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	Kaidan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		No longer in common usage in modern Japanese, J-Horror books and films such as Ju-on and Ring (as well as the book on which the latter was based), would more properly be labled by the katakana houra ("horror") or the standard Japanese kowai banashi ("scary story").
		When film director Masaki Kobayashi filmed several of Hearn's tales for his film Kwaidan, the old spelling was retained in the title.
		This motif is repeated in the film Ring with a videotape that kills all who watch it, and the film Ju-on with a house that kills all who enter it.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Kwaidan (502 words)

	Kwaidan (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Kwaidan (怪談, Kaidan, 1965) is an anthology film directed by Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi and is based on Lafcadio Hearn's collections of Japanese folk tales.
		While Kwaidan is normally put into the horror genre, it is nothing like the vast majority of horror films (though perhaps one could make a few comparisons with a much less gory Suspiria).
		Kwaidan may only have specialized appeal today but at the time it marked the most expensive production in the history of Japanese cinema.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Kwaidan_(film) (241 words)

	Kwaidan - Criterion Collection DVD - Michael Weise Productions
		KWAIDAN is in some ways reminscent of the Twilight Zone movie made back in the 1980s.
		Like that film, it is comprised of four supernatural set pieces, and also like the Zone, the first of the pieces is the weakest.
		KWAIDAN's quiet stories all take place in medieval Japan, and they can give you the "willies." Viewers willing to watch the last three tales will not be disappointed; each story has gorgeous sets and surreal imagery.
	www.mwp.com /shop/dvd.php4?asin=B00004W3HF (230 words)

	THE CINEMA LASER DVD REVIEW--
		KWAIDAN ($30) is a haunting Japanese film of the supernatural that contains a quartet of ghostly tales.
		In the hands of director Masaki Kobayashi, KWAIDAN is like a piece of fine art that has been delicately painted onto a canvas with bold colors that stimulate the viewer's eye and draw them into the world he has created.
		The film element used for the transfer displays mild blemishes, as well as some scratches, but the beauty of the film's cinematography and production design still shine through with striking clarity.
	www.thecinemalaser.com /dvd_reviews/kwaidan-dvd.htm (1160 words)

	Kwaidan
		Kwaidan came out of left-field for me. I've not studied film academically, and although I'm a fan of Japanese film, I've not seen anywhere near as much as some of my compatriots here.
		Kwaidan is a collection of four short supernatural horror stories, based on the writings of a Westerner named Lafcadio Hearn, who moved to Japan and became a Japanese citizen in 1895.
		Kwaidan is a long film, clocking in at just under three hours, and likely won't please some people who don't like such langourously paced films.
	www.heroic-cinema.com /reviews/kwaidan (410 words)

	Kwaidan Review
		Director Masaki Kobayashi weaves together four strange, sometimes unsettling tales of the spirit world into a film that is hypnotic, beautiful and surreal, and crafted with absolute technical perfection in terms of use of color, widescreen, and geometric lines to frame, break up, or lead the eye further into his picture.
		This film employs a wide range of color and lighting, from the bright, raging, heightened look of some daylit sequences to the flness of the darker, brooding, foreboding ones.
		Kwaidan is another one of the many important but less than mainstream titles that Criterion has made available to true cinema buffs, and represents perhaps their crowning achievement in terms of video quality to date.
	www.dvdmoviecentral.com /ReviewsText/kwaidan.htm (1338 words)

	DVD Review - Kwaidan (Criterion)
		The film is comprised of four supernatural vignettes bound together only by a narrator's voice and theme of ghosts and spirits.
		The stories are all originally crafted by Lafcadio Hearn, an Irish expatriate at the turn of the 20th century that loved Japan and its folk stories so much that he became a citizen, adopted a Japanese name, was accepted by Japan and turned out to be one of their most well-loved storytellers.
		These four short films are perfect illustrations of the different types of ghosts that haunt the human condition - ghosts of love, ghosts of the past and ghosts of what we aspire to be.
	www.thedigitalbits.com /reviews/kwaidancriterion.html (1946 words)

