Psychopathy was not a thing in 1954, nor was it mentioned in 7 Samurai. Sure, psychopathy and social predation have existed since the rise of societies across the Ice Ages, but it was not really talked about until Alfred Hitchcock’s film noir classic Psycho (1960). In that movie, psychopathy was depicted and ultimately analyzed in clinical detail, but only after the villain’s schemes and fetishes had overwhelmed the hapless victim who stimulated them and the dogged detective who tried to solve the mystery. In 7 Samurai, by contrast, all we knew about the villainous bandits is that they were hungry and cruel, just like the villagers upon whom they preyed. Like the villagers they had been ravaging for years, they were fighting for survival. Unlike the villagers, they were fighting moreover for their own predatory brand of economic triumph in desperate times while the villagers, though sometimes criminally opportunistic of necessity, were trying on the whole to do everything right. They grew their own food, made their own lives and tried to keep both.

13 Assassins was different. It broke new ground in our awareness of psychopathy as a force that pervades every level of society, in this case right up to the venerated boardrooms of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It also aptly depicted psychopathy as a force that can’t be reasoned with. The arch villain, brilliantly played by Goro Inagaki, never slowed the cutting of the gory gash he inflicted on Japanese society — not because he was ambitious, as his place in the Shogun’s palace was already assured by inheritance and by the routine courses of neoptistic family politics — not because anyone got in his way, as anyone who knew about him was desperately trying to get out of his way — but simply because he was a psychopath.

Early in the story, the villain’s seemingly unstoppable blood-soaked rampage of ordinary everyday choice, which in the feudal Japanese society of the 19th Century was officially beyond reproach and unassailable through normal protocols, drove the responsible parties in the Shogun’s chain of command, originating by implication with the Shogun himself, to what everyone soon came to recognize as the only way to deal with psychopaths other than permanent imprisonment. The matter, in the impeccable yet opaque language of decent Japanese society, would be “settled quietly”.

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