Movie Appraisal: Kaidan (怪談) (2007) and J-Horror Theater Wrap-Up

From the director of Ringu, Hideo Nakata, we have Kaidan, a movie about a curse and a ghost. As the fifth movie in the J-Horror Theater series, I wasn't expecting much. Hell, the fourth and sixth movies were not all that good in my opinion, with the sixth one, Kyofu, being a trainwreck of a movie. Kaidan is a masterpiece. While calling it strictly a horror movie is laughable, it is a great movie to just watch. Hideo Nakata could never make a better movie than this, and yet he would still have made one of the great ghost story movies of all time with this one.

While the story is a tradition Japanese one about a legacy of death, a curse, and love, it is also fantastically put together. A moneylender is killed by a broken Samurai in old Japan. The Samurai dies himself soon after, and their children grow up orphans. The moneylender's daughters grow to be beautiful and powerful in Old Tokyo (Edo), while the Samurai's son is very clearly of a lower status. He falls in love with one of the daughters, but their relationship is cursed, and when he decides to leave her, he is cursed as well.

And that's the basic story. I know it has been told before in movies like The Depths (1957) and others, but this is one of the more recent re-tellings of an old tale with a tragic story. The movie is art in motion throughout, showcasing both acting talent and a story that works incredibly well. It does take on the old idea that the sins of the father are passed down to the child, almost literally in the case of this movie. It shows that fate is fixed and cannot be changed. And a curse, a woman scorned, and ultimately fate... those things cannot be avoided. They will follow one around for the rest of his days.

Maybe it's a little silly, but a movie like this, made so traditionally about such a tradition matter, is exactly what I want to watch. It is one of the only period horror movies that I know about, which makes it very unique and incredibly interesting in its own right. I wasn't expecting what I received, neither the quality nor the absolute passion evident in this film.

Again, this is not strictly a horror film. While it has horror elements to it (mostly in small pieces and mostly at the end of the movie), it is much more of a historical drama of a sort. I would even call it a romance movie at times. While it doesn't always work, it damn well tries very hard to be something special, and I truly appreciate that. It hearkens back constantly to the ancestral sins as well showing that one's own sins can damn one as well. The way Shinkichi (the lead character) treats the women throughout the film can only be described as disheartening. While appearing to be a good man on the surface, he takes advantage of them, leaves them once they cannot give him what he wants, and finds another, prettier face. I know customs were different once upon a time, but I find it kind of sickening how easily he slimes his way through the story. Even then, there was a certain sadness I felt towards him at the end of the movie, before his ultimate fate is decided. It takes a great movie to make me feel something for a character I loathe, and this is certainly a special sort of movie.

Again, there really isn't horror here, so despite the moniker of J-Horror Theater, this is much more of a traditional ghost story, one of the ghost seeking revenge certainly, but one that shows very little in the way of actual scares. I would almost say that this movie is made in a way to be a throwback to early Japanese horror movies of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It has that style and feel to it, although I could be wrong, I suppose.

Anyway, this is a great movie and I recommend it all the way, just don't expect a horror movie, because this isn't really one of them, not in the modern sense of the term anyway.


So, I guess we're done with all six movies of the J-Horror Theater. What six movies they were too! We saw everything in the Japanese Horror repertoire, from Infection with its subtle gore and mindscrew attitudes to Kyofu and its terrible and bizarre story. We saw Premonition and Reincarnation, both with their slow builds and near-perfect stories, both full of so much horror and awe that they'll always remain in my mind as true quality. And then we saw Retribution, a movie that I should have liked, and ended up finding far too dry for my taste. But even that one had a certain something, even if it was simply a single perfect scene. And finally we have Kaidan, a traditional ghost story I won't soon forget. All six movies were something to watch, even if I found two of them less than stellar. All-in-all the J-Horror Theater experiment was a success, really showing the quality that Japanese horror movies can achieve when their best directors take on the task of making amazing movies.

I'm glad I finally reviewed all these movies. They've been on my plate for years and years. I have a few more series and sets of movies like this to review, probably not this year (not at this point anyway), but next year and the years after I'll need more horror movies to review, so why not? I don't think I'll forget these movies, and if this year goes down as my J-Horror Theater October, then so be it. I think I can be proud of these reviews and these movies for the most part. I will admit I really wasn't expecting much out of these last three reviews, especially since two out of my first three reviews of this series were fairly negative. I'm glad that these final three movies picked up the series, making it rise in my opinion, and making all the hours I put into watching and reviewing these movies definitely worth it.

Anyway, until tomorrow night... 

Book Evaluation: Ghost Story (1979) by Peter Straub

What? No picture!? This is blasphemy, I say! Blasphemy!