	DVD Verdict Review - Kwaidan: Criterion Collection
		Kwaidan is a study in the masterful control of film technique.
		The wide scope of the film (2.35:1 aspect ratio, enhanced by Criterion for 16x9) is used by Kobayashi to devastating effect: he moves closely in toward the faces of his actors, capturing their emotional reactions as they contend with the horrors that lurk along the edges of the frame.
		Kwaidan is a film of extremes: long pauses, terrifying bursts of violence, bleak silences, frightening howls.
	www.dvdverdict.com /reviews/kwaidan.php (1512 words)

	[No title]
		Kwaidan is a dialect word, standard Japanese says Kaidan, and it is under this title the films was released in Japan.
		Kobayashi was a painter and had complete control over the film in the sense that it is all built on sets in an airplane hanger.
		The film is known for its artistic merit, and some feel that as a film (it won a prize) it is overrated.
	userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu /anthro/jbeatty/COURSES/JapaneseFilm/cn3.htm (1438 words)

	Kwaidan (JAPAN 1964)
		Kwaidan is comprised of four stories introduced by an unseen narrator.
		The fact Kwaidan was relatively unknown in the U.S. until Criterion released their special edition uncut laserdisc and subsequent DVD is a travesty.
		Kwaidan stands alongside Akira Kurosawa's Dreams and Mario Bava's Black Sabbath as one of the best supernatural anthology films ever produced, and is deserving of far more attention than it has received.
	www.lovehkfilm.com /panasia/kwaidan.htm (385 words)

	Kwaidan
		Consisting of four episodes, Kwaidan is based on the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, a folklorist of Greek-Irish ancestry who came to the United States in 1869 and later moved to Japan.
		The film’s last episode, In a Cup of Tea, brings the story cycle to a close with a tale about storytelling in which a writer recounts the saga of a warrior (Kanemon Nakamura) who discovers the reflection of someone else while glancing into his cup of tea.
		As the film shows in its chilling, Borges-like finale, this is achieved through the very process of storytelling itself.
	www.ehrensteinland.com /htmls/library/kwaidan.html (888 words)

	Horrordvds.com - Kwaidan DVD review (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-03)
		Kwaidan consists of four short stories - The Black Hair, The Woman of the Snow, Holichi, the Earless and In a Cup of Tea.
		Kwaidan is sort of like Tales from the Crypt or Tales from the Darkside.
		The main problem, which was definitely distracting for me, were these clear vertical lines that consistently appear and disappear for a few seconds at a time throughout the majority of the film.
	www.horrordvds.com /reviews/a-m/kwaidan (1568 words)

	dOc DVD Review: Kwaidan (1965)
		Like many Japanese films and stage plays, complex make-up is rarely used to indicate the presence of a demon or ghost, but instead, slight changes in a person's pallor or eyebrows make the monster.
		Kwaidan literally translates as "ghost story", and if ever there was a film bordering so close to the ethereal, it'd have a hard time competing.
		That said, the film is amazingly vivid, crisp, and clear for its age.
	www.digitallyobsessed.com /showreview.php3?ID=595 (1141 words)

	Kwaidan (aka Kaidan)
		The film actually concludes with a fragmented tale set in two time periods which attempts to explain why so many Japanese horror stories are unfinished or incomplete, but this too is unremarkable from a purely narrative point of view.
		Kwaidan uses the painstakingly posed tableaus seen in so many Japanese films in combination with some dramatic staging against beautiful and often surreal hand-painted backdrops to transport the viewer to a realm of delusion and unreality.
		Kwaidan is perhaps not the greatest film to come from Japan in its era, but it is a memorable and satisfying piece of work.
	homepage.eircom.net /~obrienh/kaidan.htm (731 words)

	Imaginarium Online, Features (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-03)
		Second, all of these films move well beyond their genre even as they elevate our idea of what "horror film" means in 2003.
		It struck me that this is exactly the sort of film that critics will want to stick their particular ism on and there have already been treatments of the film that interpret it as a feminist backlash against the sadomasochistic objectification so common in Asian culture.
		We, the audience, audition the film by looking at the headshot, which is the poster or the trailer, and commit with our budget, which is the money we pay to see it.
	www.cornerstonemag.com /imaginarium/features/asian_horror_survey.html (4708 words)

