Kwaidan

• The budget ran near 350 million yen and Kobayashi blew through it three-quarters of the way in. To finish, he took personal loans from friends and sold his own house. The overrun bankrupted his production company, Ninjin Club.
• No soundstage in Japan was big enough for the sets, so the whole film was shot inside a converted aircraft hangar. Each tale needed its own hand-painted cyclorama, so the crew had to redecorate the cavernous space between segments.
• The eerie skies are all hand-painted, not photographed. In 'The Woman of the Snow,' giant eyes are painted into the backdrop watching Minokichi, signaling the spirit's constant surveillance.
• Toru Takemitsu built the soundtrack out of treated natural sounds and silence rather than conventional scoring, splitting and reassembling wood-cracking and other noises into the film's unnerving sonic texture.
• It won the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival.
• The US theatrical release chopped out the entire 'Woman of the Snow' segment to shorten the runtime, gutting one of the film's centerpiece tales for American audiences.

Across all four tales the dead punish the living for breaking a vow or crossing a boundary, not for being evil. The samurai breaks faith with his wife, Minokichi breaks his oath of silence, and the monks who forget Hoichi's ears doom him to mutilation. Kwaidan reads less as horror about monsters than about the unforgiving arithmetic of broken promises.

The hand-painted eyes-in-the-sky and the unfinished 'In a Cup of Tea' frame suggest the films are obsessed with seeing and being seen. Hoichi performs for an audience he cannot see; Minokichi is watched by eyes he never notices; the final story literally breaks off mid-tale, implicating the viewer as the next one to be haunted.

Hoichi's body painted with protective scripture, ears left bare, plays as a parable about art and survival. The monk is only safe so long as he is completely covered in text, only to be maimed at the one spot left blank, hinting that the artist who gives himself to the dead always pays a piece of his own flesh.

Four ghost stories pulled from Lafcadio Hearn, each one a different shade of dread. A samurai abandons his loyal wife for status and comes home to find her hair waiting. A woodcutter swears silence to the white-skinned spirit who spared him. A blind monk plays his biwa for an audience of the drowned, his body painted in sutras to hide him from the dead. A man drinks the reflection of a stranger from a cup of tea. No jump scares here. Just slow, painted doom closing in.