Tôkaidô Yotsuya kaidan

Shigeru Amachi wants to marry Katsuko Wakasugi, the daughter of prominent samurai Shinjirô Asano. Asano refuses the request, belittling Amachi who promptly murders him. Shuntarô Emi witnesses the murder and promises to help him cover it up, if he in turn helps him marry Wakasugi's sister. The two tell Wakasugi that her father was murdered by a notorious criminal and they will help her get revenge. Instead, they murder her sister's fiancé and Emi runs off with her.

Months later, Amachi and Wakasugi are married and living in Edo. Amachi has fallen for Junko Ikeuchi, the daughter of a nobleman, and hatches a plan to rid himself of Wakasugi. He hires Jun Ôtomo to seduce her so that he can legally kill her, but the plan goes awry. Ôtomo ends up dead and Wakasugi is poisoned causing hideous facial deformities before she also dies. Amachi marries Ikeuchi, but the spirits of Wakasugi and Ôtomo haunt him leading him to ruin.

This is probaby the best known adaptation of the kabuki play "Yotsuya Kaidan" (there are many). It's a fairly routine film from a story and characters perspective, but the film's vibrant colours and gory, hallucinatory visuals are really something.

This classic japanese tale has been filmed many times. It's the story of a samurai's betrayal of his wife and the ultimate vengeance her spirit seeks. The spectre of her ghost haunting the mind of her husband is almost like seeing a japanese "The Shining".

Great film -- very compelling, entertaining and thought provoking.

My wonderful girlfriend somewhat randomly picked this up from at the video rental -- excellent film, very interesting story and very well presented. Really liked the character development and camera work -- angles were great and simple film editing (1959) created some excellent special effects.

A classic ghost story with a very clear moral message -- if you double deal on your wife, she will get ugly on you.

Fast summery of the movie, it's about a samurai who wants a woman as his wife, Doea the unthinkable and then does it again.

It's a good plot and great acting in it. And the scenes are very good! Specially the final part and the scenes and how it's filmed are really nice. The last part of this movie really made the movie shine and it was really good stuff.

It's a good revenge movie, the main villians you really hope to die as mercyless and themselves were. I liked this movie a lot, even though I was sitting after half the movie wondering were the ghost stuff were suppose to happen and man didn't i have to wait long.

All in all, great horror movie.

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.