#Japanese symbol for female yuki series#

When Hoichi disocvers that he has been decieved by the dead and refuses to perform for them again, the ghosts exact a terrible revenge. Each night he is summoned to the nearby graveyard to chant the epic tale for the ghosts of the warriors who fell in that battle, duped by the spirits into believing that he's performing in the home of a wealthy lord. 'Hoichi the Earless', easily the most powerful of the bunch, regards a blind biwa (a stringed instrument resembling a guitar) player renowned for his moving rendition of the tragic tale of the battle between the Genji and Heiki clans. (If you saw the last episode of the flaccid Tales From the Darkside movie, on which this was based, you have an idea of how this one ends). 'The Woman in the Snow' concerns an apprentice woodcutter who encounters an eerily beautiful female ice-vampire - called a 'Yuki-Onna - who spares his life on the condition that he never tell a soul about their encounter. You know something in this household just ain't right. He returns to their decaying old house to find her exactly as he left her, affectionate and forgiving as could be.

'The Black Hair' is the tale of an impoverished samurai who abandons his loyal and loving wife to marry the daughter of a wealthy lord in another province, only to discover many years later that he is still in love with his first spouse. Kwaidan is far less concerned with springing shocks and fraying nerves than it is in exploring the whirlwind of conflicting emotions that swirl in the dark night of the human soul. Henry 'twist' endings and deliberately telegraph their punches, case in point being 'Hoichi the Earless', which gives away its climax with its very title! This film is also missing the compulsory 'wrap-around' story normally employed by anthology films to tie all the stories together, and the horror elements are far more low-key than most horror aficianados are used to. To begin with, all of the episodes eschew the usual O. Kwaidan differentiates itself from the pack in a number of significant ways. Terror's House of Horrors, Tales From the Crypt & Asylum).

#Japanese symbol for female yuki series#

Shot in gorgeous, sumptuous color way back in 1964 by director Masaki Kobayashi, Kwaidan is an unusual, unique and quite extraordinary entry in the old horror anthology genre best represented by 1945's Dead of Night and Milton Subotsky's Amicus anthology series (i.e. The words 'beautiful', 'lyrical' and 'evocative' aren't ones that you would normally attribute to a horror movie, but they are precisely the ones that best describe Kwaidan, a quintet of Samurai Gothics based (interestingly enough) on the writings of an American author by the name of Lafcadio Hearn.