"Demon hag"), also titled The Hole, is a 1964 Japanese historical drama and horror film written and directed by Kaneto Shindō.

Two fleeing soldiers are ambushed in a large field of tall, thick reeds and murdered by an older woman and her young daughter-in-law.

The two women loot the dead soldiers, strip them of their armour and weapons, and drop the bodies in a deep pit hidden in the field.

[3] Once a location was found near a river bank at Inba Swamp in Chiba Prefecture, they put up prefabricated buildings to live in.

[6] Most of the cast consisted of members of Shindo's regular group of performers, Nobuko Otowa, Kei Satō, Taiji Tonoyama, and Jūkichi Uno.

"[13] The review praised Kuroda's "fine photography" but said that nothing else "in the film quite matches this opening among the reeds, or its aftermath in the ruthless stripping of the victims and disposal of their corpses, except perhaps the encounter between the old woman and the General.

"[13] Variety noted that Otowa "is superb as the older woman, while Jitsuko Yoshimura contribs an excellent characterization as the daughter-in-law, especially in the ‘romantic’ sequences."

"[14] A. H. Weiler of The New York Times described the film's raw qualities as "neither new nor especially inventive to achieve his stark, occasionally shocking effects.

Although his artistic integrity remains untarnished, his driven rustic principals are exotic, sometimes grotesque figures out of medieval Japan, to whom a Westerner finds it hard to relate.

"[15] The review noted that Shindo's "symbolism, which undoubtedly is more of a treat to the Oriental than the Occidental eye and ear, may be oblique, but his approach to amour is direct... the tale is abetted by Hiyomi Kuroda's cloudy, low-key photography and Hikaru Kuroda's properly weird background musical score.

"[15] Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, writing in 2010, commented: "Onibaba is a chilling movie, a waking nightmare shot in icy monochrome, and filmed in a colossal and eerily beautiful wilderness.

[17] While Onibaba is said to gain its inspiration from the Shin Buddhist parable by Kaneto Shizawa's discretion, onibaba also refers to traditional tall tales and ghost stories throughout Japan of vicious and monstrous elderly demon women said to stalk about various areas and wilderness to hunt for human victims to take back to their lairs and feast on them.

This can be seen through how both the mother and daughter in law lurk about their home territory of the fen which they live in, awaiting stragglers and lost soldiers of war before killing them for their valuables in order to purchase and gather food in their desperate times.

With the outbreak of the Onin War, Onibaba also portrays an almost post-apocalyptic level of societal breakdown and moral degeneracy; as Kyoto was valued as Japan's capital long before the rise of the city of Edo and the reestablishment of the Shogunate's power by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the violence and warfare of the Onin War eventually spread throughout Kyoto itself, completely causing chaos and throwing Japan into turmoil because of its abandonment and desolation as Japan's center of politics, religion, and economics into the twilight of the Nanbokucho era.

Its reach of anarchy can be felt into the rural lives of the mother and daughter-in-law and their neighbors, lacking community to ensure moral guidance and direction, delving into wanton abandon as their lives become more of a struggle to survive and desolate of human interaction, and pushing them to go as far as to commit what would be heinous crimes and atrocities in more peaceful times, but has now been necessitated to be essential to surviving their meager and bleak times.

With origins from Buddhist themes, the film is evocative of the Third Age of Buddhism (Japanese: Mappo) which in Heian Era depictions, spoke of how demons from Hell sent forth by the infernal King Enma to be unleashed upon the earth, and hunt eagerly for sinners, degenerates, and non-believers to throw into eternal damnation.

[21] Writing for Sight & Sound, Michael Brooke noted that "Onibaba's lasting greatness and undimmed potency lie in the fact that it works both as an unnervingly blunt horror film (and how!)

[23][24] Onibaba was screened at a 2012 retrospective on Shindō and Kōzaburō Yoshimura in London, organised by the British Film Institute and the Japan Foundation.

[25] Willem Dafoe, a professed admirer of the film, has stated that he wanted to remake Onibaba, and indeed acquired the rights for a time, but ultimately felt that any contemporary spin he might put on it would "ruin" the source material.