“His name is Nuppeppo. Japanese monster,” the man sitting next to us said, grimacing and holding up his fingers like claws. He was wearing a headband that made it look like an axe was buried in his skull. It was Halloween in Shinjuku, and I was holed up with a friend in a tiny bar up a steep flight of stairs underneath a stained-glass window modeled after one in Dario Argento’s “Suspiria.” Outside in the Times Square of Tokyo, it was raining, and we were amusing ourselves by opening up the little plastic balls we’d bought at a gachapon arcade. 

“Gacha” are ubiquitous in Japan, and we’d gone to one of the larger hubs, lined with brightly lit rows of coin-operated machines dispensing every type of plastic trinket you can imagine. (One offered a selection of tiny Dyson vacuums.) The one that drew me was filled with small vinyl Nuppeppos designed by an artist who called herself “Mysterious Lisa,” in colors like “Melon Green” and “Jellyfish Blue.” A flyer inside the shell offered vinyl molding workshops for aspiring toy designers, led by the artist herself. 

I’d seen Nuppeppo before, in an encyclopedia of Japanese folk monsters illustrated by the legendary manga artist Shigeru Mizuki. A faceless, foul-smelling lump of rotting flesh with arms, it could be spotted lumbering out of graveyards in Old Kyoto at night, startling anyone who dared to take shelter under the incense-scented wooden roof of a Buddhist temple. “Mysterious Lisa” had molded its folds to form an eyebrow ridge, a nose, and even what appeared to be a smile. It looked quite content, actually. 

Nuppeppo is an example of a Japanese yokai, part of a category of supernatural beings that can be quite broad—ghosts, demons, and urban legends can all be considered yokai under the right circumstances—but specifically refers to animistic creatures that inhabit ponds, mountains, forest paths, beaches, rivers, and even city streets—anywhere a traveler might be caught unawares after dark. They can be spritely and whimsical like faeries, or massive and terrifying like cryptids. Unlike kaiju, whose origins are in the postwar atomic era, they predate modern Japanese pop culture. But in recent decades, they’ve become a vital part of that culture. 

Mizuki, who died in 2015, was the key architect of that revival. Although he also published work for adults, Mizuki is best known for creating “Gegege no Kitaro,” which has been adapted into multiple long-running anime, video games, and live-action movies. The series revolves around Kitaro, the last living member of the yokai Ghost Tribe who, along with his deceased father—now reanimated as an eyeball with legs—acts as a go-between for the mundane world of humans and the supernatural world of the yokai. His adventures were first published in 1960, and first adapted for television in 1968; his most recent animated movie, “Birth of Kitaro: The Mystery of GeGeGe,” opened in Japanese theaters in 2023.

The immense popularity of Mizuki’s work has led multiple Japanese towns to claim him as a tourist attraction; I opted for the more accessible option of Chōfu, the Tokyo suburb where Mizuki lived and worked for 50 of his 94 years. (His hometown of Sakaiminato has a more elaborate setup, but it’s five hours from Tokyo by train.) On the surface, Chōfu is a typical Japanese town, a collection of karaoke rooms and cram schools and chain stores clustered around a central transit hub. Look closer, however, and you’ll find small panels illustrated with images from Mizuki’s comics at regular intervals along the main road. These lead to a promenade lined with statues of Mizuki creations like “Telebi-kun,” a yokai boy who can climb into and out of televisions at will (an inspiration for “The Ring,” perhaps?).

At one end of Chōfu’s yokai promenade sits a playground, which was occupied by a handful of moms and kids bundled into matching puffer coats when I visited on an overcast weekday afternoon. A friendly-looking Kitaro statue guards the entrance, encouraging small visitors not to be afraid. And indeed, Kitaro’s morbid graveyard origins were totally lost on the toddlers bouncing on a sculpture of Ittan-momen—a haunted roll of cotton Kitaro and friends use like a flying carpet—and squealing while climbing into a yokai cottage whose long tongue stuck out to form a slide. Through them, I could see how yokai have been woven into Japanese childhoods since Mizuki revived interest in them back in the ‘60s, inspiring everything from “Pokémon” to “Spirited Away.” 

