(Reposted from the Halloween page of one of my characters at Panhistoria now I've removed it from there.)

According to Japanese legend, it is believed that if a cat's owner is killed and it licks its blood, the creature will become a cat monster - kaibyo or bakeneko that would revenge the wrongful death. Bakeneko mono, as ghost-cat stories are called, can be found in traditional folk stories and kabuki plays, and during the 30s to 60s there was a number of Japanese ghost-cat horror films made (see the essays Ghost Cats & Blind Masseurs and A Few Bakeneko-mono Ghost-Cat Movies)

One of the best was Kuroneko (藪の中の黒猫, Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko, literally "Black Cat of the Bamboo Grove"), a sparse but magnificently eerie horror story loosely based on the traditional Japanese folktale The Cat’s Return, which came out in 1968 and was written and directly by the highly respected Kaneto Shindo.

The plot...

In a time of civil war, in the 11th Century, a group of mercenary samurai brutally rape and kill a mother and daughter-in-law and cover their crime by setting their hut ablaze. When the ashes have cooled, a black cat is seen lapping blood from the charred corpses. Some while later the samurai who led the assault encounters a young noblewoman who requests he see her safely to her home, where she toys with him before biting him and sucking out his blood. He is discovered at dawn dead among the ashes of a burnt hut.

As other samurai returning from the war through that area are also killed in similar circumstances, the issue is brought to the attention of the local governor who orders Gintoki, an ex-farmer who rose to the status of a samurai vassal during the civil wars, to kill the ghosts or else he will be killed. Gintoki encounters the two beautiful women in an eerie, beautiful scene and discovers that the ghost-cats are the revenge-spirits of his own mother and wife, killed while he was off at the war. Emotional drama abounds as the older, vengeful spirit seeks to kill her son, the younger ghost makes a bargain in order to be temporarily reunited with her husband, and Gintoki is ultimately unable to reconcile his love and his duty.

Ah, but you knew it was all going to end badly for everyone, didn't you? *chuckle*

Here's a good essay on the film: Shindo’s Kuroneko, and if you need more encouragement to dash out and rent or buy it, here's a trailer to whet your appetite: