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Haniya Yutaka (1909–1997) was one of the leading figures in postwar Japanese literature and avant-garde art movements, chiefly remembered today for his unfinished metaphysical novel <i>Dead Souls</i> [<i>Shirei</i>, 1946–1997]. This essay, however, examines his hitherto unknown theoretical writings on film. Haniya and other writers gathering around the literary magazine <i>Kindai bungaku</i> [Modern Literature, 1946–1964] shared a keen interest in film’s unparalleled importance in twentieth-century modernity. And their collective efforts to transgress conventional boundaries between literature and film culminated in the 1957 publication of the anthology entitled <i>Literary Film Theory</i> [<i>Bungakuteki eigaron</i>]. Above all, Haniya’s film writing was clearly distinguished for its tendency to explicate film’s paradoxical mode of existence <i>philosophically,</i> an approach that the film critic Matsuda Masao later called an “ontological film theory” [<i>sonzaironteki eigaron</i>]. Looking closely at his essays and interviews collected in <i>Literary Film Theory</i> and two other volumes on this topic—<i>Thoughts in the Darkness</i> [<i>Yami no naka no shisō</i>, 1962] and <i>Dreaming in the Darkness</i> [<i>Yami no naka no musō</i>, 1982]—the present essay reads Haniya’s theorization of cinema in relation to both Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology and recent scholarly debates on non-Western film theory.