The Living Skeleton (吸血髑髏船, Kyūketsu Dokurosen) is a 1968 Japanese horror film directed by Hiroshi Matsuno.

Saeko later scuba dives with her boyfriend, the couple find a group of submerged human skeletons, chained together at the ankles near the ocean floor.

[1] Matsuno directed a few films starring Bunta Sugawara in the early sixties before working on The Living Skeleton.

[6] Slant Magazine referred to The Living Skeleton as "representing the peak of Shochiku's dalliance with horror convention" and a "chilling and genuinely unnerving black-and-white update of the bygone kaidan tradition".

[7] The Austin Chronicle referred to the film as "probably the most conventional of Schochiku's [sic] horror releases"[8] Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln referred to the Criterion Collection's Eclipse set, calling the film "the most accomplished and sophisticated of the quartet in terms of its visual structure and narrative" and along with Genocide, "easily the most interesting entries".