	DVDBeaver.com - DVD Review - "Kwaidan" (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-03)
		Indeed, the breadth of the film's poetic expression is unmatched in all of Japanese cinema: breathtakingly photographed on handpainted sets, the film is at once a miniature writ large, and an abstract wash of luminescent colors that seem to hail from another world.
		This interaction of the film's plastic and aural textures with the simple, aching humanity of Hearn's tales serves to accentuate the power of the storytelling: four episodes about mortals caught up in forces beyond their comprehension — when the supernatural world intervenes in their lives.
		The episode marks the apotheosis of the film's eerie atmosphere — anticipating, and arguably surpassing, Japanese cinema's recent excursions in the realm of "J-horror".
	dvdbeaver.com /film/DVDReviews8/kwaidan.htm (1042 words)

	Kwaidan (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-03)
		Kwaidan communicates the spirit and mystery of that faraway land, yet manages to speak eloquently in universal terms.
		Kwaidan is direct in its approach, short on dialogue and brilliant on image.
		The source material for Kwaidan is excellent with only a sprinkling of age related marking on this laserdisc of the 1964 film.
	www.filmsondisc.com /DVDpages/kwaidan_dvd_review.htm (796 words)

	Nehring The Edge: KWAIDAN (1964) movie reviews (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-03)
		The four short films are less about the characters being haunted by ghosts than by their own pain, guilt and burdens.
		The remainder of the film centers on Hoichi, a blind monk who is lured by the lost souls of the ancient battle to their hidden temple.
		Like the remainder of the film it is a joy to watch for its look and the great acting but the story itself is literally incomplete and muddled.
	nehring.blogspot.com /2005/11/kwaidan-1964.html (970 words)

	Amazon.co.uk: Kwaidan [1965]: Video (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-03)
		Kwaidan was Kobayashi's first film in colour; spurning realism and aiming for "the ultimate in stylised film method", he shot the whole movie inside a huge disused hangar, painting all the sets himself.
		The film tells the story of four tales drawn from Lafcadio Hearn's turn-of the century book of the same name (Kwaidan means "weird tales" and is a collection of Japanese and Chinese "fairy" tales).
		The sound tract, like the visuals is haunting and when this film came out on the big screen in the late sixties it received huge interest from people who at that time, already, thought that the world (as it was) was not enough...
	www.amazon.co.uk /exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004CJDC (642 words)

	Kwaidan: The Criterion Collection (1965)
		Kwaidan appears in an aspect ratio of approximately 2.35:1 on this single-sided, double-layered DVD; the image has been enhanced for 16X9 televisions.
		Also fine are the film’s fl levels, which is especially important given the dark nature of so many shots.
		Ultimately, the audio of Kwaidan earned a “C-“ due to a combination of the age of the material and the simplicity of the mix.
	www.dvdmg.com /kwaidan.shtml (1233 words)

	"Kwaidan"...More Haiku Than Horror (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-03)
		Another problem with this film is that it leads off with the two strongest episodes—"The Black Hair" and "The Woman Of The Snow." The last two tales, "Hoichi The Earless" and the deliberately unfinished "In A Cup Of Tea," are weak by comparison and definitely anti-climactic.
		Kwaidan begins with five minutes of beautiful (but interminable) abstract titles of colored ink mixing with water, to the exotic tinkling of a Japanese bell.
		Still, this second episode of Kwaidan is quite beautiful to look at, in the same way that the final scenes in the snowy topiary in The Shining are beautiful (and, unlike Kwaidan, quite terrifying).
	www.horror-wood.com /kwaidan.htm (1136 words)

