Kuroneko

Kaneto Shindo made this four years after Onibaba and it is the more formally beautiful of the two.

A mother and her daughter-in-law are raped and killed by a passing troop in a burning house. They come back as vengeful spirits in a bamboo grove that appears at night, luring warriors home.

The trick is that the son returns from war a decorated samurai and is ordered to destroy them.

Shindo shoots the ghosts with wirework and reversed footage so they move through the air in a way that is graceful and wrong, and the entire film is high-contrast black and white with black backgrounds that swallow the frame.

The obligation the film ends on, a mother choosing between her promise and her son, is the sharpest thing in Japanese horror.