Beauty is the Beast: Suzuki Sumiko and Prewar Japanese Horror Cinema

The 1930s were crucial years in the development of the horror film as an international genre of popular cinema. At the same time Hollywood hits like Dracula and Frankenstein made global icons of their stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, Japanese actress Suzuki Sumiko achieved a similar type of fame as her nation’s first horror star. In contrast to Hollywood ‘scream queens’ like Fay Wray, Suzuki most often played the monster, not its victim, making her place in horror history more akin to male stars like Lugosi and Karloff. Suzuki inaugurated a line of Japanese female film monster stars by portraying a traditional feminine monster of the kabuki theatre, the bakeneko or ‘ghost cat,’ and Suzuki and her successors’ bakeneko pictures often take on the style and motifs of Hollywood horror while still remaining true to native visual representations of the grotesque and monstrous in Japanese art and theatre that predate the advent of cinema. The result is a meeting of two distinct traditions in the body of the star actress that recasts a well-known monster of woodblock prints and the kabuki stage in the fashion of Lugosi’s hypnotic vampire Count Dracula.