Kuroneko
Director: Kaneto Shindo
Year Released: 1968
Rating: 2.5
A mother and daughter - raped and killed by dirty samurai - make a pact with The Dark Powers to get their revenge on the living (in Spectral Form!), only to have their plan stymied when a warrior assigned to vanquish them turns out to be their son and husband (respectively). The atmosphere is the real star, however, as Shindo fills his sets with mist and darkness, filming it in meticulous, quite striking black and white - the story, on the other hand, is a merely secondary feature, with several scenes that seem stretched out more out of a need to perpetuate the eerie mood than actual necessity. The ending is a smidge disappointing in that the victims of this affair become even more victimized (the wife is sent to Hell because of a tryst with her spouse, the "mother" kills her son). Such is fatalism!
