"Fifty-three Stations of the Mysterious Cat"

...is a type of ghost story film unique to Japan, and like films about raccoons and foxes, it has long been made as a kind of ``grotesque stuff'' (books on the history of Japanese cinema state that it was ``popular with low-brow audiences''). However, in the early 1930s, Sumiko Suzuki (1904-1985), known as the ``enchantress actress'' of Japanese cinema, played the heroine of this type of ghost story film one after another (``The Legend of the Saga Ghost Cat'' and ``Arima Cat'' (both 1937), ``The Fifty-Three Stations of the Ghost Cat'' and ``The Ghost Story Mystery Shamisen'' (both 1938), ``Yamabuki Cat'' (1940), etc.), and since then, it has come to form part of the undercurrent of Japanese film history as a unique genre of ghost story film. That is to say, although they were considered weird and low-brow entertainment films, they were mass-produced as a genre with definite box office value, and Nagata Masaichi, the producer who made Suzuki Sumiko's "Transformation Cat Movie" a hit at Shinko Kinema before the war, also had success after the war at Daiei (Nagata became president in 1947) by turning Irie Takako, a prewar "young lady star" who had lost popularity, into a "transformation cat actress."

*Some of the terminology used in "Fifty-three Stations of the Strange Cat" is listed below.

Source | Heibonsha World Encyclopedia 2nd Edition | Information

…日本固有の怪談映画の一種で，〈狸もの〉〈狐もの〉などと同様に古くから〈ゲテモノ〉としてつくられてきたが(日本映画史をつづった本には〈低俗観客層に愛好された〉などと記されている)，昭和10年代の初めに日本映画きっての〈妖婦女優〉として知られた鈴木澄子(1904‐85)がこの種の怪談映画のヒロインを次々に演じて(《佐賀怪猫伝》《有馬猫》(ともに1937)，《怪猫五十三次》《怪談謎の三味線》(ともに1938)，《山吹猫》(1940)，等々)，〈化猫女優〉の異名を取って以来，怪談映画のなかでも特殊なジャンルとして日本映画史の底流の一部を形成することになった。すなわち，ゲテモノ，低俗娯楽映画といわれながらも確実な興行価値をもつジャンルとして量産され，とくに戦前の新興キネマで鈴木澄子の〈化猫映画〉をヒットさせたプロデューサーの永田雅一は，戦後も大映(1947年より永田が社長に就任)で，戦前の〈お嬢さんスター〉で売れなくなっていた入江たか子を〈化猫女優〉に仕立てて成功した。…

※「《怪猫五十三次》」について言及している用語解説の一部を掲載しています。

出典｜株式会社平凡社世界大百科事典 第２版について | 情報