Sam Peckinpah? one of the greatest action filmmakers of all time, made a ninja movie?! With James Caan, Robert Duvall and Burt Young?!! For action junkies it sounds too good to be true. Here are the 15 best movies that came about as a result. And when so-called 'kung-fu movies' exploded in popularity worldwide in the '70s and '80s, the ninja legend exploded right along with it. This, of course, made them a popular villain for the originally Chinese-centric martial-arts film genre as well. Rather, the world mainly came to know of them through Chinese historical-fiction (the word 'ninja' itself is an Early Middle Chinese translation of the kanji 忍者 which is read as 'shinobi' in Japanese), where ninja were popularized as an example of treacherous, dishonorable behavior to be expected of Japanese villains. Some even managed to establish 'respectable' houses/lineages of their own, eventually becoming the basis for the 'shadow warrior' archetype by which ninja are popularly imagined today.Īs befits professional killers paid to undertake what would today be called 'black ops' missions, little is recorded of actual ninja activity in Japanese history. They became highly sought-after for their skills and willingness to do 'dirty work' that samurai often felt was beneath them. Two such clans, the Koga and the Iga, became so well known for producing skilled ninjas that some would leave their communities to become professional operatives for specific nobles or the Shogunate itself. The field was 'evened' so effectively, in fact, that the nobles began to hire the best of these clans' so-called 'ninjas' as spies and mercenaries.

Unable to stand up in traditional combat to the expensively funded and heavily-outfitted samurai, some of these resistant clans developed unique martial-arts techniques and fighting strategies based on mastery of one's environment, along with weapons based on common tools and simple farming equipment, in order to even the playing field in combat. During the feudal era in Japan (largely beginning in the 15th Century), many isolated rural clans were resistant and even hostile to the idea of being ruled over by the laws of nobles - especially when they were being enforced by often oppressive samurai. Let's be clear about one thing upfront: Ninja were (and, depending on who you ask, still are) a real thing.

Enter the ninja film