Onibaba

A mother and her daughter-in-law survive a civil war by killing lost samurai and selling their armour. A neighbour returns from the fighting. The mother finds a mask.

Kaneto Shindo shot it in a field of susuki grass planted for the purpose, and the grass does what a haunted house does elsewhere: it is taller than the actors, it moves constantly, and nobody can see more than a few feet.

The film is explicitly about sexual jealousy and hunger, and it is far more direct about both than a Japanese film of 1964 might be expected to be.

The mask, based on a hannya from noh theatre, is the image people remember, and what it does when it is removed is the reason the film has a reputation.

Shindo has said the pit came from a story his mother told him. The war is the Nanboku-chō conflict and the peasants are the point.