My all-time favorite samurai movie is “Sword of Doom” from 1966, the dark saga of sociopathic expert swordsman Ryunosuke Tsukue. The original Japanese title translates as “Boddhisattva Pass,” which doesn't make a lot of sense until you find out that the movie is based on the first section of a huge 41-book serialized novel written as an elaborate Buddhist parable on the nature of evil, impermanence and so on.

The fact that the movie is only the first part of a much longer work also explains the absurdly abrupt ending, which leaves almost all of the subplots hanging. On the other hand, the sudden ending fits the darkly nihilistic tone of the movie, giving it an existentialist edge that sets it apart from most other samurai movies. The evil swordsman Tsukue goes mad in a brothel just as his enemies are closing in. Believing them to be the ghosts of all the people he has cruelly murdered, he goes on a blood-soaked killing spree before seeming to suddenly notice the camera-man filming him (or the audience watching the movie). Then he suddenly approaches the screen, slashes it, and the movie ends. The audience never finds out if he survived or not, or what happens to any of the other characters. The movie just explodes in violence and then ends.

The creepy edginess of the ending is reflected in the tone of the rest of the movie, which has been described as “samurai noir.” Tsukue is played very effectively by Tatsuya Nakadai, who portrays him as a virtual automaton, an empty vessel capable of nothing but destruction. There have been other movie versions of the same novel, some of which carry the story past the bloodbath in the brothel and into Tsukue's doomed attempts to find redemption. If you pay attention very closely to all of his crimes, a method emerges out of his apparent madness, and the straightforward judgment of his evil becomes less apparent. Some reviewers have even suggested that Tsukue is not so much a psychopathic killer as a boddhisattva of destruction, striking down those whose time has come. In this interpretation, he seems like an empty vessel because he is exactly that, with no more human volition than a bolt of lightning or an earthquake. Either way, he's just as spooky!