Kuroneko

• Shindo shot it in black-and-white CinemaScope with Kiyomi Kuroda behind the camera; Kuroda's chiaroscuro work won Best Cinematography at the 1968 Mainichi Film Concours, while Nobuko Otowa took Best Actress at the same ceremony.
• It was made through Kindai Eiga Kyokai, the independent outfit Shindo co-founded, alongside Nichiei Shinsha, and distributed by the major studio Toho (Japanese theatrical release Feb 24, 1968) -- the same lean independent footing that produced his 1964 grass-marsh nightmare Onibaba.
• The original title is Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko ('A Black Cat in a Bamboo Grove'); scholar Yusuke Suzumura of Hosei University argues the phrasing is a deliberate nod to Akutagawa's 'In a Grove' (yabu no naka also being a Japanese idiom for a mystery that can't be unraveled), not an adaptation of it.
• The ghosts' gravity-defying glides, somersaults and leaps were built from Kabuki stagecraft -- slow-motion wirework echoing the chunori flying technique -- with the wires reworked by Shindo to mimic the movement of a cat rather than hidden by optical trickery.
• Lead Kichiemon Nakamura was a working Kabuki actor, later named Nakamura Kichiemon II and designated a Living National Treasure of Japan before his death in November 2021 at age 77.
• Toho International released it in the United States with English subtitles in July 1968; it waited until Criterion's October 18, 2011 DVD/Blu-ray for a restored home release.

The black cat that licks the women's wounds is the actual author of the haunting, not the women. Read that way, the mother and wife don't choose vengeance -- they're conscripted into a feline pact that demands samurai blood and human form only by night, which reframes every seduction as bondage rather than agency. Their tragedy isn't death; it's being made into instruments of a hunger that isn't theirs.

The film stages class war as horror. The women are peasants destroyed by samurai, and their afterlife exists solely to kill samurai -- until the state sends a peasant-turned-samurai (Gintoki, elevated for battlefield kills) to stop them. He's the system's trick: weaponizing one of their own against them. The bamboo grove becomes the only ground where the powerless hold power, and the establishment can't tolerate it.

Gintoki's wife breaks the pact to spend seven nights with him and is dragged to hell for it -- the movie's real argument is that love is the one force that can violate even a supernatural contract, and the price for it is damnation. The horror isn't the killing; it's that tenderness is the unforgivable transgression.

In a Japan gutted by civil war, a mother and her son's wife are raped and burned alive in their hut by a famished pack of samurai. A black cat finds the bodies and licks their wounds. What rises is a pact: the women return as onryo who lure warriors into a moonlit bamboo grove, seduce them, and tear out their throats to drink their blood. When the governor dispatches a celebrated swordsman to end the killings, he recognizes the ghosts at once. They are the wife and mother he came home from war to find gone. Duty and grief draw blood.