Disney+ is adding another title to its Japanese originals slate: Night Tales Club, a six-part supernatural thriller set to premiere in January 2027. The show adapts a collection of short horror stories by Ichi Sawamura, with Takayuki Yamada attached as lead Hojo.
Hojo is a successful businessman obsessed with strange phenomena. In the series, he treats ghost stories, monsters and unexplained events as bugs in a larger system—so he funds a club where people can trade their stories and evidence for 20 million yen.
One story, one director
The format is built to pull in genre fans: each episode is directed by a different filmmaker, while Kenji Nakajima handles the Hojo sequences.
- Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure)
- Takashi Shimizu (Ju-On)
- Shinzo Katayama (Gannibal)
- Yukiko Sode, Yuichiro Sakashita and Yosuke Nakamura round out the roster
Series writer Sawamura said the adaptation gave him “an enormous sense of surprise and joy” and that the stories will soon “be available on screen to scare audiences around the world.”
Why this matters for the streaming slate
Disney+’s Japan output has so far mixed darker local originals like Gannibal and Land of Tanabata with lighter fare such as Merry Berry Love and The One Shot. Night Tales Club leans into a proven streaming export: compact horror with a strong auteur pedigree.
The director-by-episode structure gives Disney+ several marketing hooks inside a single title. A horror fan may tune in for Kurosawa, then stay for Shimizu or Katayama. That matters for retention, not just acquisition, because each episode can generate its own discovery moment.
For content planners, the lesson is in the packaging. Rather than commissioning one big-budget film, Disney+ is stacking several established horror names into a single episodic title. The risk stays contained—six short stories, not one costly swing—but the audience surface area is much larger.
The announcement also lands a day after Carol Choi replaced Luke Kang as President of The Walt Disney Company APAC. For buyers tracking Disney’s regional strategy, the timing suggests the local-originals engine is continuing, not pausing, through leadership change.
Source: Deadline
