Kwaidan

Kwaidan (1965) is a Japanese anthology horror film directed by Masaki Kobayashi, adapting four ghost stories from Lafcadio Hearn's collection of Japanese folk tales.

**The Black Hair:** A poor swordsman in Kyoto abandons his devoted first wife to marry a wealthy woman, hoping to improve his station in life. Despite gaining riches, he finds his new wife cold and selfish, and he increasingly yearns for the warmth of his former home. Eventually he returns to Kyoto and is reunited with his first wife, who receives him without reproach. He spends the night contentedly beside her — but awakens to find himself lying next to her rotted, skeletal corpse. The house collapses into ruin around him, and as he flees in terror, he is attacked by his dead wife's long black hair.

**The Woman of the Snow:** Two woodcutters — the elderly Mosaku and his young apprentice Minokichi — are caught in a fierce blizzard and take shelter in a ferryman's hut. During the night a supernatural snow woman, the yuki-onna, enters and breathes her killing cold upon Mosaku, freezing him to death. She spares Minokichi because of his youth and beauty, but warns him on pain of death never to speak of what he has witnessed. Time passes, and Minokichi meets and marries a beautiful young woman named Yuki. They have three children and live happily, and the townspeople remark that Yuki never seems to age. One winter night, watching his wife sew by lamplight, Minokichi is struck by the resemblance to the yuki-onna and breaks his vow, telling Yuki the old story. She reveals that she is indeed the snow woman. She cannot bring herself to kill him for the sake of their children, but she vanishes forever into the snowstorm, leaving only her sandals behind in the falling snow.

**Hoichi the Earless:** Hoichi is a blind biwa player at a Buddhist temple, renowned for his chanting of 'The Tale of the Heike,' the epic account of the naval Battle of Dan-no-ura in which the Heike clan was destroyed. Each night a spectral armored samurai comes to escort Hoichi to perform before a ghostly aristocratic court. His fellow monks grow alarmed at his nightly absences and follow him, discovering that he has been playing in a graveyard — performing for the spirits of the drowned Heike dead. The head priest, fearing Hoichi will be consumed by the spirits, writes the entire Heart Sutra across every inch of his body to render him invisible to ghosts. But in their haste, the priests neglect to write the sutra on his ears. When the samurai returns and finds only two disembodied ears floating in the dark, he tears them off to bring back as evidence of compliance. Hoichi survives, and his fame as a musician spreads so widely that wealthy patrons shower the temple with donations. He lives out his days honored and prosperous, though earless.

**In a Cup of Tea:** Framed as a story being read by a writer awaiting his publisher, this segment tells of Kannai, a samurai retainer to Lord Nakagawa in the Edo period. While drinking tea at a teahouse, Kannai sees the clear reflection of an unfamiliar man's face in his cup. Disturbed, he drinks it anyway. Shortly after, the face's owner — a man named Heinai Shikibu — appears in the flesh; when Kannai challenges him, Shikibu vanishes. That night three ghostly retainers of Shikibu arrive and attack Kannai in turn, each vanishing when wounded. The story breaks off unresolved before Kannai's fate is revealed, because — the frame conceit suggests — the author never wrote an ending. When the publisher arrives at the author's home, he and the landlady discover the writer himself inexplicably trapped inside a large water jar, staring out in terror, and they flee in panic. The film ends on this unresolved, self-reflexive note.

Sources: Wikipedia