Enjoyed Kwaidan much more than you did, apparently --certainly a film that is much more about visual and aural style creating a certain atmosphere than it is about plot. I just enjoy living in that eerie, hyperreal world for three hours.

For me, those beautifully un-memetic sets, those costumes, the color temperature and midcentury filmstock, the lighting and Toru Takemitsu's score combine to have that visceral, pre-verbal effect that you describe farther down in this post. With a handful of exceptions it just doesn't look like any other film.: a horror movie with bright pinks and salmon-orange sunsets.