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Elegantly shot in widescreen by Yoshio Miyajima and impressively scored by Toru Takemitsu (Japan's greatest film composer), Kwaidan is a visual or aural feast. It's also the last great film by director Masaki Kobayashi, best known for his epic World War II trilogy The Human Condition. For contemporary western film audiences used to slice-and-dice horror films cut to rock & roll rhythms, it will seem impossibly slow and tame, but that's because it makes no concession at all to western sensibilities. On its original release in 1965, the film was greeted with indifference by U.S. audiences, whose idea of Japanese horror was honed by the pulpy exploits of Godzilla and Mothra. Lafcadio Hearn's source stories delve into the psyches of men who venture into unknown territory; they often begin fearlessly but wind up mad or maimed by their experiences, often at the hands of evil women. In an odd way, Kwaidan resembles a series of film noir tales. Ultimately, though, it is a series of very spooky ghost stories, clearly mounted with great skill on lovingly constructed studio sets (designed by Shigemasa Toda), whose artificiality actually ratchets up the sense of dislocation.