Black Cat (1968) was placed in competition at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the festival was canceled due to the events of May 1968 in France.
The original title translates to "In the Grove of the Black Cat" and is a direct reference to the Ryûnosuke Akutagawa story, "Yabu no Naka" ("In a Grove"), which also inspired Akira Kurosawa for Rashomon (1950).
As a protégé of the revered director Kenji Mizoguchi, Shindo adopted his master's sympathy for the plight of women. Gender politics enter into the ghost story, as defenseless women return from the dead to exact a bloody revenge.
In Bakenoko mono folktales, cats take human form to dispense supernatural justice, avenging murders when there are no human witnesses. Shindo stages Black Cat (1968) in the same wartime setting as Onibaba, among poor peasants in the Heian period (794-1185). Kaneto Shindô said that his sympathies were with the low-born: "My camera is fixed to view the world from the lowest level of society, not the top."