Kwaidan

Midnight Eye review... Kwaidan (Kaidan, 1965, director: Masaki Kobayashi). "...Kwaidan harks back to a time when the ghost story was not a vehicle for delivering as many gore-ridden shocks to the audience as possible, but was concerned with creating a dense emotional atmosphere, rich in poignant moments of sadness and a pervasive sense of loss. Like his contemporary Kaneto Shindo, whose films Onibaba and Kuroneko are amongst the most famous of that period's 'kaidan' (the Japanese term for ghost story, the genre from which Kobayashi's film derives its name), Kobayashi uses the supernatural world as a pretext to make a highly poetic foray into the human consciousness. A far cry from the kind of J-horror that is currently being used as a blueprint to revive the horror genre in Hollywood, Kwaidan is set in an ancient world, not so very different from our own in this sense, in which the most horrific thing is often not the ghost, but the human spirit." Also... the Trailer (QuickTime Video) for Eureka Video's 'Masters of Cinema Series' edition of Kwaidan.