Daiei Gothic Vol. 2: The Ghost of Kasane Swamp (1969) Blu-ray Review

Radiance Films

Blu-ray Release: October 14, 2025 (as part of Daiei Gothic Vol. 2)

Video: 2.35:1/1080p/Color

Audio: Japanese LPCM 1.0 Mono

Subtitles: English

Run Time: 86:31

Director: Kimiyoshi Yasuda

Note: This disc is currently only available as part of Radiance’s Daiei Gothic Volume 2 Blu-ray collection, which also includes The Demon of Mount Oe (1960) and The Haunted Castle (1969). I am also using the same intro paragraphs for all of my Daiei Gothic reviews (volumes 1 & 2).

Japanese ghost stories – or kaidan (sometimes translated as kwaidan) – are rooted in an ancient pantheon of conventions, stock characters, and narrative tropes. These established, often unaltered stories date back way before motion picture cameras to the Heian period (794–1185) and records of public exhibitions date back to the Noh and Kyogen theater of the 1300s, and Bunraku puppetry and the kabuki theater of the 1600s. Japanese horror filmmaking dates back to the silent era, though many early features have been lost to time. During the Second Sino-Japanese War and WWII, the authoritative government labeled genre movies frivolous, nearly halting the production of kaidan pictures. After the war, occupying US forces discouraged period dramas, known as jidaigeki, assuming that they would cultivate national pride and encourage dissent. Since the majority of the established ghost stories took place in an older historical era, horror continued to be largely ignored.

Kaidan films finally had their renaissance during the 1950s, as US political authority waned and the region’s motion picture output was redefined by a mix of Edo era ideals and western cultural influences. This surge in horror produced several highly acclaimed films that were popular even outside of Japan, including Masaki Kobayashi’s Academy Award-nominated Kwaidan (1964) and Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). While Toho stole much of the glory during the ‘60s, Daiei Studios got in on the boom early with strong showings from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (Japanese: Ugetsu Monogatari, 1953) and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), which features a ghost among the many witnesses to a central crime.

The Ghost of Kasane Swamp (1970)

A samurai's wife tries to repay her husband's debt with her body, but is caught in bed with the money lender and they are both murdered by her husband, who dumps their bodies in a nearby swamp. Shingoro and Oshiga, the money lender and samurai's children, find a curse has been passed to them as they each try to recover the money. (From Radiance’s official synopsis)

Like every title in Radiance’s Daiei Gothic collection, Kimiyoshi Yasuda’s The Ghost of Kasane Swamp (Japanese: Kaidan Kasane-ga-fuchi) is a retelling of a traditional ghost story – in this case, a folktale of the same name (sometimes known as The Pool of Kasane) that was supposedly based on a true crime that occurred in Ibaraki Prefecture during the Edo period. Being unfamiliar with the story and having not seen any of the other five (or so) movie adaptations, I’m immediately struck by the story beats and character types that it shares with the more popular Ghost Story of Yotsuya in Tokaido (Japanese: Tôkaidô Yotsuya Kaidan, 1825), including villainous social climbers, infidelity-inspired murder, swampy graves, and, most conspicuously, a woman who has half of her face mangled (albeit under different circumstances).

As in the case of Ghost Story of Yotsuya (1959), the most celebrated film adaptation of Ghost of Kasane Swamp, The Depths (1957), was directed by Nobuo Nakagawa. Considering that Daiei’s version of Yotsuya, directed by Kenji Misum, was released the same year as Nakagawa’s, it might seem out of character for the studio to have taken more than a decade to retell this particular story. Well, that’s because this was the studio’s second adaptation of Ghost of Kasane Swamp, after Ghost Story: Depth of Kasane (Japanese: Kaidan Kasane-ga-fuchi, 1960), which was also directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda. For the record, Yasuda made two Kasane Swamp movies for Daiei over the course of a single decade. 

