Kuroneko

Shindo's stylish black-and-white ghost story forms a companion piece to his earlier film Onibaba. Once again we have a woman and her daughter-in-law preying on a lone samurai. But the mood here is a little gentler and more poignant than we are accustomed to. The two women are victims of a brutal gang of samurai: they are raped and killed and fire is set to their hut. But when their cat licks the blood from their corpses, they are transformed into shape-shifting demons that favour the form of black cats. Waylaying benighted warriors, they wreak their revenge. A champion samurai is sent against them, but he finds the monsters he's hired to destroy are his own wife and mother. Shindo skilfully builds an atmosphere of eerie menace--draperies waving in the wind, Hikaru Hiyashi's score mimicking the desolate caterwauls that precede each killing. Shindo, faithful as ever to his left-wing principles, includes a strong measure of barbed social comment in his portrayal of the arrogant samurai class. --Philip Kemp