The movie was placed in competition at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the festival was canceled due to the civil unrest events of May 1968 in France.
The original title translates to "In the Grove of the Black Cat" and is a direct reference to the Ryûnosuke Akutagawa story, "Yabu no Naka" ("In a Grove"), which also inspired Akira Kurosawa for Rashomon (1950).
As a protégé of the revered director Kenji Mizoguchi, Shindo adopted his master's sympathy for the plight of women. Gender politics enter into the ghost story, as defenseless women return from the dead to exact a bloody revenge.
(at around 10 mins) The first dialogue occurs.
The film was shot in black-and-white and in TohoScope format, and distributed by Toho. It was not dubbed into English but was released with subtitles in the United States in 1968.