Kwaidan / Masaki Kobayashi (1964)
Kwaidan demonstrates absolute mastery of the craft of film making. Story, pacing, performance. Yes. Art direction. Lighting. Production design. Watching Masaki Kobayashi's masterpiece and trying to find flaws is a useless endeavor. So, let's not.
The color and look of this film is incredible. The entire production design creates a feel that is dreamlike, artificial and fully engrossing. Now that we've been subject to ten years of digital capture and The Volume, this kind of studio set production makes me wonder why did we stop doing this?
It's not nostalgia. The film's recurring through lines–the inescapability of promises and vows; the connection between the living and the dead; the danger of seeing or hearing things that shouldn't be taken in, voluntarily or accidentally; and karmic debt are relevant today, even if the film's setting is distant. The vivid color in the film makes it impossible to look away from for the entirety of its more than three hour runtime. Which is the point. The four stories are about each about commitments and viewing the film is a commitment.
Each story unfolds like a dreamlike tragedy. The four segments ("The Black Hair," "The Woman of the Snow," "Hoichi the Earless," "In a Cup of Tea") each turn on debts, promises, or transgressions against the dead or supernatural that come due — the past reasserting itself over people who thought they'd escaped it. Mournful, but not overwrought.
As horror, Kwaidan doesn't meet modern standards and doesn't fit neatly in a box.
The Black Hair: A samurai abandons his devoted first wife for a more advantageous marriage, only to return to her years later filled with regret. He finds her seemingly unchanged and finds passion rekindled, but dawn reveals a horrifying truth about what he's actually spent the night with.
The Woman of the Snow: Two woodcutters caught in a blizzard take shelter in a hut, where a pale spirit kills one and spares the other on the condition he never speak of what he saw; years later, married to a mysterious woman he loves, he breaks that promise.
Hoichi the Earless: A blind monk musician is secretly summoned night after night to perform for what he believes is a noble audience, unaware he's playing for the ghosts of a clan destroyed in an ancient battle, and his temple must take drastic measures to protect him from being claimed by the dead.
In a Cup of Tea: A samurai's servant sees a strange man's reflected face grinning up at him from his cup of tea, drinks it anyway, and is soon visited by the man and his ghostly companions — a mystery the author writing the tale is himself pulled into and left unable to finish.
As horror, Kwaidan doesn't meet modern standards and doesn't fit neatly in a box. The film is a cornerstone of Japanese gothic/folk horror (kaidan eiga), an anthology of ghost stories rooted in traditional folklore, emphasizing atmosphere, moral/karmic consequence, and the supernatural as an extension of unresolved human affairs, rather than slasher- or creature-feature mechanics. Kwaidan predates J-horror by three decades and doesn't share its texture, but the imagery of long black hair as a vector of dread in "The Black Hair," the vengeful female spirit in "The Woman of the Snow," and the idea of transgression triggering supernatural retribution are all threads that the later J-horror wave inherited and modernized.
In a way, this film could be thought of as a prototype for Creepshow and other anthologies that deal with the karma or payback from the universe. Only, that crass comparison ends just about there. Creepshow 2 is a personal favorite, but it is like comparing excellent graffiti to the Sistine Chapel. Where as Creepshow (and Tales From the Crypt, et al) treat karmic retribution as a payoff or punchline, Kwaidan are melancholic, inevitable and tragic.
Kwaidan isn't asking to frighten you so much as to haunt you, and on those terms it succeeds completely. Its commitments to color, to patience, to grief mirror the commitments its characters break at their peril, and the film rewards the viewer who honors that same demand for attention. Sixty years on, it remains less a relic of studio-bound film making than a rebuke to everything we gave up when we left it behind.
Key scene
Spoilers below.
The blizzard hut encounter in "The Woman of the Snow:" This is the moment where Kobayashi's theatrical, painterly instincts are most fully realized. The storm is obviously not real snow or real wind — it's built entirely on a sound stage, with an artificial sky (that huge painted eye watching from above) and unnaturally saturated blues and purples bleeding across the frame. Rather than undercutting the horror, that artificiality is the horror: it makes the hut feel like it's sitting inside the spirit's own dreamlike, otherworldly space rather than in the real world at all. The color design does emotional work too — the cold blues against the woodcutters' warm lantern light visually stage the collision between human vulnerability and something ancient and indifferent, before a single line of dialogue does.
Own it
My Letterboxd review