the director's childhood observations of the hypocritical behavior of adults and that of the child protagonist, his career at Daiei, and how the success of the first films allowed him to make SNAKE GIRL – in place of the requested two back-to-back GAMERA films, the film's ambiguity about the supernatural elements and the unreliable POV of the protagonist who nevertheless is the film's moral center, and the recurring cast members in the film and the GAMERA series. He also discusses the output of manga artist Kazuo Umezu and the serialized source story upon which the film is loosely based.

In "This Charming Woman" (27:40), manga and folklore scholar Zack Davisson notes that the myths of snake women in Japanese folklore actually had their bases in Chinese and Indian stories passed along the Silk Road and that they were combined with more local legends of sea serpents and female ghosts. He also discusses the work of Umezu, its borrowings from the Brothers Grimm, and the contrast between Japanese "child monsters" and the parental monsters of Western folk tales. The disc also includes an image gallery and the film's theatrical trailer (2:08). Not provided for review was the illustrated collectors' booklet featuring new writing by Raffael Coronelli included only with the first pressing. (Eric Cotenas)