The Ghost of Yotsuya

• Nakagawa's film premiered in Japan on July 11, 1959, two years before Shintoho declared bankruptcy in October 1961. The studio's actual final production was Nakagawa's own Jigoku (Hell, 1960), released the following year.
• The story is drawn from the kabuki play Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan by Tsuruya Nanboku IV, which premiered in July 1825 at Edo's Nakamuraza Theater, performed on alternating days interwoven with the revenge drama Chushingura.
• The film's vivid color cinematography was influenced by the international success of Hammer Studios' The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958).
• Yotsuya Kaidan has been adapted for film more than 30 times; critics still regard Nakagawa's 1959 version as the definitive screen adaptation of the story.
• Director Hideo Nakata has cited Yotsuya Kaidan, alongside Kwaidan and Ugetsu, as part of the classic Japanese ghost-story tradition he studied while making Ringu (1998).

The film reads as a punishment fantasy about male sexual entitlement. Iemon discards Oiwa the moment she ceases to be beautiful to him, and her ghost specifically weaponizes that obsession by appearing on the faces of the women he desires. The horror isn't just death, it's being forced to look at what you tried to throw away.

Oiwa's disfigurement happens in pieces while she's still alive - the poison rots her face and pulls her hair out in clumps before she ever dies. That's arguably more unbearable than the murder that follows. The horror front-loads: she's stripped of her humanity in a mirror, watching it happen to her, and everything after (the sword, the door, the water) plays almost like an afterthought to that first cruelty.

The door sequence, where Iemon nails both corpses facing each other, functions as a grim marriage ritual. He's literally binding them as a pair, and the ghost that follows may be born from that final obscene coupling rather than from the murder alone.

Tamiya Iemon wants out of his marriage to Oiwa, and he wants the granddaughter of a wealthy neighbor instead. A poison-soaked face cream, sent by the neighbor's household, disfigures Oiwa slowly, rotting her features and pulling her hair out in clumps. When she realizes what's been done to her, a sword mishap during her hysteria leaves her dead. Iemon nails her corpse and a servant he's framed for theft to opposite sides of a door and dumps them in a swamp. Oiwa doesn't stay buried. Her lantern-lit ghost comes back, and Iemon starts seeing her ruined face on every woman he touches. The swamp won't hold her.