Jigoku

Nobuo Nakagawa spends an hour on a moral tangle: a hit and run, a fiancée's death, a chain of betrayals radiating out through a whole cast of guilty people.

Then everybody dies, and the film relocates to the eight hot hells of Buddhist cosmology and stays there. Skin is flayed, bodies are sawn, a river of pus is crossed, and a father searches for an unborn child on the bank of the Sanzu.

Made in 1960 for a studio about to go bankrupt, with sets that are frankly cheap, and none of it matters because the imagery is so far ahead of anything the West was doing that it looks like a different decade.

It is the first film to depict hell in this much sustained detail and it predates the Italian gore cycle by three years.