Today for Spooky Day something a little bit different: I usually gather up a few horror movies to review but today there will be only one movie... kind of. See, today's film is an anthology film, made up of different stories with a common theme: ghosts. Which is appropriate, really, since the name of the movie (in Japanese anyway) is "Ghost Stories".
1965
Director: Masaki Kobayashi
"The Black Hair" - This is the least satisfying tale in the bunch, but it's still pretty good. Being the first one it sort of whets your appetite for the other three. A samurai divorces his saintly wife to marry up into a successful family and get ahead on the social ladder. After a while though he realizes that his new wife is a total bitch and he kind of misses his ex that he treated like total crap. He returns home and this being a ghost movie everything goes about as well as you'd expect.
"The Woman Of The Snow" - A woodcutter is caught in a snow storm and watches his companion get the life sucked out of him by a scary lady snow vampire. Instead of killing him though she lets him go after making him promise not to tell anybody - a little while later a mysterious stranger (hmmm) shows up in his life and marries him, being a perfect wife and never aging (
HMMMMM). One night he decides to tell her about that experience in the snowstorm many those many years before. Things go about as well as you'd expect.
This one is more striking than the last - the sets are weird and very expressionistic, with sky-balls all over the place. And damn is that one creepy snow-lady.
"Hoichi The Earless" - This one is the best of the bunch. It's about a blind boy at a temple who is tempted by dead spirits to come and sing for them about the battle that they all died in. After the temple priest gets hip to the whole thing (having your workers sitting in a graveyard singing all night is apparently not cool) he paints holy symbols on Hoichi to hide him from the restless ghosts... but forgets oooooone little area (if you need to guess than look at the title, fool). Things go about as well as you'd expect.
This is the segment from this movie that everyone remembers and for good reason. It could easily be a standalone movie, with awesome camerawork, atmosphere and acting. Everyone also gripes about the title giving away the ending, but the point of this movie is not that you are surprised by what happens because you're not supposed to be. The whole point is that you basically know what is going to happen - tragic events are inevitable and obvious, and the horror comes from the viewer knowing that something really bad is going to happen, it's just a matter of when.
"In A Cup Of Tea" - This one is just
weird (and that's saying something). A samurai drinks a cup of tea (or water, I mean it looked like water to me, but the title....) that has a face in it - later he is visited by a ghost who claims to be injured because of it. The samurai tries to fight him and his ghostly minions. Things go about as well as you'd - wait, no they don't because the story abruptly ends, and even though I just said that the movie isn't really about surprises I'm still not gonna say why because that would ruin the fun.
Kwaidan is not an in-your-face kind of horror movie. It's more under-your-skin creepy. It's atmospheric, beautiful and slow. The version I watched had twenty minutes trimmed out (Criterion seriously needs to reissue this movie) and it was still over two-and-a-half hours long. Every minute is gorgeous though. They don't make horror cinema like this anymore.
Happy Halloween.
