KWAIDAN (1964)

This movie won the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival, so at least some anthology films (sometimes called portmanteau films) used to enjoy more popularity than they do now.  No frame story this time, just four ghost stories; the title means 'ghost story' but it is untranslated in America.  I don't know why they translate some foreign movie titles but other times they don't.  Why isn't Yojimbo just called Bodyguard?  Oh forget it.  This movie is very colorful and theatrical, drawing on rich traditions of the stage, with gigantic sets depicting all sorts of natural and unnatural occurrences in vivid, expressionist bursts of artifice and design.  The stories are all slow-burns, even the abbreviated final story, that rely more on mounting tension and creeping suspense than blood and guts or things jumping out at you suddenly.

The source material is a collection of ghost folklore compiled by Lafcadio Hearn, a foreigner living in Japan who sparked interest in eastern mythology with his books before his death in 1904.  The first story is called 'The Black Hair' and features one of my favorite tropes in horror films, the evil protagonist.  A samurai decides to abandon his wife, a humble weaver, so that he could marry a much richer woman, and live a life of luxury.  After a few years he starts to notice how much he hates his new wife and how much she hates him so he decides to head back to his first wife and see if she'll take him back.  I saw the twist coming in this story, but I thought it was coming earlier than it was, so by the time it actually happened, I was still caught a little off guard.

'The Woman of the Snow' is the next tale, and concerns the legend of the Yuki-onna, a ghostly white spirit that appears to men when they are freezing to death.  After dispatching an elderly woodcutter, she decides to spare his apprentice on the condition that he never speaks a word of the incident to anyone.  This sounds awfully familiar.  The depiction of weather is phantasmagorical, with pounding blizzards appearing and disappearing at a moments notice, the entire season changing instantaneously, and the snowy sky forming as a strange blue and white mosaic, like some kind of glacier, after appearing as a warm orange and pink patched-together quilt.

'Hoichi the Earless' is the third story, and its a real show-stopping number.  Hoichi is a blind monk who specializes in reciting an epic poem recounting the defeat of the Heike clan in a massive naval battle with the Genji clan.  At night, a mysterious visitor takes him to recount the story before an imperial court, but its not long before his fellow monks discover that Hoichi has practicing his talent before the very same deceased warriors the story honors.  The design of the naval battles is cleverly unrealistic like some sort of haunted museum piece come to life, with samurai lined up in rows on small boats moving towards each other, waiting to begin the hacking and slashing. 

The spirit world as well, appearing as an ordinary cemetery to most people, is an affectingly otherworldly place, with large empty spaces filled with rolling tides of fog and immense columns separating the groups of ghosts in court.  His fellow monks paint Hoichi all over with protective prayers in a hypnotic sequence that suggests just how fearful they are of what the spirits might do if they feel slighted.  This segment really goes all out, with even more ornately painted skies than the other tales, intricately costumed ghosts holding court, and sudden violence when the ghosts become enraged at Hoichi's refusal to continue performing for them.

The fourth story, called 'In a Cup of Tea', is much smaller, but functions well as a sort of after-dinner mint for the sumptuous banquet that preceded it.  Strange visions plague a man whenever he looks into his reflection on a liquid surface, and later at night he is terrorized by three visitors who all seem intent on enacting some sort of spiritual revenge.  The story then jumps to a historian reading an account of what we've just seen, and finding that the lines between history and his own life might be blurring.  An appropriate final story, which might leave the viewer wondering just how safe he is from the different kinds of specters he's witnessed in this film.