Less than half the running time of the 1949 adaptation by Keisuke Kinoshita, this version couldn't be more different yet it mostly succeeds. Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, whose prolific career (IMDB lists him as the director of roughly a hundred titles) includes the horror classic *Jigoku* and the *Quick Draw Okatsu* series among other things, the film's set-up and drama is being staged in a highly compressed form and played out in a rather cold and economic fashion, which might actually be the whole point up to the moment of oiwa's murder, when this thing truly becomes a horror flick and the (intentionally, i guess...) by-the-numbers buildup gives way to some genuinely haunting visuals as the walls keep closing in around her murderers. Where Kinoshita's version was about bad karma catching up with Iemon, Nakagawa turns this stuff into a classic supernatural revenge story, culminating in a finale kinda foreshadowing that of Kihachi Okamoto's 1965 classic *Sword Of Doom* as Iemon appears to desperately defend against invisible shapes and shadows on the walls and ceilings.