The Depths

The dead are indeed vengeful in Nobuo Nakagawa's second period ghost drama. Not content with tricking his murderer into killing his wife and stumbling to a watery death, the prologue's blind victim brings about the tortured demise of his own daughter so that she can haunt his murderer's innocent son. Then the blind victim returns in the flesh, as it were, to personally finish off the samurai who kills the son. Along the way, the ghost engineers jealousy, deceit, despair, attempted rape and mutilation to achieve his ends.

The Ghosts of Kasane includes several elements that would resurface 2 years later in the same director's The Ghost of Yotsuya, the two most notable being the similarity in the appearance of the two ghosts in each film, and the somewhat stylized presentation, adapted from Japan's kabuki theatre. This earlier work is not as accomplished as Yotsuya in its atmosphere, performances and visual effects, but still manages some scary moments. Amongst the most original is the way in which we're eventually shown Rui's disfigurement. There's also the director's preference already in evidence for mobile camerawork, elaborate sets and a powerful score.

Although only in the second rank of Nobuo Nakagawa's films, The Ghosts of Kasane is a good introduction to his style and to the venerable tradition of Japanese ghost stories.