Kwaidan (1964)

Yup, another 1960s horror set in feudal Japan already. But there are key differences, starting with the fact that this piece is a compilation of four stories, with no recurring characters between them. I hadn't seen a film like that since before I started this blog.

Might as well summarize them in order of presentation. In "Black Hair," a samurai gets a divorce against his wife's pleas, not because there's anything wrong with their relationship, but because he's seen an opportunity to marry into wealth; as you can imagine, he lives to regret it. In "The Woman in the Snow," a frosty demoness spares a man's life on the condition that he never tell anyone about her, which gets tempting when he falls for a reminiscent beauty. In "Hoichi the Earless," a blind shamisen player gets unknowingly solicited by ghosts to play a ballad about the battle that killed them, prompting his caretakers to fear for his place in the land of the living. In "In a Cup of Tea," a samurai sees a face clearly not his own reflection in (wait for it) a cup of tea, and his reaction does not please the owner of that face....

I had actually read a synopsis of a fairy tale nearly identical to the second in a book on demons. The yuki-onna (which translates roughly to the story title) stood out to me as the only demon with no known weaknesses: If she comes upon you, the only thing that might save your life is your handsomeness. Anyway, this made events easy for me to predict, and I'm not sure whether that increased or decreased my enjoyment. If nothing else, it helped assure me of the claim that these stories, which come from a 1904 collection of 17, date back centuries.

Easily the hardest aspect to like is the pacing: Apart from a rushed setup for the first chapter, it's one of the slowest movies I've ever seen, starting with the opening credit sequence. The unextended version I saw clocks in at 2 hours and 44 minutes but has barely enough plot or character development combined for half an hour. I almost gave away the whole shebang in my second paragraph. (Didn't explain the title of HtE, but that's a bit of a spoiler in itself.) It's one thing for the slowness to ratchet up the tension, but that happens only so often. Heck, BH doesn't get remotely scary until almost over. No wonder contemporary American audiences, who knew Toho Studios best for the likes of Godzilla, panned it.

Each tale also includes at least one character whom I regard as a great fool. It can be hard to sympathize with them or appreciate the writing quality surrounding them. That's scandalously common to the genre, so maybe I shouldn't harp on it here, but when there's so little substance to begin with...

The best aspect, meanwhile, is the artistry. This comes partly in the noh-style music, which, indeed, lends itself to a glacial pace. Well, much of the time, it hardly counts as music -- more like eerily dramatized sound effects, sometimes leaving actions curiously silent or possibly providing their sound much too late or too soon. I took interest in comparing and contrasting the score of Onibaba.

Personally, I prefer the visuals. The technicolor functions well, especially (as you might not expect) for TWitS, with its unworldly sky patterns. The special effects are mostly impressive for the time. And the camerawork rivals anyone else's.

My favorite chapter is either the second or the third. That said, the fourth might prove scariest overall. I like how it begins with a narration about many old Japanese writings ending abruptly without explanation.

Masaki Kobayashi had previously directed the dramatic trilogy The Human Condition, of which I've seen Part I, and the anti-samurai epic Hara-Kiri. I prefer those to his first attempt at horror, but it's nice to see him mix it up with something slightly more hit than miss.