The Haunted Lantern
Strange occurances plague Shin and his new fiancee during the Festival of the Dead. He has nightmares of a woman disappearing in a supernatural spray of blood and gruesome visions of monsters. Then an old priest claims that Shin is truly dead. It is the time of ghosts and sinister spirits roam the Earth. A ghostly beauty haunts Shin, thirsting for vengeance and an otherwordly kiss.
THE HAUNTED LANTERN is a contemporary variation of classic Japanese kwaidan (ghost) stories. Ghost stories are popular in Japanese literature and cinema and often concern otherworldly female apparitions haunting their former lovers. This is also the case with Haunted Lantern. The movie starts with a young woman in search of her beloved samurai friend. She finds him wounded in a hut and suddenly they are surrounded by enemy samurais. Resistance is useless and so the girl urges her lover to commit suicide together in order to be united in death. She slits her throat, but her friend cowardly refuses to kill himself.
This introduction turns out to be a nightmare for samurai Shinzaburo who meets beautiful Tsuyu and they immediately fall in love. But Shinzaburo’s parents have a marriage proposal and want him to marry Tsuyu’s younger sister Suzu. For family reasons, Tsuyu is asked to marry another man whom she does not love. To make a long story short, the love triangle situation results in the two sisters committing suicide. It is the time of the Bon festival, the festival of the dead. Soon the samurai (who does not know that Tsuyu and Suzu killed themselves) is visited by his love and her sister.