July 2, 1966 [The Sword of Doom]

What a shock to see Tatsuya Nakadai as the malevolent swordsman Ryunosuke in The Sword of Doom, his lost and haunted face from The Human Condition returning—but now it's wrapped around a burning skull, his voice the low monotone of the Japanese demon squatting behind the tree you pass, making you jump before it cuts you open—and Ryunosuke cuts, again and again and again, a demon possessed by demons. Toshiro Mifune as the fencing-master reminds Ryunosuke to "study the soul to know the sword"—but the teacher sees an evil soul in the student, who grates out icy-sharp words about honor and righting wrongs—and he knows who has been wronged: always him, the crazy man's defense of evil. He walks into a dark sharp corner, and when he emerges he bares his teeth—again, haunted by all those dead—and he bites like the decapitated heads in Madame Guillotine's basket, one last snarling outraged kiss; and he defends himself from ghosts by making many more in a finale of slaughter that goes on so long it begins to feel, if not necessary, then simply the normal state of things, filled with screams and groans, drenched in blood. The film ends in close-up, Ryunosuke raising the Sword of Doom, still slicing away long after we've left the theater. He is making a world—a dead one, an anti-creation in which evil has the potter's wheel, and everything gets splattered as he spins with hands steady and black-wet.