The 150-year old Kabuki drama Yotsuya Kaidan continues to inspire the Japanese cinema of ghosts and demons to new filmic interpretations; our series includes no fewer than three films based on the tale of the samurai Iyemon, haunted by the horribly disfigured ghost of his poisoned wife, Oiwa. But whereas Kazuo Mori's film Oiwa no Borei (The Ghost of Oiwa, PFA 7/86) focused on Oiwa's plight--much as the woodblock prints tend to focus on her ghost--in Shiro Toyoda's 1965 film Illusion of Blood, the emphasis is on the relentless dissolution and demoralization of Iyemon, portrayed by Tatsuya Nakadai. A masterless ronin reduced to thievery, Iyemon first murders his father-in-law in order to live with his bride Oiwa, and then poisons her when the opportunity to marry into wealth presents itself. The film, like the play, is a portrait of terrible times, but Toyoda also strikes a contemporary note, particularly in Nakadai's interpretation, by concentrating on the psychology of this morally bankrupt individual, thoroughly corrupted by his will to survive and out of whose guilt an entirely otherworldly revenge plot is hatched. Eminent director Shiro Toyoda, in his first period drama, draws us into the bizarre realm where the supernatural and the psychological are indistinguishable, using a visual style influenced by Japanese picture scrolls (emaki-mono), in which scenes are viewed at oblique angles from above. Toyoda's unsettling angles and closeups create a breathtaking effect, but in translating horror into beauty, his intent was not to deflect the violence inherent in the bloody tale. Toyoda has said, "Man is becoming increasingly evil in today's world and I would like to depict the final stage of this progression into evil in this film" (quoted in Kinema Jumpo).