Drawn from the Japanese folklore collections of Lafcadio Hearn, Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan is an anthology of four superbly crafted ghost stories, each more haunting than the last. Shot with stunning visual invention on enormous studio-built sets—the painted skies, the stylized interiors, the stark geometric landscapes—and suffused with dread and dark poetry, this is one of the most visually extraordinary films in the history of world cinema, a meditation on fate, guilt, and the supernatural that lingers long in the memory.