Kuroneko (Blu-ray disc)

The second feature from Kaneto Shindo is based on a Japanese folk tale, 'The Cat's Revenge'. Set in the ancient Heian Era, when times were hard and people were starving, a woman and her 20-year old daughter are scratching a meagre living in the forest when a band of marauding, depraved samurai rape and slay the two women, leaving their hut in ashes, and the blood-covered bodies splayed nearby, which attracts a black cat who laps up the blood. This transforms the spirts of the women and they become shape-shifters wreaking revenge on the samurai class until one day Gintoki, a warrior, returns home to find his wife and mother gone and is assigned to rid the country of the shape-shifters only discovering later that they are his wife and mother.