I'm just kidding here. I'm supposed to be talking about Ghost Story, one of the most appropriately titled works there ever was. It is about, you guessed it, a ghost story. Well, technically it is about multiple ghost stories, some absolutely fictitious, and some... well, less so.

The novel revolves around four members of a group called the Chowder Society, who have, for fifty years, been telling ghost stories to one another. The whole tagline of this book should be something like: This is where ghost stories... come true... because that's exactly what happens. There was once a fifth member of their group who died suddenly and unexpectedly at a party to celebrate a visiting actress years ago. It had looked like he had been frightened to death.

Oh, spooky! Now, I jest, of course, but ghost stories tend to not interest me in the slightest. It makes no difference whether I believe in ghosts or not, ghosts do not seem to really have the power to carry an entire novel. Most of the great ghost stories are, in fact, short stories or novellas at most. This is because ghost stories need that vague attitude about them to usually be effective. They need to take place at an indeterminate time and in a place that has old history to it. Well, that's usually what ghost stories are like, but this one is different. This novel is much less a ghost story and much more something else entirely.

Eventually, the Chowder Society seems to be seeing some fairly mysterious stuff and call on a member's nephew, Donald, who has written on the occult, to take a look. Donald is a man who has his own emotion issues, mostly with a woman named Alma Mobley. She was a grad student that he worked with and fell in love with in his time at Berkeley. He became enamored with her and then almost obsessed, all the while she acted like something unreal. She would frequently lie to him, unbeknownst to him, and eventually she left without a trace as he debated doing something drastic. Afterwards he investigated their time together and found all lies, nothing but lies surrounding her... then suddenly, one day his brother, dead in the present part of the novel, becomes engaged to one Alma Mobley. Well, that might have been fine, but soon after David, Donald's brother, was dead, and Alma gone again.

When one of the members of the Chowder Society dies, the rest decide to tell Donald the horrible truth of Eva Galli, the woman that they kind of killed and tried to hide the body of. Well, they attempted to because the body simply wasn't there in their trunk when they went to bury it. A lynx was near the car instead, glaring at them. And they believed that she was Eva Galli, a manitou, or shape-shifter who lives much longer than humans. Making the connections, they also believe that this thing was Alma Mobley as well.

Eventually as others die, they are joined by a man named Peter, and learn of a woman named Florence de Peyser, who seems to have control over the undead people and the manitou herself. Eventually, they track Eva/Alma down and defeat her, but she escapes before they can finish the job. Donald vows to go and find her and leaves soon afterward. He finds a young girl whom he believes to be the next form of Eva. The novel starts off with this and ends with this eerie young girl. Eventually she turns into a wasp and Donald kills her, then makes the promise to go after de Peyser in California.

The story is only part of Ghost Story. The plot, although important, only plays a small role to why this novel is so good. And it is very good, beautiful and brilliant in idea and execution, despite being a ghost story in name only. There are no ghosts here. Supernatural elements, certainly, but no ghosts. Ghosts are spirits of the dead, or even demons if you're being generous. Ghosts are not shape-shifters or creatures that can take the form of people. These are instead old Native American spirits of good and ill.

The idea of the story within a story, the little ghost stories inside of the large narrative are brilliantly handled as well, amazing set pieces to make the novel absolutely memorable. A memorable book does not make a good book, but a good book makes a memorable one. The ending, Eva and Alma, and the atmosphere of the novel stuck with me for so long after reading this novel for the first time years ago. It made me understand what horror could be if executed correctly.

Now, I have to talk about Peter Straub because, in my opinion, he is a terribly underrated novelist. The guy exudes atmosphere from every sentence. He's a better writer than almost any other horror writer I can think about, even Stephen King. The way he writes is brilliant, even in his less interesting novels, because he paces superbly, and every tangent has a reason to it, everything feels real, even when it obviously isn't real. And the atmosphere of his novels is basically the best set pieces to the novels since Lovecraft wrote some of his best works. In mentioning Ghost Story, I have to mention Shadowlands, which is also by him, and in someways is the more superior novel out of the two just because of how intricate the plot actually is.

Peter Straub is such a fantastic writer of horror-fiction and this novel shows it time and time again. Reading it is like going through the old horror novelists in turn... Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, Henry James, and M. R. James... he represents all fo them here, all of the old ghost stories that aren't that frightening to us today because of language, word use, or pure boring imaginations on our parts, are again made horrific here in the modern setting of Peter Straub's world. Here is one of the best ghosts stories of all time, paced  and written like a ghost story around the turn of the last century, but involving no real ghosts at all. In many ways this is the last great ghost story, the one that tops all of the rest... and of course the master of horror that Peter Straub is would be the one to write it.

I recommend this novel with every fiber of my being. It needs to be read. Go, find it, and read it. You won't be disappointed.