Entry #8: Kwaidan
Kwaidan is named after a Japanese term that translates into English as "ghost stories", so you know some creepy and crawly things will be going down in this Masaki Kobayashi directorial effort from 1964. Kwaidan certainly lives up to the "stories" part of the term "ghost stories" as it delivers a trio of haunted tales (plus an epilogue) each connected by the recurring moral of the necessity of keeping your promises. The first of these stories is The Black Hair, which follows a swordsman (Rentaro Mikuni) leaving his faithful wife for another woman in the hopes of gaining a better place in society. Next up is The Woman of the Snow, which see's a man named Minokichi (Tatsuya Nakadai) trapped in a frozen wasteland and encountering a deadly spirit known as the Yuki-Onna (Keiko Kishi), which promises to spare his life if he promises to never tell a soul about their encounter.
