By HARVEY F. CHARTRAND

Fables don’t frighten, nor do horror films that "transcend the genre."

Case in point: Masaki Kobayashi’s arthouse hit Kwaidan (1964), a beguiling and dreamlike anthology of ghost stories based on old Japanese folk tales. Did I mention that folklore isn’t usually scary, either--the single notable exception being Viy (or Spirit Of Evil) by Nikolai Gogol, based on an old Russian tale?

That’s not to say that Kwaidan’s fables don’t have their outré pleasures, or even moments that come close to raising gooseflesh. But Kwaidan never really delivers the goods, horror-wise.

Another problem with this film is that it leads off with the two strongest episodes—"The Black Hair" and "The Woman Of The Snow." The last two tales, "Hoichi The Earless" and the deliberately unfinished "In A Cup Of Tea," are weak by comparison and definitely anti-climactic. (And yet, because Kwaidan’s almost three-hour running time was considered excessive by distributors, the superior "The Woman Of The Snow" was cut from the American print for 37 years and only recently restored on the Criterion Collection’s excellent reconstruction of the film, available on DVD and VHS.)

Kwaidan begins with five minutes of beautiful (but interminable) abstract titles of colored ink mixing with water, to the exotic tinkling of a Japanese bell. These gorgeous but slow-moving titles seem to proclaim that Kwaidan is Art with a capital A, that this film will be uplifting, ennobling, good for you.

In episode one, "The Black Hair," a poor samurai (Rentaro Mikuni) divorces his true love (the exquisite Michiyo Aratama) to marry for money. His second marriage to the wealthy daughter of a warlord proves emotionally sterile, if financially rewarding. After the guilt-ridden samurai retires, he returns to his first wife, only to discover something eerie about her. She lives in a seemingly abandoned house and hasn’t aged a day since he left her 30 years before.

Were it not for the highly ritualized Noh Theatre acting style and a sparse score that sounds like floorboards collapsing, the finale of "The Black Hair" could have been a real spine-chiller. This is the episode that comes closest to unleashing pure horror upon the viewer.

In the second episode entitled "The Woman Of The Snow," a handsome young woodcutter (Tatsuya Nakadai) and his old friend are caught in a blizzard and seek shelter in a shack in the forest. An icy spirit in the form of a woman with marble-white skin freezes the old man to death just by breathing on him, but spares the woodcutter’s life on the condition that he never tell anyone about her.

One day, the woodcutter meets a pretty girl and falls in love with her. They marry and raise three happy children. And yet the wife never seems to age. Years later, the now middle-aged woodcutter, believing he dreamed of the Woman of the Snow, forgets his promise and tells his still youthful wife what really happened the night he and his friend were stranded in the shack during the snowstorm. Is the woodcutter in for a nasty surprise? You bet he is!

"The Woman Of The Snow" is entirely studio-bound, with expressionistic skies (painted by director Kobayashi) reflecting the tranquil or turbulent emotions of the characters. With the exception of the winter scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), fake snow has never looked more realistic than it does here.

Granted, the ghostly, pallid features of the Woman of the Snow can be rather unsettling at times, reminiscent of the evil little girl with the translucent skin who pursues the alcoholic actor (played by Terence Stamp) in Federico Fellini’s "Toby Dammit" segment of Spirits Of The Dead (1968). However, some of the symbolism in "The Woman Of The Snow" is so heavy-handed as to alienate the viewer, such as the image of a woman running into a giant eyeball glowing in the winter night sky.

Still, this second episode of Kwaidan is quite beautiful to look at, in the same way that the final scenes in the snowy topiary in The Shining are beautiful (and, unlike Kwaidan, quite terrifying).

In episode three, Hoichi the Earless is a blind musician, living in a monastery. He sings so well that the ghostly imperial court of a vanquished samurai clan commands him to perform for them the epic ballad of their death battle. In a trance, Hoichi entertains the dead, who rise from their cemetery plots late at night to hear the songs of their former valor.

But the ghosts are draining away Hoichi’s life, so the monks set out to protect him by painting sacred calligraphy--a holy mantra--over his entire body. This makes Hoichi invisible to the warrior-ghosts. But the monks forget to paint over Hoichi’s ears, the only parts of the balladeer that are visible to the marauding ghosts! I must admit that watching invisible forces pull off Hoichi’s ears was tough to take.

The fourth and final episode, "In A Cup Of Tea," tells the incomplete story of a samurai who keeps seeing the face of a mysterious stranger reflected in his cup of tea. Despite this fearful presence in his teacup, the samurai drinks the brew, swallowing the soul of the apparition. The samurai is soon afterwards confronted by the stranger and his three retainers, who challenge him to a swordfight.