Directed by Hajime Tsuburaya. Written by Tetsuo Kinjo. Airdate Feb. 27, 1966.
It’s Halloween, Ultra Ghouls! I timed this review for a night in the lonesome October, of my most Ultra Q year.
There’s only a handful of Halloween Ultra episodes. That’s no stunner; the holiday isn’t celebrated in Japan the same way it is in North America. It’s only been in the last 15 years that Halloween has taken off in the country with large-scale parties celebrating the national love of cosplay. “More excuses to cosplay? Great, we’ll take it!” But back in the Showa and Heisei eras, a Halloween Ultra episode wouldn’t have much draw. Ultraman Tiga has a lighthearted seasonal romp, “On the Night of Halloween,” but there’s not much else in the series where you’ll find grinning Jack O’Lanterns, costumed trick-or-treaters, and cackling witches in wide-brimmed hats riding broomsticks.
But an episode doesn’t specifically need to be about Halloween to be a great episode for Halloween. “Baron Spider” may be the best Ultra episode to watch for Halloween. It’s become an October tradition for me. This is old-fashioned Gothic horror, like a compressed Vincent Price–Edgar Allan Poe movie with a Japanese cast, and it’s definitely a treat … with good tricks. It’s also Kenji Sahara’s favorite episode. I totally get you, Kenji-kun.
After a prologue in a lighthouse that sets the mood and gives us our first look at the awaiting eight-legged horrors, we dive into a tale of “We Took the Wrong Road and Now We Have to Stay at the Creepy Old Mansion.” Yes, it’s one of those. No complaints. I published a story like this myself. Writer Tetsuo Kinjo blatantly used one of the most famous tropes in horror literature and movies, with overt elements pulled from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” One character even quotes Poe’s poem “Ulalume,” and what a scene-setter quote it is…
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispéd and sere—
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year…
One evening, Jun, Ippei, Yuriko, and several friends are driving back from a party. (One of the friends is played by the gorgeous Akiko Wakabayashi, star of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster and future Bond Girl in You Only Live Twice.) Unfortunately, the partying gang chooses to drive through the part of Japan that crosses over the moors of Devonshire in Victorian England. They end up on the wrong road and have to take shelter in a crumbling Gothic mansion after Ippei and another guest tumble into a swamp and almost drown. Jun, relying on his knowledge as a writer of weird fiction, recalls the legend of a baron who once lived in a mansion like this one. The baron was obsessed with spiders, and his spirit and that of his daughter still linger in the cobwebbed manse in the form of giant venomous tarantulas.
There isn’t much else to the story. It’s what you expect, and what you want. The uninvited guests in Baron Spider’s mansion must survive attacks from the massive tarantulas and escape the house of horrors. Do you think the car will have trouble starting? Of course it will! It doesn’t matter how many horror clichés Kinjo puts in the script, because the execution is a hundred percent masterful. Some clichés exist because they’re fun and we don’t mind the familiarity.
The six-foot-wide tarantulas are fantastic monsters. They don’t look realistic — you can sometimes see the wires used to move them — but realism isn’t the point. The spiders have the right nightmare quality, and they’re photographed to emphasize what people find so unnerving about arachnids: multiple legs, creeping movements, hanging from ceilings, slavering mandibles.
I wouldn’t call the episode scary, unless you’re an arachnophobe, in which case the title already told you to avoid it. But it’s definitely creepy and thrilling, with a helluva climax that goes full “Fall of the House of Usher.” When the closing narration starts, I expected the narrator to say, “The deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’ ” The narrator instead says something about night spiders, but I know what he meant.
“Baron Spider” is non-stop good times if you love spooky Halloween entertainment. It’s drenched in atmosphere with some of the best production design and photography in the show. The filmmakers gave everything they could to make the episode feel like classic Western horror films. They’ve got the Hammer, Universal, and AIP–Poe aesthetic nailed shut like a coffin lid, and you can tell everyone involved was having a blast paying their respects to the genre.
This is the first episode of an Ultra show I’m awarding the “Classic” rating. It’s appropriate for a franchise with such variety that its first classic episode is a one-off about giant spiders in a haunted Gothic mansion. There are more horror-themed episodes ahead in the Ultra series, but none as timeless as this. Happy Halloween!
Rating: Classic
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