Page 124 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

A Murder of Doves 111

within contemporary Japanese horror cinema that not only depicts the
‘human’ as ‘animal’, but also reveals human interaction as founded upon
a logic of ‘survival of the fittest’. This perspective underlies many of the
capitalist and militaristic discourses that not only informed Japan’s
economic miracle of the 1970s and 1980s, but also impacted social
practices, from education to daily interpersonal exchanges. Additionally,
as discussed in the preceding section’s analysis of Iwai Shunji’s All About
Lily Chou-Chou, the binary rubric – ‘in or out’ (uchi-soto) – finds regular
articulation through the practice of ijime, particularly given bullying’s
privileging of those ‘in’ the group over the ‘outsider’, who is often
violently ostracised for being deemed too weak for, or somehow
undeserving of, a place within the dominant social order. But to what
extent is the binary inside/outside, as a discursive construction, operant in
contemporary Japanese culture? Additionally, how might notoriously
brutal films like Matsumura Katsuya’s All Night Long series, to which the
term ‘dove style violence’ was initially applied, simultaneously re-
inscribe such dualistic thinking while challenging long-held illusions of
the corporeal and/or social body as a cohesive formation?
Matsumura Katsuya’s All Night Long series has yet to receive the
intensive critical attention enjoyed by more recent works of Japanese
horror cinema, like Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Dark Water, and Shimizu
Takeshi’s Ju-on: The Grudge. Even the much maligned Guinea Pig films
explored in this book’s first chapter have received more frequent and
extensive critiques, even if the vast majority of these explorations have
been limited to fan-based internet sites dedicated to Japanese horror
cinema. Curiously, it is to the infamous Guinea Pig films that
Matsumura’s All Night Long series is most often compared. For example,
cultural mythologies or urban legends constellate around both filmic
cycles, and in the history of their public reception, the All Night Long
series resembles the Guinea Pig films in that each series’ domestic and
international reputations were enhanced or, depending on one’s tolerance
for graphic violence, variably stigmatised by knee-jerk reactions to the
films’ ‘realistic’ depictions of the human (primarily female) body
graphically dismantled. As well, the Guinea Pig and All Night Long series
benefited from the assorted hype and potentially purposeful