Shinoda Masahiro’s Demon Pond unfolds at its own singular pace. The film’s ethereal, hypnagogic qualities are enhanced equally by the burnt orange and cerulean hues of Kosugi Masao and Sakamoto Noritaka’s painterly cinematography, which reflect its remote mountain village setting being stuck in a state of permanent evening twilight, and the constantly unpredictable ebbs and flows of electronic music pioneer Tomita Isao’s transfixingly restless Moog score. Where Tomita’s music includes modernized reworkings of pieces by 19th-century composers Claude Debussy and Modest Mussorgsky, Shinoda’s film fuses the kabuki theatricality of the 1913 play by Izumi Kyôka on which it was based with the uncanny artifice of then-groundbreaking, and still mind-bending, visual effects.

These collisions between the classical and the modern are fitting for a film that discomfitingly resides in various liminal states—between night and day, the otherworldly and the worldly, the artificial and the organic.