Macbeth: Current Events & Pop Culture

Throne of Blood a.k.a. Kumonosu-jô (“Spider’s Web Castle”)

Famed director Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 film, Throne of Blood, loosely adapts Shakespeare’s Macbeth into a story set in the samurai culture of feudal Japan. Literary critic Harold Bloom writes that, because Macbeth’s crimes are so universally offensive and immoral, Kurosawa’s adaptation is “uncannily the most successful film version of Macbeth, though it departs very far from the specifics of Shakespeare’s play.”