Like contemporaries Satsuo Yamamoto and Tokuzo Tanaka, Yasuda was a busy member of the Daiei repertoire and worked on a number of films in the Zatoichi and Sleepy Eyes of Death franchises. He also directed every film in the Akadô Suzunosuke trilogy (1957), but his lasting legacy and the two films most like Ghost of Kasane Swamp are the fantastically moody kaiju period piece Daimajin (1966) and the wacky monster-mash Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters (Japanese: Yôkai hyakumonogatari, 1968), both of which kicked off subsequent, though shorter-lived franchises.

Yasuda is less of a formalist than Tanaka. In comparison to the other two films in this collection (or Tanaka’s Snow Woman [1968], available as part of the first Daiei Gothic collection), Ghost of Kasane Swamp appears to have been shot on the quick and maybe even on a lower budget. Yasuda’s sets are comparatively spartan (even more stage-like than Tanaka’s), he utilizes more handheld camerawork, and he’s not afraid to explore the seedier aspects of the frothy source material. It’s a scruffier and meaner film that nevertheless maintains an impressionistic spookiness of the other Daiei kaidan and even sets itself apart with a truly bizarre first act nightmare sequence (a sort of a mini-film in and of itself) and a genuinely eerie climax.

Bibliography: 

• Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema by Jasper Sharp (Scarecrow Press, 2011)

• Introduction to Japanese Horror Film by Colette Balmain (Edinburgh University Press, 2008)

• Yokai.com: Kasane

Video

Nobuo Nakagawa’s 1957 version of Pool of Kasane was released on R2 DVD at some point, but this version appears to be the digital home media debut of the Yasuda adaptation. It’s definitely the film’s Blu-ray debut. All three movies in Daiei Gothic Vol. 2 were reportedly scanned in 4K at Imagica laboratories in Japan, cleaned up by Radiance themselves, and color graded at DaVinci Resolve. The 2.35:1, 1080p transfer matches the collection’s Haunted Castle transfer in that it sometimes shows its age in terms of the softness of wide-angle shots, but is otherwise a really nice balance of dark shadows and fine patterns. The palette tends to be muted to help sustain the mood and ensure that the occasional red highlights really pop, which they do. Grain levels and details appear natural and artifacts are minimal, despite a slight smudging effect seen along some hard-lit edges.

Audio

Ghost of Kasane Swamp is presented in its original Japanese mono and uncompressed 1.0 LPCM. This is a mostly dialogue and music-driven film and there is some obvious ADR, so don’t be surprised when lip sync falls off a bit throughout. There is a slight hiss and sometimes muffled quality to the dialogue, but the vocal qualities remain clear. Like several of the Japanese horror and exploitation films of this era, Hajime Kaburagi’s score mixes traditional Japanese motifs with rock and ‘50s sci-fi interludes, represented by ragged, Morricone-esque surf guitar and wobbly theremin (probably actually a Moog or percussion instrument). 

Extras

• Select-scene commentary from Lindsay Nelson (24:24 in total) – The Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science and Economics at Meiji University and author of Circulating Fear: Japanese Horror, Fractured Realities, and New Media (Lexington Books, 2021) explores the stylistic trends of Japanese film at the end of the ‘60s, the history of adapting Ghost of Kasane Swamp to stage and film, differences between film versions, similarities to Ghost Story of Yotsuya and the Zatoichi series, Yasuda’s career, how ghosts are represented in the film, and gender themes.

• Norio Tsuruta on The Ghost of Kasane Swamp (17:35, HD) –  The director of J-horror era films, including Kakashi (2001) and Premonition (2004), discusses Daiei’s origins and trademarks, and compares this Ghost of Kasane Swamp to other versions of the story.

• Legacy of Ghosts (12:16, HD) – Zack Davisson, the author of Yurei: The Japanese Ghost (Chin Music Press, 2015), traces the history and evolution of Ghost of Kasane Swamp from folktales and art pieces to kabuki plays, banraku shows, and motion pictures.

• Theatrical trailer

The images on this page are taken from the BDs and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.