Film · 1964 · Films · 1960s
Onibaba
Scored from 115 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
In fourteenth-century Japan, with the countryside emptied by civil war, an older woman and her daughter-in-law survive in a hut amid a vast field of susuki grass by ambushing lost and wounded samurai, stripping their armour, and dropping the bodies down a deep pit. The loot is traded to a merchant for millet. When Hachi, a neighbour who went off to war with the younger woman's husband, comes back alone and begins sleeping with her, the older woman sees both her livelihood and her only companion slipping away, and a samurai wearing a demon mask appears out of the grass. Kaneto Shindo's black-and-white film works at once as folk horror and as a study of hunger and jealousy.
Released in 1964, Onibaba is a drama, horror and thriller film. It was made in Japan, in Japanese. It runs 2h 3m.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 362 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 115 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 117 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 1,928 1960s films, not against the whole corpus.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Onibaba lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1960s (1,929 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 115.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
