book one redone - Coldbacon

sort of blueish-gray color.” Whether you believe Hoichi is touched by evil
or just led astray, the guy’s certainly on a mission. And it makes things
like rain, and even a lack of sight, irrelevant. The two bumbling idiots
hired to spy after him (terrified of rain, noises, everything) recall the two
peasants in Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (also known as R2D2 and
C3PO). Question: Why do the Heike clan ghosts want to keep hearing the
story of their own demise again and again? Look, they lost. They’re dead.
They need to get over it. And I wonder if this didn’t inform Miyazaki’s
idea for Spirited Away, in which the dead spirits are drawn to the bath
house night after night in what amounts to a sort of ritualistic celebration
of their own deadness. Like I said, get over it, or get scrubbed down
nightly by some pre-pubescent hot Japanese chicks—wait—
Eerieness: solid
Biwa Playing: beyond reproach
Color: blue turning gray over you
Mural Scrolling: Andrei Rublific
Applicability: Um, yeah
Story Four (In a Cup of Tea): Orange, blue and green. The spiral into
madness makes my heart flutter.
Eerieness: delayed
Biwa Playing: choreographic
Color: retained
Mad Laughter: plenty
Applicability: Ringu, I love you yeah, yeah, yeah
As you watch each story in Kwaidan, you learn certain things. For
example, the more attractive the girl, the more likely she is to be from
another world. Also, eerie sounds are bad. Storms? Bad. Doors swinging
open on their own—you guessed it, bad. And so the way it works is you
learn these rules, which the film then uses to build suspense and terror.
Almost paradoxically, therefore, the more you know, the more control the
film has over you. All horror films do this, only the Japanese do it better.
“What, this? Babies aren’t scared of this! Bring me a baby. I’ll prove it.”
– Master Shake, Law and Order, Criminal Intent
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