Yotsuya kaidan (1949)

Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita [Other horror films: Shinshaku Yotsuya kaidan: kôhen (1949)]

Yotsuya kaidan is not an easy movie to talk about. Part of this is because it’s the first movie in a two film series, and so seems to be primarily set-up to the conflicts in the second part. It’s not that things don’t happen, but most of the action here takes place at the end. It’s also barely horror, which is problematic.

I guess if you want to get technical, there is horror in trying to poison your wife, and a character getting their face disfigured by scalding hot water, or a woman needing to deal with the unwanted attention of a man, or being stuck in a loveless marriage while there are potentially better opportunities out there. Admittedly, this paragraph started off as glib, because while some of this could conceivably be horror, it’s not the easiest case to make.

Here’s what I can say: after a character’s face gets burned by some water, there’s a suspenseful scene toward the end as the character keeps asking for a mirror, but a horrified servant doesn’t want to give them one. It’s a pretty tense scene, and when we do finally see the face, it’s certainly disfigured, so that’s horror enough to count, amiright??

Mostly, though, Yotsuya kaidan (also known as The Yotsuya Ghost Story and The Ghost of Yotsuya: Part I, and apparently also The Yotsuda Phantom – you can see why I also use the original foreign titles over any re-titles) is a romantic drama. It’s a dark drama at times – there’s a character who consistently tries to get a character to kill his wife so he can move up in the world – but it’s still mostly a drama.

It’s well-done. Some of the acting is quite melodramatic, but that might partially be due to the Japanese culture, which, at least as presented here, seems quite reserved. Instead of having a conversation about important topics, someone’s wife just wails and proclaims that they ‘must never speak of it again.’ Because that works, I’m sure.

The performances are pretty good, though. Ken Uehara’s moral struggles are palpable here, and even toward the end, he has only so much agency insofar as things go. Osamu Takizawa’s slimy character was solid. Keiji Sada (who died in a car crash at the young age of 37 in 1964), who I thought was going to be the main character, was perhaps one of the most moral characters here. Kinuyo Tanaka (who plays two roles here) was a bit dramatic at times, but again, that may be the Japanese culture. Lastly, there’s Hisako Yamane, who didn’t really get that much character here, but that may change with the second part.

And that’s the main thing. Like I said, plenty of emotional things happen in this movie, but it ends on a cliffhanger (think the end of Hatchet, only far less dramatic), so it’s not an easy movie to judge on it’s own. Certainly it’s a moody, black-and-white picture with some issues of dark morality, but I’m far more interested in where the story is going – likely with some supernatural ghost action – than the focus we got in this movie.

Yotsuya kaidan isn’t a bad movie, but it’s also not particularly easy for me to say it’s a good movie. If you’re into dramas, or Japanese period pieces, it may well be worth seeing, but if you’re coming into this from the perspective of ‘I want to see some classic Japanese horror,’ this may not provide the best time. It’s an okay watch, but I want to see where the story is going before anything else.

6/10