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Kwaidan (1965)
Masaki Kobayashi
Kwaidan is one of the finest assemblages of love, longing, terror and
regret I have ever seen. Break it down:
Story One (Black Hair): Great story. Compelling. The immediate
decision of the samurai to leave his young wife seemed a bit rash. But
isn’t that always the way?
Eerieness: permeating
Sound Suspense: tick tock it doesn’t stop
Color: natural
Loss and Longing: unparalleled
Applicability: wide
Story Two (The Woman in the Snow): Something is done to a man for no
apparent reason. In George Sluizer’s The Vanishing, a loved one is taken
away. In “The Woman in the Snow,” a strange secret must be kept, or
rather honored. In both films, the man has a choice. He can either let it go,
or he can let it torture him to madness. In The Vanishing, Rex would have
done better to have gotten over his obsession. In Kwaidan the man is
punished for doing just that. Taken together, the combined lesson is
“damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
Eerieness: sporadic
Sound Suspense: the melody haunts my reverie
Color: epic, blue and amber like jewels in the desert
Loss and Longing: like the body of Solaris
Applicability: ghost women are hot as shit
Story Three (Hoichi: The Earless): It is interesting to see the gentle
delicacy with which the two paternal monks approach the young monk’s
strange behavior. Quite a contrast to the stereotype of rigid Japanese
discipline. Perhaps the message here is “spare the rod, the child will turn a
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