Anna Biller boldly translates kabuki horror classic Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan with sumptuous, kaleidoscopic style
If there’s a prevailing ur-text for Japanese horror films as early as Kuroneko or as widely known as Ring and Ju-on, it’s Tsuruya Nanboku IV’s 1825 Kabuki play Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (or, The Ghost Story of Yotsuya in Tokaido). It’s the tale of a philandering, greedy ronin, Iemon, who conspires with his lover to rid himself of Iemon’s current wife, Oiwa–only for Oiwa to come back from the grave to exact bloody revenge. Yotsuya Kaidan codified horror tropes and visuals that persist today, and has been adapted into countless film, TV, and stage versions in the two hundred years since its debut. The most celebrated by J-Horror creatives like Kiyoshi Kurosawa is the 1959 version by Jigoku director Nobuo Nakagawa, which borrowed the stark primary color palettes of in-vogue Hammer horror films to lend this classic feudal-era tale a gruesome modern tone.
That two-century anniversary also marks a crucial new turn in the Yotsuya Kaidan tale: Anna Biller’s The Face of Horror is its first English-language film adaptation, and her long-awaited follow-up to 2016’s retro-folk-horror-romance, The Love Witch. Now set in the roaming hills of medieval England, The Face of Horror follows the tragedy befalling maiden Eleanor (Kristine Frøseth), betrothed to and betrayed by lascivious knight Edward (Jonah Hauer-King) once he sets his sights on marrying noblewoman Isabel (Bella Heathcote). Meanwhile, Eleanor’s sister Beatrice (Ellie Bamber) is determined to unearth the truth behind the fates of Eleanor, her husband, and their father–all of whom seem to have disappeared after crossing paths with Edward.
First and foremost, The Face of Horror effectively showcases Anna Biller’s keen sense of how best to adapt Yotsuya Kaidan for a Western audience. Biller cannily transposes Nanboku IV’s kabuki play to its new medieval setting, paying homage to the traditional elements of the original tale and its century of screen adaptations while infusing it with a social and artistic sensibility all her own. Just as Nobuo Nakagawa drew on the visual language of Hammer horror to visually modernize his 1959 Yotsuya Kaidan for its audience, Biller uses that same language to carry this classic Japanese kaidan back within that Western stylistic idiom, deepening the connection with a gruesome, prosthetics-laden flair recalling Roger Corman and Mario Bava. While the English setting translates the social mores of feudal Japan for Western viewers, Biller’s particular staging in the lavish papier-mâché interiors and matte-painting exteriors of classic period horror carries the arch melodrama and unsettling scares of Japanese horror theater into an effective new idiom without compromising their emotional impact.
Biller’s exhaustive eye for preserving the rich, textured detail of these 1950s films’ costuming, production design, and cinematography is a skill already honed in The Love Witch and Viva, now given even more impressive room to flex her sharp eye and artistic strengths. Frequent Biller collaborator M. David Mullen’s cinematography reverently echoes the harsh primary lighting and distinct primary color tones of classic technicolor, leaning into glowing torchlight and verdant forest greens as much as more outlandish flourishes like spinning color wheels. Biller’s costumes, one of her many credits on the film, are gorgeously rendered, decking out much of the finery in tackily opulent golds befitting Edward’s craven, basic ideas of wealth and how to flaunt it.
While much of a modern Western audience may not have firsthand experience with Kabuki theater, Biller nonetheless channels that art form’s heightened, declarative emotions in blending her Hammeresque inspirations with melodrama not unfamiliar to fans of Douglas Sirk or the films of Powell & Pressburger. Hauer-King’s Edward is such an unrepentant, crybaby libertine for whom chivalry is just another costume to wear, rampaging like a bull through battle scenes and bedroom scenes like they’re the same connected China shop. In contrast, Frøseth’s Eleanor is a magnet for Face’s harsh lighting on her perpetually-near-tears doe-eyes–something Biller effectively weaponizes as those eyes transform from gory external tragedy and newly-channeled inner rage. The pair are an entertaining duelling figurehead for the film’s game ensemble, all of whom are locked into Face’s always heightened yet nonetheless grounded unfiltered sincerity. This story is one where emotions are always at a ten or above, regardless of its setting or era–and engagingly insists its romance and heartbreak exist on the same pitch as its grisly later developments.
While Biller remains remarkably faithful to Nanboku IV’s original play, just as fascinating and provocative is where she chooses to diverge from Yotsuya Kaidan’s Japanese and Buddhist origins, reckoning with a new Western, Christian idiom to varying degrees of success. For the most part, The Face of Horror takes the tone of a medieval morality/passion play, where death hangs over all–an interlude also present in the film. Extended ruminations on the fate of the soul in the hands of God come close to Yotsuya Kaidan’s representations of the traditional Onryo myth; however, Eleanor’s otherworldly quest for vengeance exposes the limits of this Christian context, as the tale’s endless cycle of karmic retribution loses some of its force in a world where the soul is destined for a final resting place after death.
That said, one of Biller’s most potent insights is her insistence that Christianity is as much a patriarchal tool of oppression as it is her characters’ shared belief system. Here, faith shapes everything from beauty standards to social standing, and even Edward’s attempts at redemption are less rooted in acts of penitence than in indulgences that ultimately benefit the Church’s leaders. The Face of Horror skewers the convenient idea that the will of God happens to align with whatever one wants most, and sanctions whatever evil is necessary to get it. How fitting, then, that Biller’s final act frames Eleanor’s unearthly last moves, and the living who grow to carry out her will, as a true act of Divine Fury, one rooted in the power of the film’s most marginalized characters.
The Face of Horror had its US Premiere at Fantastic Fest 2026, where it currently seeks distribution.