	MonsterZine.com
		Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan is a collection of four Japanese ghost stories, strikingly beautiful in its visual composition and often as moody and unsettling as the best of Val Lewton or Rod Serling.
		Kwaidan finally gets the home video treatment it deserves with the release of a new DVD from The Criterion Collection, that dependable source of classic films.
		It was also the most expensive film made in Japan to that date, and as the saying goes, it’s all up on the screen.
	www.monsterzine.com /200101/kwaidan.html (1055 words)

	Compare Prices and Read Reviews on Kwaidan at Epinions.com
		Viewers might be surprised to find that "Kwaidan" is not really that scary, and in fact is far too slow to even be called a horror film.
		I would go so far as to suggest that "Kwaidan" is a good document for film students to study to learn how to make films outside the MTV school.
		The four segments of "Kwaidan" were adapted from stories by Lafcadio Hearn, who lived in the United States in the 1860's before moving to Japan.
	www.epinions.com /mvie-review-46DB-234C19E8-39F46A56-prod3 (770 words)

	Kwaidan DVD (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-03)
		When the film was released in the U.S., an entire segment was removed from the prints to shorten the 3 hour running time.
		KWAIDAN is nearly impossible to classify, and cannot be pigeonholed into a particular genre.
		KWAIDAN is such a unique film that it demands multiple viewing to take it all in.
	www.dvdcult.com /rev_Kwaidan.htm (1822 words)

	The DVD Maniacs - Forum - Opinions on KWAIDAN (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-03)
		There are painterly images here that remain the most beautiful and haunting in all of Japanese cinema, presented with the purity of silent film, sparsely accompanied by post-synchronized sounds and music (by Toru Takemitsu) that enhance the otherworldly effect of director Masaki Kobayashi's meticulous imagery.
		With careful use of glorious color and wide-screen composition, Kwaidan exists in a netherworld that is both real and imagined, its characters never quite sure they can trust what they've seen and heard.
		Kwaidan is a must have for the kwaidan eiga fans.
	www.dvdmaniacs.net /forums/printthread.php?t=6080 (932 words)

	Kwaidan DVD at Video Universe
		Kobayashi, who often makes films to accompany their musical scores, the reverse of standard procedure, worked for six months with Takemitsu in dubbing the film.
		KWAIDAN was voted one of the 10 best films of 1965 by the New York Times.
		The images on this film is a presentation of the philosophy of art of Masaki Koboyashi.
	www.cduniverse.com /search/xx/movie/pid/1235806/a/Kwaidan.htm (611 words)

	Amazon.com: Kwaidan (1965) : Video (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-03)
		Kwaidan was made in the mid-1960s, and at the time, it was the most expensive Japanese film ever made.
		Kwaidan is not horrifying or scary in a "Halloween" or "Scream" manner; rather it creates an uneasy sensation of dread and despair.
		Kwaidan is Japanese for ghost stories, a type of fiction I've enjoyed since childhood introduction to MacBeth and The Christmas Carole, and these are some very well written examples.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00004W3HK?v=glance (2056 words)

	Pulse (2001)
		Unbearably suspenseful horror film chronicles a mysterious wave of suicides that seem to be intertwined with ghostly appearances.
		Only one filmmaker continues to buck the tread by twisting genre films into remarkably intelligent pieces of art that deal with larger issues of society, like the effects of modernity on the individual and the complexities of modern urban existence.
		There is a hopeless look and feel to the film from the get-go; starting with the very first shot of the solitary ship being knocked around in a turbulent sea, Kairo is infused with an atmosphere of pervasive foreboding—with dark interiors and plenty of shadows—regardless of whether it's night or day, inside or outside.
	www.reel.com /movie.asp?MID=139404&buy=open&Tab=reviews&CID=13 (918 words)

	Asian Horror
		Finally, this film is action packed with tons of great explosions and gunplay, so when you mix in the army of the dead it kinda plays out like a " John Woo meets Lucio Fulci" film which should be a wet dream for any gorehound.
		This film was followed up by two unrelated sequels, which I haven't had a chance to see yet.
		Don May at Synapse Film and he should be congratulated for providing us with a classic example of Japanese horror cinema.
	www.houseofhorrors.com /asian.htm (1456 words)

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