Thoughts from the committee
Before making the highest-budget Japanese film to date, Masaki Kobayashi was best known for morally grounded, socially-conscious movies like Harakiri and The Human Condition. With Kwaidan, he shifted gear to a lavish horror anthology steeped in Japanese folklore.
The film is an adaptation of a 1904 book written by Lafcadio Hearn, a westerner who ended up in Japan after moving through Greece, Ireland, the United States and the West Indies. Kobayashi might be using a book written by a foreigner as the basis for his film, but the four parts, ‘The Black Hair’, ‘The Woman in the Snow’, ‘Hoichi the Earless’ and ‘In a Cup of Tea’, are each part of storytelling traditions that long predate the archipelago opening up to westerners.
Taken as a whole, Kwaidan is an odd film. The hand-painted sets, orientalist source material and extreme stylisation give it a sense of artificiality that isn’t present in contemporaries like Kobayashi’s earlier work or Kaneto Shintō’s gnarly folktale Onibaba, released the same year. But taken as a vibrant fairy-tale horror, an early example of a lineage that includes films like Suspiria and Pan’s Labyrinth, it seems nothing short of essential.
“Kwaidan’s fusion of transcendent beauty and icy cosmic emptiness—its creation of spaces both vast and hermetic—sometimes calls to mind 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Shining. One can well imagine Stanley Kubrick paying close attention to what Kobayashi achieved here.” – Geoffrey O’Brien, Criterion