Just for fun...this not very scary ghost thriller gives a wonderful feel for the many uses of ghosts and demons in village life and politics. From an opening image of a large, one-eyed beast, the film settles into an intimate portrait of an Edo period fishing village whose residents must call on spirits and demons, when reasoning fails them, to defeat a land deal that would raze a cherished shrine. In this shrine the traditional purification ceremony of the hundred spook stories is conducted once a year; after each story is told, a candle is blown out, culminating in an exorcism of the shrine spirits. We are treated to a few (not the full hundred) of these delectable tales of retribution and revenge as little films within the film; they tell of fish tormenting fishermen, of rubber-necked female ghosts whose malevolent reach is infinite. But the spooks who inhabit the "real" world of the film are a livelier bunch, from the dancing umbrella called forth by the shenanigans of a backward child, to the faceless demons who drive the workers away as they are about to tear down the shrine. The final triumph of the people is symbolized by the dance of their demon friends--all of them, like the umbrella and the foxfire, recognizable from the woodblock prints--in ghoulish glee at having avenged themselves on all impious men.