Kwaidan

FOUR STORIES. FOUR GHOSTS. ONE BEAUTIFUL NIGHTMARE.

Some horror movies want you to believe what you're seeing is real.

Kwaidan has no interest in that.

Masaki Kobayashi builds worlds that look impossible from the first frame.

Painted skies.

Artificial landscapes.

Colors that seem chosen by emotion rather than nature.

Rooms that feel like stages.

Snow that seems to exist somewhere between a dream and a memory.

And inside those worlds, the dead are waiting.

Janus Films has brought Kobayashi's Kwaidan back to U.S. theaters in a new 4K restoration of the director's original 183-minute cut. 

The movie is not one ghost story.

It is four.

All are adapted from supernatural tales collected and retold by Lafcadio Hearn, whose writings helped preserve and popularize Japanese folklore for readers at the turn of the twentieth century. Screenwriter Yōko Mizuki adapted those stories for Kobayashi. 

The first is “The Black Hair.”

A poor samurai abandons his loving wife in pursuit of a wealthier marriage.

Eventually, regret sends him back.

Horror has spent centuries warning people that the dead remember promises.

Kwaidan begins by making sure we understand that lesson. 

Then comes “The Woman of the Snow.”

A woodcutter named Minokichi survives an encounter with a supernatural woman during a blizzard, but his life is spared under one condition:

He must never tell anyone what happened.

Tatsuya Nakadai plays Minokichi, while Keiko Kishi plays the yuki-onna at the story's center. 

The third story is “Hoichi the Earless.”

A blind biwa player is summoned to perform for a mysterious audience.

He does not initially realize that the people listening to his music are dead.

What follows becomes perhaps the film's most elaborate supernatural set piece, drawing on the spirits of warriors and the lingering memory of violence. 

And finally comes “In a Cup of Tea.”

A samurai sees the face of another man reflected in his tea.

That face should not be there.

The story then begins folding in on itself, eventually becoming as much about the act of telling ghost stories as the apparition itself. 

What ties these four stories together isn't a shared plot.

It's a sensibility.

A ghost in Kwaidan is rarely just something that leaps from darkness.

The dead arrive because somebody broke an oath.

Because memory remained unfinished.

Because violence left something behind.

Because the boundary separating the living from everything they tried to forget was never particularly strong.

And Kobayashi photographs those encounters as though reality itself has become ceremonial.

Yoshio Miyajima served as cinematographer, while Tōru Takemitsu composed the score. Cannes officially credits both men alongside Kobayashi and Mizuki. 

Takemitsu's contribution is especially important.

Kwaidan often uses sound less like ordinary movie accompaniment and more like another supernatural presence.

Noise appears.

Then disappears.

Silence stretches.

A scrape or voice may feel unnaturally isolated from everything around it.

The result isn't merely quiet.

It's dislocated.

Exactly the way the images are.

The visual world was equally radical.

This was Kobayashi's first color film, and the production embraced that opportunity with extraordinarily stylized sets and painted environments rather than trying to disguise studio construction as natural realism. Film Forum's presentation of the restoration specifically highlights the movie's surreal sets, luminous cinematography and first use of color in Kobayashi's work. 

That choice is one reason Kwaidan still looks unlike almost anything else.

The sky can contain eyes.

Color can announce dread before anything supernatural appears.

Snow can feel less like weather than an entire world swallowing someone.

Kobayashi doesn't use artificiality to weaken the illusion.

Artificiality is the illusion.

The movie originally emerged from Japan in the mid-1960s, and its international reputation grew quickly.

At the 1965 Cannes Film Festival, Kwaidan competed for the festival's top prize and won the Special Jury Prize. 

But for many years, audiences did not always encounter Kobayashi's full intended version.

Janus explains that the surviving/available 35mm Cannes print runs 161 minutes, while the restored DCP presents the original 183-minute cut. 

That distinction is exactly why this 2026 re-release matters.

We're not merely watching an old horror movie booked into theaters for nostalgia.

We're getting the director's longer version newly restored in 4K by Toho, with the restoration carried out by Toho Archive in cooperation with Toho Global. 

The U.S. restoration run began September 11, 2026, with Janus Films opening the film at Film Forum in New York before continuing to repertory theaters around the country. Janus currently lists Kwaidan as Now Playing. 

And as of September 12, that means Friday Night VHS marks it:

IN THEATERS.

Yes, it runs 183 minutes.

Yes, it is in Japanese with English subtitles.

Yes, it was made more than sixty years ago.

None of that makes it an odd fit for What's Screaming Now.

Quite the opposite.

One reason to track theatrical horror is to know when something extraordinary becomes available on a screen large enough to do it justice.

And Kwaidan is almost absurdly well suited to that.

Its landscapes are enormous.

Its colors are overwhelming.

Its ghosts arrive slowly.

Its silences need space.

This isn't horror designed to race toward the next scare.

It asks you to sit inside the image long enough for the image itself to become frightening.

Four stories.

Four encounters with the dead.

Three hours inside one of horror cinema's strangest worlds.

The ghosts have been waiting since 1964.

The doors are open again.