The Cinematheque

“A slow-burn chiller, suffused with the kind of quietly rising dread that Kobayashi did so well. This is unsettling, uncanny horror, in which each individual tale leisurely builds to a macabre punchline.”

Brogan Morris, BFI

Returning to cinemas in a sumptuous new restoration, Kobayashi Masaki’s resplendent quartet of Japanese ghost stories is one of the chefs d’oeuvre of the great humanist director, whose canonical Harakiri also screens this cycle. Nominated for an Oscar, and winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, Kwaidan adapts four supernatural tales (themselves based on traditional Japanese folklore) by Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek Irish writer who settled in Japan in the late 19th century. They relate the chilling accounts of a samurai returning to the wife he once abandoned, a young woodcutter’s life-altering encounter with a demonic snow maiden, a sightless musician summoned by apparitions to sing of an epic sea battle, and a warrior discovering the reflection of a mysterious stranger in his teacup. Expressively shot in colour and widescreen on theatrical, hand-painted soundstages, Kwaidan was, at the time, the most expensive Japanese film yet made. It is presented here in its original three-hour cut.

In Japanese with English subtitles

“A horror picture with an extraordinarily delicate and sensuous quality … Kwaidan is a symphony of colour and sound that is truly past compare.”

Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

“Both gorgeous and scary … It can still hold its own against the new generation of horror films still sourcing it.”

Kim Newman, Empire