Not all yokai culture is for children, however—at least, not exclusively. On my first day in Tokyo, still a little delirious from the jet lag, I boarded an elevator on the ground floor of a massive, multi-level electronics store and rode up to the single-screen art theater on the top floor. We were there to see 1979’s “Demon Pond,” part of a Tokyo Film Festival retrospective in honor of director Masahiro Shinoda, who died this past March. Shinoda was a revered leader of the Japanese New Wave, although his style is harder to pin down than some of his contemporaries; for Shinoda, the freedom to shapeshift was perhaps the point, a through line from the jazzy youth films that made him famous to the stylized throwback of “Demon Pond.” 

The mythical past of “Demon Pond” is a far cry from the gritty, street-level Tokyo underworld Shinoda captured in his most famous film, “Pale Flower.” But it’s more typical of the director’s work, at least of this period. As the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s, Shinoda embraced artificiality, and had already experimented with hybridizing traditional Japanese art forms with his films “Double Suicide” and “Himiko” — incorporating bunraku puppet theater and butoh dance, respectively—when he began adapting a 1913 Kabuki play into what would become “Demon Pond.” Isao Tomita’s futuristic synthesizer score aside, “Demon Pond” stays close to its Kabuki roots, as the highly theatrical setting (Shinoda even leaves the polished stage floor visible in some sequences) and stylized performances transport us to a heightened realm of crab men and lovesick dragon princesses.

“Demon Pond” unfolds in the style of a folk tale, following a modern man—botany professor Gakuen (Tsutomu Yamazaki)—as he travels into a realm where science and logic no longer apply. The film takes place in an enchanted pocket of rural Japan, unfolding in a lonely house above a fairytale village so ravaged by drought that the villagers are considering breaking their compact with the White Dragon Princess who reigns over the titular pond. If they fail to ring a sacred bell three times a day, as their ancestors have for centuries, then the Princess will abandon them, and the village will be washed away in a flood. But after two years with no rain, the villagers are getting desperate. What unfolds is not only a tragic romance but an enchanted parable about humanity’s shortsightedness and the madness of crowds.

Kabuki legend Tamasaburo Bando, who specializes in female roles, plays both the White Dragon Princess and Yuri, the village beauty and the key to harmony between the human and supernatural realms. It’s not what we in the West would call a “drag performance;” Bando’s style is affected, but not in a campy way. It’s something more elusive, odder, unnatural, but also intuitively correct. And his otherworldliness is most spellbinding when he’s surrounded by the Princess’s yokai companions, which include a messenger carp, a goat-headed attendant, mud monsters, and the Princess’s coterie of a cat-witch nurse, gray-faced handmaidens, and a girl who is also a camelia flower. 

Its Kabuki origins and style give “Demon Pond” a cultural weight that’s not seen in some of the more kid-focused yokai films, including Daiei Films’ Krofft-inflected “Yokai Monsters” trilogy from the late ‘60s and 2005’s “The Great Yokai War,” a remake of Daiei’s 1968 film helmed by Takashi Miike in one of his more family-friendly modes. But one thing that unites all yokai movies is their artistry. The best part of any yokai movie is the obligatory scene where large numbers of supernatural creatures gather, either in celebration or in battle, allowing the audience to appreciate not only the imagination behind the monsters’ conception but also the craftsmanship behind bringing them to the screen. 

One of the most impressive of these scenes unfolds at the end of “Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters,” when the yokai come together to punish a group of greedy landlords plotting to evict their poor, but noble-hearted tenants. The spirits then take to the streets for the “Night Parade of 100 Demons,” a mythical event with thousand-year-old roots that now takes place twice daily on weekends and holidays at the Toei Eigamura theme park in Kyoto. There, for the second year in a row, a team of artists and performers from the Ashita no Horror (Tomorrow’s Horror) and Hyaku-yo-bako (100 Monsters) collectives have come together to bring a Yokai Festival in the park. 

