Review of Kwaidan (1965) by Devon — 06 Mar 2009

Anyone who's ever seen "The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)", or any of his previous films based on Poe's stories, knows Vincent Price's contribution to horror. He seems to specialize in the weird and the offbeat, the creepy and the sometimes trippy.

I get the feeling Vincent Price would've felt right at home in Kwaidan (if he had been in Japan at the time), a japanese ghost film that leans toward the avante garde. Kwaidan is actually four short separate movies, each with highly stylized sets and costumes (painted backgrounds with giant eyes in the sky).

In story one, a samurai leaves his wife for a rich woman but realizes his mistake as he's constantly haunted by her memory. In the second story, A man trapped in a blizzard is spared by a snow vampire on the condition he never tell a soul the story of meeting her.

In the third story, a young blind priest is asked to sing the story of an ancient battle to the ghosts of the participants. In the fourth story, a swordsman goes to get a drink and sees a stranger's face in the cup.

All these stories play out almost like silent films, as there is very little dialogue, but there is a jarring, dischordant soundtrack. The art direction is very imaginative, everything looks like a graphic novel, unfortunately, it takes forever to turn each page.

The movie is glacially-paced. I hit the fast forward button and it only made the actors move in real time. The stories are all too predictable as well, there's virtually no suspense generated. Perhaps these simple stories were taken from children's fairy tales.

Perhaps this film is so inaccessible to me because it was written for another culture at another time. If so, I don't know. You could watch old episodes of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" and get the same effect in a fraction of the time it takes to watch Kwaidan.