Watch The Ghost of Yotsuya For Free

Very Cool!!!

I'll tell you why so serious

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Blistering performances.

The classic tale of 'The Ghost of Yotsuya' is entertaining enough, and zips along in its 76 minute run time, but it didn't deliver any knockout blows. The story is fairly black and white, with a ronin and his sidekick committing murder to get the women they want, but the depth of the blackness in their hearts is surprising, and makes it effective. Personally, I didn't find their supernatural comeuppance all that frightening, and felt that director Nobuo Nakagawa relied too much on the shock value of visuals, instead of creating real tension. The visuals are decent, but they're also dated, and we rarely fail to see what's coming. The performances were also generally over-done, though I understand my perspective is from another culture. Anyway, fans of the genre will probably enjoy this one.

Funny how things change. In 1949 Shintoho was producing prestige films like Akira Kurosawa's STRAY DOG. Ten years later they were producing scores of everything from lurid melodramas to nationalist war movies to cheap gangster flicks to kaidan period horror movies like this. Two years later, in 1961, they declared bankruptcy and closed shop, the first semi-big studio in postwar Japan to do so. Nobuo Nakagawa, along with Teruo Ishii who graduated from the film noir of the Chitai series into full blown sleaze and torture 10 years later, was one of those prolific studio filmmakers responsible for many of their kaidan pictures. His biggest call to fame is JIGOKU from the following year but this is an ample showcase of both the good and the bad of Shintoho film-making.Based on the classic story by Nanboku Tsuruya about a conniving lowly samurai who is haunted by the ghost of the wife he murdered, a lot of the drama is hackneyed, the characters simple caricatures of good and evil, innocent and scheming, the dialogues delivered on-the-nose. Iemon, the murderous samurai, is played and depicted as the worst villain possible. No grey areas here, nothing morally ambiguous, the movie is melodrama played to the back of the house. And yet, the first appearance of the ghost sent chills down my spine. Ringu and Ju On didn't invent the pale-faced ghost that creeps along the edge of the frame. It was there 50 years ago and in Kabuki theater before that.With the eye of a stylist, Nakagawa orchestrates a vision of hell on earth, ghosts rising from the ground or peering down from the ceiling, and it's all very stagey and theatrical probably to appeal to an audience already familiar with the story from Kabuki theater and as much creepy/atmospheric as it is graphic, certainly more graphic than American horror would dare to be for the next 10 years (we have blood gushing from wounds, facial deformities, and even an amputated limb), and while the whole is never as good as the parts, those parts should appeal to the horror fan who likes his lighting bright red and torquoise and his ghosts slow-moving and disfigured.

Ghost Story of Yotsuya (1959) *** (out of 4) Japanese horror film has a samurai (Shigeru Amachi) killing his wife (Kazuko Wakasugi) so that he can marry into a rich family. Soon after the second wedding the ghost of the dead wife seeks her vengeance. I haven't seen many of these Japanese ghost films but I've read this one has been made over eight times so it's apparently pretty popular. Since I haven't seen any of the others I can't compare them but I was still pretty impressed with this one. The movie runs a short 75-minutes but the first 55-minutes are devoted to the backstory of the samurai and his wife. Her murder doesn't happen until very late in the film and then it switches gears to the actual haunting, which takes place very fast. Some might say the film spends way too much time with the dramatic stuff but I think this is the reason the film works so well. Instead of just killing the wife at the start we get to know each character and we get to understand why the husband decides to kill her. We also see how the greed gets other people involved and how their lives are destroyed as well. When the hauntings do begin to happen they come at us very quickly and this here gives them a rather unsettling atmosphere, which works very well. It seems this film was influenced by the look and feel of the Hammer films out at the time since they were very popular in Japan. The violence of those Hammer films made their way into this as we get a pretty ghoulish murder of the wife where she's poisoned and pretty much has part of her face melt off. The performance by Amachi is extremely good as we certainly believe his breakdown once he begins to get haunted. It's Wakasugi who steals the show however as the tortured wife who will eventually seek revenge.

And who can fault Iwa's fury? Her husband Iemon murders her father to marry her, deceives her into parting from her sister, fathers her child, pays another man to seduce her, then administers a disfiguring poison so he can marry another woman. Yet Iemon is not wholly wicked - he suffers pangs of conscience, and most of his crimes are the result of his servant's goading. Whilst our sympathy goes to Iwa, our empathy extends to Iemon. The film is endowed with the dimensions of a classical tragedy, as the director undoubtedly intended. In fact, the picture's opening scenes are unabashedly stage-bound, before it shifts subtly into an engrossing cinematic experience. Although the story has been adapted to film many times in Japan, this is generally considered the definitive version.Besides its dramatic power, this version of Ghost Story of Yotsuya is visually sumptuous and thrillingly scored, the scope compositions are masterly, and the female phantom's appearance is truly nightmarish.This is easily the most accomplished, frightening and satisfying of Nakagawa's period ghost stories.