Although a movie studio also owns it, Toei Eigamura is much smaller than parks like Universal Studios; it’s built around a backlot in the style of a 19th-century Japanese village, and is small enough that you could easily see the whole thing in an afternoon. This was fine by me, as I only had a few hours before I had to head back to Tokyo for my flight home the next day. The crowd early on a Saturday was mainly Japanese families with young children and foreign tourists of all ages, all drawn by Toei Eigamura’s three main attractions: Samurai movies, “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” and, from September to November, yokai. 

The Yokai Festival was a classic theme-park experience, with themed snacks — including a green matcha churro made to resemble Mikoshi-nyudo, a monk whose neck can grow to abnormally long proportions — costumed characters posing for pictures with visitors, and, of course, merch. The day I was there, there was a single “night parade” at 2:30 PM (again, this park is aimed mostly at young children), followed by a stage show where costumed yokai taught kids how to do a “Yokai Dance,” “Monster Mash”-style. It was kitschy but very charming, and the crowd’s enthusiasm was infectious. I took a picture with Yagyo-Douji, a three-eyed child who, like Kitaro, serves as an ambassador between humans and yokai at the festival.

Here, that also means bridging the gap between artist and audience. For an adult visitor, the most compelling thing about the Yokai Festival was the visibility of its creators’ fingerprints—literally, on the hand-sculpted masks worn by the yokai characters roaming the park, and figuratively, in the “Yokai Exhibition” that was installed upstairs from the walkable village. Here, visitors could see the thesis projects of two local art students, one of whom sculpted elaborate yokai out of cardboard and the other of whom created fanciful “fossils” of “extinct yokai” embedded into “burial sites” made of lacquer and foam. 

These were displayed alongside masks created by Hyako-yo-bako founder Junya Kono, who revived Kyoto’s fabled “Night Parade of 100 Demons” along its mythical route on the city’s northern edge as a graduate student in the mid-’00s. Now in his early forties, he’s a lecturer at a private arts university and the epicenter of yokai artistry in the region. Down in the gift shop, prints of his work were sold alongside books by Matthew Meyer, an American illustrator who, in the tradition of “Kwaidan” author Lafcadio Hearn, moved to Japan and now tends to an online database of Japanese legends and folklore full-time. 

Meyer, Kono, Mysterious Lisa, and their fellow yokai enthusiasts are part of a resurgent yokai culture that began in Japan and is now spreading worldwide. Yokai culture seeks to bring enchantment back to everyday life and make friends with the things that scare us. It respects craft, and the artists who paint, sculpt, and draw these creatures are as crucial to the culture as the yokai themselves. Much like the ancient people who turned their fears into monsters, modern yokai culture uses these folk beliefs as a conduit for creative expression, bringing 21st-century anxieties to electrifying, anthropomorphic life. 

This was never clearer than in a quiet corner of the ‘Yokai Museum” at Toei Eigamura, where a series of colorful woodblock prints hung on a plain black wall. Produced by Ashita no Horror director Ogaki Gaku, these “Modern Mononoke” personified internet-age anxieties: A genderless creature with a cracked, featureless mask and pink hair covered in eyes represented the pathological need for affirmation from strangers online, while the God of Disinformation took the form of a three-faced monk with a chaotic jumble of metal sprouting from its head. 

These are real fears, ones that are just as relevant today as the empty pit in your stomach when walking alone down a dark mountain road. So, what do the things that keep you awake at night look like? Could you draw them, describe them, give them a name? If you did, they might become less fearsome in the process—maybe even cute little mascots you could put in your pocket and take home.

“Love, Brooklyn” is the story of three people who are stuck as the community they love changes around them. Roger (André Holland) is a journalist who can’t get started on his story about gentrification. Casey (Nicole Beharie) is a gallery owner and his ex, though they cannot quite figure out whether they want to get back together. Nicole (DeWanda Wise) is a recent widow and the mother of a young girl, who has an intimate relationship with Roger but is still mourning his husband and insists she is not Roger’s girlfriend.

In an interview with RogerEbert.com, director Rachael Abigail Holder discussed casting, locations, and her deeply personal connection to Brooklyn.

You have three of my favorite actors in this film, so I’d love to hear about the casting process.

It started six years ago. They were out to another actor when they took me on as the director. And that actor read the script, and he passed on the project. And I was like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we made it Black?”

