Kaidan

In the Nineteenth Century, the acupuncturist Soetsu lives with his daughters Oshiga and Osano in the Shimousa Province, Japan. He saves some money, becomes a moneylender and lends his money to the samurai Fukami. Three years later, he visits Fukami to collect his money and the samurai kills him and dumps his body in the Kasane Swamp, where bodies disappear and never return to the surface. However, before dying, Soetsu curses Fukami and the samurai goes crazy and kills his wife.

Twenty-five years later, Fukami's son Shinkichi, who is a street vendor of tobacco, meets Oshiga, who is a singing teacher in Edo, and they fall in love with each other. Oshiga is older than Shinkichi and financially supports him. She becomes infamous in Edo and when her student Ohisa flirts with Shikichi, she becomes jealous and decides to give no more classes to her. Shinkichi decides to leave Oshiga and move to his homeland Hanyu with Ohisa. Oshiga has an argument with Shinkichi and he hits her face with the Bachi of her Shamisen. Oshiga has an infection in her face and dies; however, she curses Shinkichi and promises that she will haunt and take to the grave any woman that he loves.

"Kaidan" is a great Japanese ghost story about deadly jealousness, curse and doomed love. This stylized slow-paced film combines romance, drama and supernatural genres with a magnificent cinematography. The romance between Oshiga and Shinkichi in Edo shows beautiful locations and the camera work uses angles and movements to show details sometimes in a corner or in another room or space.

I believed that Hideo Nakata's "Kaidan" would be a remake of the 1964 Masaki Kobayashi's classic masterpiece, but they are totally different stories. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "A Maldição do Rio" ("The Curse of the River")

Hideo Nakata is himself perhaps a haunted man. Despite having had quite a full film career already, it is only by his work in the horror genre that he is largely known. This is especially true in the West where viewers can be a lot more literal in their definition of the genre. With just Nakata's name alone on the marketing, anyone could be excused for having expectations closer to films like Ring or Dark Water. It is these unfortunate connections that will undoubtedly drag this film down into murky waters not unlike those often present in Nakata's films.

The film is a fairly close retelling of Encho Sanyutei's 19th century ghost story entitled "Shinkei Kasane-ga-fuchi" about the cursed fate of two families and the karma passed on from parent to child. Anyone familiar with the 1964 film Kwaidan (the title uses an antiquated spelling of the same word, both meaning "ghost story") will see similarities in the presentation of Nakata's film. Many have said that he intended to pay homage to ghostly films of the 50s and 60s, but that is not going back far enough. The film reflects the very traditions of Japanese ghost stories and fables. The main actor, known for Kabuki, plays opposite a character once played by his own father in a Kabuki performance years earlier.

I stated earlier about the limited view of the horror genre as held by many Western film goers, but it hasn't always been the case. Sadly the idea of a "slow burn" and finding suspense in the thematic fabric of a film is something rare today in Hollywood horror. Too often, films depend on incredibly literal scares, in the form of disturbing images, gore and violence, but lack any real thematic richness. In some ways Nakata's few inserted jump scares in the film made me balk a little. Perhaps it is his Hollywood experience that convinced him that such heavy handedness was needed. The film has some genuinely tense and "Oh .. !" moments (I am sure you know what I mean) that really don't need any audio cues to let us all know they are happening.

Perhaps this is connected to the negativity around this film. For the few scares present in the run time of the story, there aren't much. In fact, categorising the film as "horror" might me somewhat of a misnomer as well, at least by modern Hollywood definition. What we have with Kaidan is a traditional Japanese ghost story and fable that strives to not only thrill us but also impart some wisdom. The true horror of the story is the tragedy inherent in its themes and sheer extent that it spreads. Obviously, what comes along with such a film, some viewers won't like. Viewers expecting something more akin to modern horror films like The Grudge, will no doubt find parts or all of Kaidan boring and uneventful. Others will decry the feature of "more long-haired ghosts" but to be fair, such people don't appreciate the deep tradition of ghost stories in Japan.

White kimonos are what women are cremated or buried in and traditionally all women had very long hair devoid of any colouring or permed curls. I say, if it ain't broke, why try to fix it. Certainly it is better than Hollywood's constant recycling making every second movie monster like the love-child of the Alien and Pumkinhead, or the tendency to laden everything down with CGI and "in case you didn't get it" effects (I am referring to The Ring's, Hollywood equivalent of Sadako).

So whether you'll like this film or not depends on yourself. The film is not a modern horror tale full of scares and jumps. It is a dramatic, period ghost film, drawn from tradition and based on a 19 century novel. If instead of demanding Kaidan to entertain you, open yourself to what it has to tell you. This a story not unlike those told around campfires at night. The scares are in the themes and situations that the characters face and the fear is in those characters' minds. As with many good horror films, the film is out to scare the characters, not you. Get into their heads and you'll feel it too.

