Kaneto Shindô's Kuroneko (Yabu no naka no kuroneko or The Black Cat Inside the Bamboo Grove) — released to great acclaim in 1968 — is a sparse atmospheric horror story ascribing to the director’s philosophy of using beauty and purity to evoke emotion. Eccentric and more overtly supernatural than its breakthrough companion piece Onibaba Kuroneko revisits similar themes to reveal a haunting meditation on duty conformity and love. In this magnificently eerie and romantic film — loosely based on the Japanese folktale The Cat’s... Return — a mother and daughter-in-law (Nobuko Otowa and Kiwako Taichi) are raped and murdered by pillagers but return from the dead as vampiric cat spirits intent on revenge. As the ghosts lure soldiers into the bamboo groves a fearless samurai Gintoki (Kichiemon Nakamura) is sent to stop their reign of terror. Kuroneko remains a standout film of the kaidan eiga genre of period ghost stories often based on old legends or kabuki plays. Marking Shindô’s first use of wire work as Yone and Shige battle against samurai blades the film is subtly complimented by Kiyomi Kuroda’s award-winning chiaroscuro cinematography Hikaru Hayashi’s vibrant score and riveting performances from many of the greatest actors of Japan’s golden age of film. [show more]
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Kaneto Shindô writes and directs this Japanese horror. Set in the ancient Heian era, Yone (Nobuko Otowa) and her 20-year-old daughter-in-law Shige (Kiwako Taichi) are scratching a meagre living in the forest when a band of marauding, depraved samurai rape and slay the two women, leaving their hut in ashes, and the blood-covered bodies splayed nearby. A passing black cat revives the spirits of the fallen women and transforms them into shape-shifting ghosts who proceed to wreak revenge on the samurai class by luring them into the surrounding bamboo groves. But one day the warrior Gintoki (Kichiemon Nakamura) returns home to find his wife and mother gone and is assigned to rid the country of the murderous ghosts.
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