And André Holland has been one of my favorite actors for so long. That moment in “Moonlight” made me think, “We need to see this guy fall in love, like from the beginning.” And I thought it would be fun to see him be funny and a little softer than in the other roles he’s been in. So that was basically my pitch. He’d always wanted to work with Nicole, and so did I. But we didn’t know each other. We started pre-production in 2022, and she was shooting “The Morning Show.”

There was a world where we could have just recast her part and kept on going. And we just didn’t want to do it. The way I describe Nicole’s talent is that she creates more than just a little show; she writes multiple chapters of a story in her eyes. She’s amazing.

DeWanda and I have actually known each other since 2006. I cast her in one of my first New York plays. And we’ve just been like in each other’s worlds without really connecting. She’s playing a very different part than what we normally see her in. She had a juxtaposition of being a confident, blunt, and honest woman, yet also incredibly soft. I love her so much.

We often talk about a location being a character in a movie. Still, in this case, the location is the title character and a parallel for what is happening to the characters. You really made it look beautiful. What does Brooklyn mean to you, and what made it the right location for this story?

Brooklyn is and has always been one of the coolest places on Earth, and it has always been in a state of constant change. The best way to describe Brooklyn’s role as a character in our movie is the beginning of the story of this entire production. Paul Zimmerman wrote the script about his 20s, and Paul is now in his 70s. I read it in 2019, and I felt like he was writing about me and my friends. This particular change that we’re exploring in our story has happened before. I just thought that was wild, that it felt so timeless. 

Personally, Brooklyn is where I lived while studying for my MFA. When I was growing up, I lived on Long Island in a predominantly white neighborhood, and I attended an entirely white school. I used to go to Brooklyn every Sunday to go to church with my family. And my family’s West Indian, and Brooklyn’s sort of the landing place for so many Caribbean, West Indian people that going there every Sunday, even if we didn’t go to church, even if we were, like, picking up roti and curry, it felt like I was visiting with family all the time. So, Brooklyn, to me personally, was like my window into my culture.

I want to ask you about one particularly striking scene, where Roger and Casey are at a dinner party with a wealthy art patron named Lorna, and Casey is under a lot of pressure to accommodate her so she will buy more art.

That was one of the funniest and most fun scenes we shot. Cassandra Freeman is another actor who hasn’t had a chance to do their thing. She’s so hilarious, but she’s only played for the most part very dramatic roles. I really wanted Lorna to be a black woman because gentrification is not solely one color. And we all have to look at our relationship to power. I fought hard for her to be a black woman. And I wanted her to be funny too. I wanted it to be light, and I didn’t want it to feel like in-your-face commentary. 

In terms of moving the story along, this is a moment where Casey is vulnerable, and Roger picks up on it. She’s softened and upset in a way that only someone who really knows her can know. I think women, Black women, especially, we have this way when we’re upset, sometimes our upset-ness can look like we’re angry or tired. Nicole has this beautiful way of showing her softness and her vulnerability.

How does the theme of gentrification relate to the past and possible future romantic storylines?

It’s like what Roger says at the end of the movie. You can spend your time being mad about the past and holding on to what the current should be, or what the future should be. And you might be right. But I think life is about trying as much as possible to be mindful about how much you’re staying in the present. 

The homes and other interior spaces in the film reveal a great deal about the characters. 

Lili Teplan is a genius. She worked so hard with nothing and made all of my dreams come true. I had been building decks for every space in the film since 2019, and kept updating it and pulling images. It felt like the little version of me that would spend hours with my stuffed animals, playing, creating, and building. Meeting Lily and her artistry and her ability to make so much out of nothing was like our inner children meeting together. It was just so magical and amazing.  

Our location manager, George Marro, compiled a list of homes and spaces to visit in Brooklyn that we explored extensively. We didn’t have to do a whole build-out. 

What has been the best part of showing the film at festivals?

The American Black Film Festival was really fun, and I think that was the first time I watched it with a predominantly Black audience, a large group of Black people all together. I was like, “Oh, this is a different movie.” I felt like I was watching it for the first time, because a lot of the audience members were reacting and talking to the screen. And at the Black Star Film Festival, it felt like I was watching with my cousins.