All Slights Deserved

Although Japanese supernatural horror might nowadays lead one to think of stories about cursed videotapes and spectral emo girls who can't keep their hair out of their faces, these are only recent manifestations of a tradition that's several hundred years old. Japanese ghost stories, or kaidan , first emerged during the Edo period in the seventeenth century, adapted and inspired by earlier Chinese ghost stories. Typically they revolve around vengeful spirits who return to redress a wrong committed against them in their mortal lives, or sometimes with a general grudge against humanity. Kaidan have inspired two of Japanese cinema's most celebrated films - Kobayashi's Kwaidan and Mizoguchi's Ugetsu - but there are numerous other lesser works that draw upon this heritage. During the fifties the Shintoho, a short-lived studio founded by former employees of the more famous Toho Co, produced a series of modest kaidan films, one of which was The Mother Tree ... Thi...

It's sometimes inexplicable how certain films become completely forgotten. Unless you're a devotee of old British horror/supernatural films there's a good chance you've never heard of The Halfway House , yet this Ealing drama prefigures their more celebrated Dead of Night and one suspects its musing on our final destinies could even have influenced Powell and Pressberger's A Matter of Life and Death . Ten people of varying backgrounds are drawn to spend the weekend at a remote guest house in rural Wales. They're a cross section of British wartime society: a famous conductor who has just months to live, a feuding middle-class couple and their adolescent daughter, a retired seaman and his wife still grieving over the death of their son in conflict, a neutral Irishman and his fiancee, a deserter recently released from prison and a racketeer who's made a fortune from the war. Their hosts are the Halfway House's enigmatic innkeeper Rhys (Mervyn Johns) a...