Six Degrees of Separation: The Slit-Mouthed Woman and the Bird Mother

Welcome to ANIWIRE! Today we are return once again to Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi, and to a mysterious guest whose creations haunt the world to this day. Before that, though, here’s the news from the past week.

News

• Netflix released the opening credits sequence for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off! Excited to see that Shuhei Handa, a character designer previously associated with Studio Trigger, contributed designs for this show.
• There’s a new trailer for Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night, an upcoming original series from Dogakobo. Featuring direction by Ryohei Takashita, scripts by light novel author Yuki Yaku and music by the dependable Masaru Yokoyama. Can’t wait to see more of this one. Due next spring!
• The new Silent Hill production is a barely functional interactive drama that asks the question, “what if Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was an aggressively monetized gacha game?”
• There is now an English dubbed trailer for Hayao Miyazaki’s newest film, The Boy and the Heron.
• Ryan Holmberg announced a new manga imprint called SMUDGE, produced with publisher Living the Line and curated by himself. It will be devoted to older horror and dark fantasy manga. Could this be the opportunity Daijiro Morohoshi fans have been waiting for…?
• Megacorp KADOKAWA announced that they are creating their own wholly-owned anime studios. This could either be a load of nothing that blows up in their face, or a seismic shift in the industry away from the production committee system. We’ll see!
• Hilltop Works translated the cult classic summer simulation game Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 into English.
• Also, there’s a new English translation for the visually stunning PC-98 game Dead of the Brain.

Bookmarks

• For The Comics Journal, Andrew Farago wrote the obituary for the great comics artist/writer/storyteller Keith Giffen.
• At Mangasplaining, Deb Aoki interviewed Isaki Uta, the artist behind Is Love the Answer? among other works.
• For Full Frontal, Ludovic Joyet interviewed Italian animator and cat enthusiast Misu Yamaneko.
• For Paste, Dia Lacina wrote about Final Fantasy XI on its 20th anniversary. You can still play this game today!
• Jocelyne Allen reviewed Akari, a series about glassblowing drawn by Marco Kohinata. There truly is manga about everything.
• Mike Dent released his 2022 Tokusatsu Viewing Guide, covering such works as Shin Ultraman and Avataro Sentai Donbrothers.
• For Anime News Network, Jeremy Tauber wrote about early 2000s pop culture artifact Lucky Star.
• For The New York Times, Rafael Motamayor spoke to Hajime Isayama about the conclusion of manga/anime juggernaut Attack on Titan.
• Marc Normandin is taking November to write about the influential games studio Compile on the 20th anniversary of its closure.
• At The Gutter Review, Tom Shapira wrote about British comics artist John Burns.
• Amilee Doree released a video about the cult ero guro visual novel Dasaku in honor of Halloween. (This one’s 18+.)

AMV of the Week

Here’s “Fantasy” by Synaesthesia Productions.

The following piece contains images and videos best suitable for mature audiences. Reader discretion advised.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the horror film series Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi. In case you forgot, it’s a found footage franchise about pugnacious director Jin Kudo, his overqualified assistant Miho Ichikawa and their cameraman Masatsugu Tashiro. The three of them investigate urban legends only to fall backwards into an occult conspiracy that spans realities (and in fact, forms the spine of director Koji Shiraishi’s filmography.) It’s a metafictional trash heap of cheap special effects and jump scares, spread across ten films and multiple shorts. Yet it’s attracted a small following of devoted fans who adore its lo-fi horror sequences and unconstrained imagination.

Since then, though, I made a discovery. I was browsing the archives of Bogleech, a horror blogger whose creature design breakdowns are a highlight of Halloween season. A 2018 entry profiled the Grudge Girls, grotesque creature designs made by Keisuke Aiso. These characters have appeared at art installations (2019’s Grudge Girls Revolution at Vanilla Gallery) as well as at interactive haunted houses (2015’s Grudge Girls Apartment.)

One of Aiso’s designs is based on the slit-mouthed woman or Kuchisake-onna. She appears as a scarred woman wearing a mask. Her favorite pastime is to ask passers-by, “am I beautiful?” If they say no, she kills them with a pair of scissors. If they say yes, she removes her mask to reveal that her mouth is a bloody slit from ear to ear. From there she will either slit the mouth of her victim in the same way, or kill them later at night, based on their response. It’s a story comparable to the likes of “man door hand hook car door,” or that old classic “Bloody Mary.”

Aiso’s interpretation of the kuchisake-onna takes the character to its most outrageous extreme. Rather than a scarred human woman, he made a giant prosthetic head turned sideways on a long neck. The woman’s teeth run all the way down the front of the neck, like a giant zipper. This kind of kuchisake-onna would have a tough time hiding her true nature from her victims. But that’s just what makes her cool. Maybe a modern kuchisake-onna would be comfortable with her long, long mouth rather than just using it to prank people.

Aiso’s take on the slit-mouth woman also had me wondering: had I seen her before? In fact, I had. This same design appears in the very first Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi film, titled Operation Capture the Slit-Mouthed Woman. The kuchisake-onna initially appears as a tall human woman with supernatural powers. Yet at the end of the film, the Aiso version of the character is glimpsed in the corner of an abandoned apartment. You can just barely see her pictured in the image above.

At first I wasn’t sure what to think. Had Koji Shiraishi ripped off Aisawa’s creature design? After jumping to IMDB, though, I found Aisawa’s name credited on Shiraishi’s film as “special effects make-up artist.” He is also credited in the newest Senritsu Kaiki film, Senritsu Kaiki World Kowasugi! Just like that, I had found a connection between two obscurities: Koji Shiraishi’s offball filmography, and Keisuke Aiso’s grotesque creature models.

Even if you’ve never heard Aiso’s name, you probably know about his most famous creation, Mother Bird or Momo: an egg-shaped head with bulging eyes rimmed with black, fringed with stringy hair, bare swinging breasts and two big bird feet. She’s loosely inspired by the ubume, a Japanese yokai spirit of women that die in childbirth. Aiso first put her on display at 2016’s Ghost Gallery III exhibition. But she took on a life of her own in 2018, when rumors began to spread of a deadly “Momo Challenge” on WhatsApp.

In 2019, the phenomenon grew to the point that Kim Kardashian herself spread word of the threat on social media. Parents were convinced that Momo was telling children to hurt or kill themselves, that jerks online had spliced Momo into otherwise child-friendly YouTube videos, or that Momo herself was somehow infecting those videos.

Of course, Momo was only ever a statue. It was not designed to last. Aiso himself confessed that the sculpture had been destroyed in 2018. All that remained was a meme spread by kids and irony-poisoned internet users. Fans modded her into Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto V. Children passed on her story alongside the likes of Smile Dog, Slender Man and Candle Cove.

Meanwhile, parents continued to fret about what their children were being subjected to on the internet and at their schools. Their fears blossomed into an ongoing crusade to ban books, restrict the rights of teachers and police gender expression and sexuality among children and teens across the United States. As Leigh Alexander once wrote for Slate, adults should spend less time worrying about how technology is affecting their children and more time considering how technology is affecting them.

You might not have expected that a minor film franchise may have been connected to a makeup artist whose invention terrified the internet and flipped the switch of a generation of aspiring American fascists. But the truth is that all technology and culture are linked. A butterfly flaps its wings in one corner of the world, and a building falls elsewhere. The smallest, least essential work of art is both meaningful and meaningless. Spotting the countless intersections between these personal creations and the rest of the world is why I do the work I do. 

If a masked woman ever corners you in the back streets and asks if you think she is beautiful, take a closer look. Is her mouth a simple slit from ear to ear? Or is it, in fact, a perpendicular line?