An artistic triumph for the director Masaki Kobayashi, his cameramen and his art directors.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 20, 2021

Kwaidan is not for everyone. It is for the lover of the offbeat and eerie. It is a film you will not soon forget.

| Sep 20, 2021

This awesome and enthralling Japanese [film] weaves a spell of enchantment with its weird stories, which unfold amidst settings of surrealistic splendor that have been photographed in the most breathtaking color since Gate of Hell.

| Sep 20, 2021

All three stories are weird and wonderful, and under Kobayashi's direction, the film casts its own exotic and highly colourful spell.

| Sep 20, 2021

Judged purely as an expensive mood piece, the film could be considered a great success. The best thing about Kwaidan is its otherworldly, haunted atmosphere.

| Sep 20, 2021

[Kwaidan] combines the fantastic color of Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits with Poe-like burstings of Gothic horror.

| Sep 20, 2021

There aren't likely to be many films this year as visually magnificent as Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan.

| Sep 20, 2021

It is more like a picture on a wall than something that should move on a screen. The director seems never to know when to have done with a scene and be on to another sequence.

| Sep 20, 2021

[Kwaidan is] filmed in exquisite color and told without any compromises to foreign tastes, which both guarantees the film's integrity and asks a lot of audiences.

| Sep 20, 2021

shot mostly on sound stages in constructed sets with highly mannered backdrops, this is a film of a rare, hermetic beauty, full of ethereal images and errant ideas that will haunt the mind.

| Apr 27, 2020

The use of electronic and natural sound in a non-naturalistic way is hauntingly and chillingly effective.

| Mar 18, 2020

Film is visually and physically stunning but its three tales of the supernatural are more intellectual than visceral.

| Mar 26, 2009

The first episode builds an effective mood through its elliptical action and long, slow tracks through empty rooms, but this 1965 film soon levels off into academic stylization.

| Sep 19, 2007

It is a compendium of four ghost stories adapted from Lafcadio Hearn, so determinedly aesthetic in their design and style that horror frissons hardly get a look in. Very beautiful, though.

| Jun 24, 2006

It can still hold its own against the new generation of horror films still sourcing it. Well worth a look.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 31, 2006

Couple these sound effects and voices with some remarkable pictorial images and the consequence is a horror picture with an extraordinarily delicate and sensuous quality.

| May 9, 2005