Released in Japan in 1977, Katō Tai's Beast in the Shadows adapts Edogawa Ranpo's famous novel of the same name. In keeping with the then-popular fashion for "detective films", it draws on Ranpo's opposition between "orthodox" and "heterodox" narratives to question the links between the iconic and the textual. Indeed, the plot that Oyamada Shizuko, a "heterodox" novelist under the pseudonym Ōe Shundei, hatches to kill her husband and get rid of her "orthodox" competitor, Samukawa Kōichirō, rests precisely on the opposition between the image, supposedly the bearer of illusion, and the text, the vector par excellence of logical reasoning. But Katō underlines the relativity of this division by arranging several posters (here described as "text/image precipitates") at key moments in the film.