Japanese movies have a legacy of terrifyingly vengeful female ghosts
When it comes to nursing a grudge, female spirits have the killing edge, as the Ju-on films have proved time and again
The Japanese have male ghosts and benign spectres too, but the memorable ones - as far as J-horror movies go, anyway - are female and hell-bent on revenge.
Many of these vengeful spirits have been inspired by Oiwa, the tragic heroine of Tsuruya Nanboku IV's 1825 kabuki play Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (loosely translating as Ghost Story of Yotsuya) whose samurai husband wants to marry up and so has to get rid of his loyal wife.
The method he chooses - poisoning Oiwa and dumping her body in a river - horribly disfigures the poor woman and leaves her with an implacable rage against her husband. Her spirit - with its long hair and horrifically melted face - harries him to his doom.
Filmed again and again, most notably by Nobuo Nakagawa in his 1959 masterpiece The Ghost of Yotsuya, Oiwa's tale has served as a template for many contemporary Japanese horror films, including the 12 billion yen box office hit that started the J-horror boom: Hideo Nakata's 1998 Ringu (or Ring).
The long-lived Ju-on series also features a vengeful female ghost. The genius of 42-year-old director Takashi Shimizu is to remove her from the realm of the pre-modern - when supernatural payback was one of the few (if fanciful) ways women could exercise power - and place her in contemporary Japan, into an average house in an average Tokyo suburb.