Japanese horror’s international reputation was built around the turn of the century by a small group of filmmakers, and two of them, Kiyoshi Kurosawa with Cure and Takashi Shimizu with Ju-On, now share a single streaming series. Night Tales Club, the latest Japanese original for Disney+, is an anthology in which each of its six episodes goes to a different director. The format makes the show a roll call of the country’s genre filmmaking across generations, not a vehicle for one auteur.

As Deadline reported, Takayuki Yamada plays Hōjō Zen’ichi, a businessman obsessed with the inexplicable; the Japanese announcement makes him the founder of ALAYA, a life sciences and medical engineering giant. He is convinced that ghost stories, monsters and other supernatural anomalies are “bugs” in an underlying conspiracy, and from a top-floor laboratory he invites visitors to share their experiences and evidence in exchange for twenty million yen in gold bullion. There are three conditions: the story must be true, there must be a victim, and the visitor must hand over the only piece of evidence.

Alongside Kurosawa (Cure, Wife of a Spy) and Shimizu (Ju-On, who later remade it in Hollywood as The Grudge), the episodes go to Shinzo Katayama, who directed the Disney+ hit Gannibal; Yukiko Sode (Aristocrats); Yuichiro Sakashita (I Can’t Cry With Your Face); and Yosuke Nakamura, whose credits include work as assistant director on Higuma!!. The sequences that link the stories are directed by Kenji Nakajima, an art director who was visual director on The Naked Director, the Netflix series that Yamada headlined, and on Tokyo Swindlers.

The source material comes from Ichi Sawamura, whose debut novel Bogiwan ga Kuru won the Japan Horror Novel Award and was adapted by Tetsuya Nakashima as the 2018 film It Comes. The series takes six of the eight stories in his 2024 collection Atama no Ōkina Ke no Nai Kōmori, and Sawamura wrote the adaptation himself. “As the original author of these stories, I feel an enormous sense of surprise and joy that they will soon be available on screen to scare audiences around the world,” he said.

The project pushes the Disney+ Japanese slate toward its darker end, after Gannibal and the murder mystery Land of Tanabata and alongside lighter fare such as the romcom Merry Berry Love and the variety show The One Shot.

All six episodes will stream on Disney+ under the Star banner from January 2027. Yusuke Wakabayashi and Yamamoto produce, Yoshihiro Hanno composes the score, and the production companies are Pipeline and Chiaroscuro.

The teaser arrived a day after Carol Choi, the executive who set up Disney’s Japanese originals team, was named president of Disney Asia Pacific in place of the retiring Luke Kang. Among the first titles on the slate she now runs from the top is a series whose host pays in gold for proof that a ghost was real.

Tags: Disney+, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Shimizu, J-horror, Night Tales Club, Takayuki Yamada