In Demon Woman, the viewer is treated to a glimpse of the miserable lot of the ordinary farmer during the rampaging turmoil of pre-modern war. The film is beautifully stark with the entire thing shot among the waving reeds of an estuary. It is plain to see, from the miserable lives of the farmers, how warriors of the ancient world regarded those who tilled the earth with no more respect than cattle. Only a man’s status as a warrior keeps him in a bearable state.

As depicted in Oni Baba—which, like other Japanese movies of the era, saw the medieval world through the prism of post-apocalyptic Japan—the life of the pre-modern farmer was generally worse than the life of an animal, and infinitely worse than the life of the primal hunter gatherers. It was through the primal experience that most of our collective psychology was developed. The agrarian experience kept much of this lore alive in the minds of the learned class on the backs of the wretched farmer, amongst whom festered an animosity and ravenous animal impulse that would merge with the higher primal ideals of the upper class into our toxic modern ideologies.

A viewing of Demon Woman—even a glance at the title and cover—will impart the message that the life of the lowly farmer was debasing and emasculating, as exemplified in the character of Hachi, the escaped slave soldier. The only way an agrarian society could support the mind or ambition of a Homer, an Achilles, an Odysseus, or an Aristotle, was through the debasement of the majority of the male population, who were enslaved and essentially made the bitch-wife of their betters. Eventually, when liberation from the Ancient Regime came in the 18th and 19th centuries, what rose up politically, from the masses, was largely the shrill cry of the womanized slave man—and here we are, trying to scrape all that vaginal muck away.

In the metaphoric time frame of Lions and Men, during that period in European history when the lion like aspirations of the head of state lived side by side with the real beast, and when most men were essentially jackals circling his kill [conquered tribes and states] the idea of the hunter warrior might only live on at the top and the fringe of society. Demon Woman depicts the sorrowful shadows of such a world, where most people lived Hobesian lives that were indeed nasty, brutish and short; stark empty lives that generated our current collective thirst for plenty.