Disney+ will premiere “Night Tales Club” in January 2027, a six-part Japanese horror anthology that brings together filmmakers behind “Cure,” “Ju-On” and “Gannibal” under one series, The Hollywood Reporter reported.Takayuki Yamada, star of “The Naked Director,” plays Hojo, a wealthy businessman fixated on the unexplained. Hojo believes ghosts, monsters and curses are “bugs” exposing a larger conspiracy. He founds the Night Tales Club and offers 20 million yen, about $130,000, in gold to anyone who brings him evidence of a supernatural encounter. Each episode follows one of those accounts.
A different director handles each story. Kiyoshi Kurosawa (“Cure”) and Takashi Shimizu (“Ju-On”) anchor the lineup, joined by Shinzo Katayama (“Gannibal”), Yukiko Sode (“Aristocrats”), Yuichiro Sakashita (“I Can’t Cry With Your Face”) and Yosuke Nakamura (“Higuma!!”). Kenji Nakajima, who directed Yamada on “The Naked Director,” shoots the Hojo framing scenes.
The material comes from author Ichi Sawamura, who wrote the adaptation himself. The series draws on six of the eight stories in his 2024 collection “Atama no Ōkina Ke no Nai Kōmori.” His debut novel, “Bogiwan ga Kuru,” won the Japan Horror Novel Award and became Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2018 film “It Comes.” Sawamura said he feels “an enormous sense of surprise and joy” that the stories will reach screens worldwide. Yusuke Wakabayashi and Teruhisa Yamamoto produce.
The anthology format suits the project. It gives each director a self-contained space while Yamada’s character threads the episodes together. Genre observers note that Kurosawa and Shimizu helped build Japanese horror’s international reputation around the turn of the century, and the pairing marks a rare reunion of that generation on a single streaming title.
The announcement also signals Disney’s wider ambitions. Japanese originals on the service so far include “Gannibal,” the rural-village police thriller, “Land of Tanabata,” a murder mystery, and lighter titles such as “Merry Berry Love” and “The One Shot.” One trade report says Disney plans to roughly triple its annual output of international original series over the next three years. Disney has not detailed episode release plans beyond the January premiere. A teaser has been released ahead of the launch. The anthology will stream on Disney+, and Variety reports Hulu as an additional outlet in some markets.