The best Japanese horror movies are good because of the atmosphere they create. I would say that they are good not because they are frightening, but because of the psychological impact they cause. However, this one was not good in this aspect. The film fails to show the true horror that the main character were passing through. It was quite an ordinary horror film, trying to scare the audience with sudden appearances of spirits and strange creatures. Speaking of which, the visual effects are not very good, which should not be a problem for a true horror movie, since you can create a true atmosphere of horror without using so many visual effects. Just think about great horror Japanese movies such as Onibaba. Also, the characters were not well developed and their interaction was far too simple. The movie tries to focus on both horror and romance, but there is no attempt to make a deeper analysis on the relationship between men and women. However, it is important to highlight that it was successful, as almost all Japanese horror movies, in avoiding the manifest approach of horror used in Hollywood. None of the characters are particularly good or bad. And there is no attempt to moralize, which is common in many Hollywood movies, when there is a clear message that bad things only happen to bad people, so be a good boy and you will have a great life.

After falling in love, a salesman allows his wife's death to occur igniting a powerful ghostly curse that befalls him and whomever he loves that carries on through the years and must find a way to break the curse.

Overall this was a pretty disappointing effort that should've had a lot going for. What is so enjoyable about this one is the fact that this one manages to perfectly expose the time-period setting here as feudal Japan in the background serves as quite an impactful location for all the ghostly activities. The cramped villages, the formal society and the countryside air provide a spectacular place for a traditional old-school ghost story to take place and that makes for a chilling setting here when they start occurring in the second half. That's really where this gets good as the fruition of the curse start coming into play as the ghostly hauntings that prevent his search for normalcy are incredibly enjoyable and truly chilling, as the encounter at the lake with his second wife are quite creepy with the stomping footsteps of someone approaching, the ghostly eyes and the possessed attempting to strange him resulting in the chilling realization of his actions being a fantastic encounter along with the a later scene of him appearing to his son only to realize his cursed ghost is in the room with him and drags him into a ghostly portal and emerging at a lake where he falls victim to another chilling ghostly trap that continues on the curse. The finale works well with the action-packed chasing and brutal slashings on his pursuers allowing for plenty of graphic bloodletting to go along with that frantic action to end this on a high note, but otherwise this was pretty troubling. The biggest issue here is the fact that there's just not a whole lot of interesting horror elements going on here, for the first half of this contains absolutely nothing at all beyond setting up the doomed romance that starts the curse. That this takes up to fifty minutes before even starting the situation, there's plenty of times here where it just doesn't get going with any sort of urgency or immediacy in signaling the ghostly activities that crop up, and it tends to feel more like a tragic romance than out-and-out horror even throughout the later half when he finds himself continually struck under the confines of the curse. This drags on for quite a few times here as the time and period setting here undermine the horror efforts with their strictly rigid society and completely impersonal approach which tends to let this go for the truly chilling set-ups. The other big flaw here is a completely confusing and unnecessary prologue that tells of a samurai's actions leading to a curse involving a mysterious lake in the area which has no part in the rest of the film at all for their familial status doesn't impact them, the lake isn't shown until the finale and it's his actions that drive the curse more than anything so to put that there is a little awkward. These tend to lower this one enough when it could've been great.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Language, a sensual sex scene and mild drug use.

"Kaidan" is a part of a ghost's stories anthology produces by the Japanese master of J-horror Takashige Ichise. Alongside with the great Shimizu's" Reincarnation" and the disappointing Kurosawa's "Retribution", "Kaidan" forms a trilogy that the producer wants as a reflection of the best that Japanese horror movies can offer. Unfortunately, "Kaidan" is the worst of the three movies, and Nataka doesn't manage to create fear as he successfully did in "Dark Water" or in his rightfully most famous movie : "Ring".

"Kaidan" is an homage to the classical romantic horror stories that Japanese studios produced in the fifties and sixties. It begins with an elaborated black and white narration, that tells an old samurai/ghost tale in a classical Japanese Kabuki style. But soon after this beautiful introduction, the actual story really starts, ans if almost as if all this introductory sequence had took all the talent of Nakata. It mostly deals with a young itinerant salesman, that convinces an older singing teacher to marry him, in the medieval Japan where such a socially disturbing weeding like this one wasn't easy. When she dies, women easily felt in love with the young boy, whereas his love is doomed by his previous wife...

The story is so classical that it becomes boring and predictable. The photography is just plain and gives a televisual look to the movie (whereas Shimizu gave an amazing visual touch to his one), and the direction is quite the same : unoriginal and even sometimes lazy (whereas Kurosawa used a very inventive use of space in in movie, and a very inventive direction).

But to me, the worst element of this movie might be the lead actor, Kikunosuke Onoe, who's supposedly a charismatic character in the movie. But he's really got a enormous lack of charisma and never manage to give any credibility or substance to to his character and the story he carries. He's supposedly a master of a old Kabuki technique, but he apparently failed to transpose it on the big screen. Or I may have lacked the culture the subtility of his play required. Anyway, I just found it quite boring, and nearly felt asleep while watching his Kabuki plays.

All in all, "J-Horror" isn't a really good introduction to the Japanese modern ghosts movies. If the directors are all good, their works here look a lot like a repetition of their previous movies, that were far better. So Shimizu's "Grudge", Kurosawa's "Kairo" and Nakata's "Ring" still stay the best of the Jap'Horror movie collection.