Rear projection is much older than cinema. Beginning in the late eighteenth century and reaching a peak of immense popularity in the nineteenth—the era of early industrialization—rear projection, in the form of the magic lantern, was used to display moving images of demons, monsters and ghosts, in evening presentations called phantasmagorias. When Marx wrote of a “phantasmagoric form,” this was the reference he was conjuring. His metaphor therefore linked the dark illusions of cinema’s prehistory to the dark operations capitalism was carrying out on the relations between men. With Kurosawa’s film, the metaphor comes full circle. The cinema of homo economicus ends where it began: in a hell of our own making.