Page 125 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

112 Nightmare Japan

misinformation accompanying the texts’ circulation through generations
of bootleg VHS and DVD copies. As Japanese film scholar Tom Mes
notes in his review of All Night Long 2: Atrocity, the second and third
features in the All Night Long series were rumored to have been
condemned by Eirin, Japan’s official censorship board, because of the
works’ ‘unacceptable tone’, a highly subjective and nebulous
denunciation at best. The extent to which the filmmakers and distributors
of the All Night Long series contributed to the cautionary discourse
surrounding the films is open to question and, unfortunately, exceeds the
scope of this chapter’s project. Nevertheless, the notoriety the films
garnered certainly impacted many spectators’ viewing experiences, and
the works’ straight-to-video aesthetics, especially when viewed in relation
to the texts’ grim plots, position the works as contentious visions
orchestrated to shock those who deem themselves ‘up to the challenge’ of
screening them.
Before commencing upon a reading of the All Night Long series
and its increasingly nihilistic portraits of alienated youth in 1990s Japan,
consider the following plot summaries:

All Night Long (1992): Three socially maladjusted teenagers meet at a
train crossing. While waiting for the train to pass, they witness the
random murder of a young woman by a male assailant armed with a large
butcher knife. The three teenage witnesses include: (1) Saito Shinji – a
seventeen year old vocational high school student whose night classes
have failed to net him a job at a local airport; (2) Suzuki Kensuke – a
nineteen year old man with ‘no occupation’ and recurring suicidal
fantasies; and (3) Tanaka Tetsuya – a meek, intelligent, overworked, and
socially awkward (especially around women) ‘Eiko-ga-oka Private
School Senior’. The three teens form a loose friendship and agree to meet
a few weeks later at Kensuke’s apartment for a party to which each must
bring a woman as a date. Tetsuya falls for a female student named Riei
and seeks the guidance of his classmate, Tamari, an obnoxious young
man with a knack for seducing and manipulating women. As the party
approaches, Tetsuya’s grades begin to plummet, and he soon realises that
Tamari, who claims to be preparing a way for Tetsuya to meet Riei, is