Nudes! Guns! Ghosts! The Sensational Films of Shintoho

Originally published to accompany a retrospective of films by Shintoho, the smallest of Japan's six major studios in the postwar era, at the 2010 Udine Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, this book is the first in English to focus on the studio's output under Mitsugu Okura, a former benshi (silent film narrator) and theater owner who headed the studio from 1955 until its bankruptcy in 1961. Similar to Roger Corman's films for American International Pictures in the same era, Shintoho's lineup took square aim at the teenage market with genre tiles that promised action, sex and scares in various proportions. And just as Corman directed and produced a long line of hits and launched the careers of the directors and actors whose work would define the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s, Shintoho was a breeding ground for talent, whose work would have a major impact on future filmmakers, from directors of "pink film" erotica to the masters of J-Horror. Read more