Page 127 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

114 Nightmare Japan

condoms and tangled sheets. A voyeur, he peers through bushes at high
school girls humiliating a horribly scarred female classmate, ogles some
of the hotel’s rutting customers through the slots in the building’s
ventilation grates (a predilection he shares with an older woman who
helps run the establishment), collects pubic hairs from the hotel room’s
crumpled bedding, and captures flies to feed his assortment of
carnivorous plants – the latter a practice that depicts nature as at once
beautiful, indifferent, ugly, and deadly. Not long into the film, Kikuo
becomes obsessed with a beautiful neighbor, Nomura Hitomi. Taking a
cue from a fellow ‘Dusthunter’/garbage forager, Kikuo begins collecting
intimate items from Nomura’s garbage. Among the items he gathers are
discarded toothbrushes, blood-soaked maxipads and tampons, strands of
hair, and pieces of half-eaten food upon which Kikuo subsequently feasts.
As the film progresses, several of Kikuo’s fellow workers catch a young
woman, Tane Kaoru, stealing from one of the love hotel’s clients. Rather
than turning her into the police, they drag her into a garbage dump and
rape her repeatedly. When one of the workers, a mentally-challenged
young man, repeatedly smashes the young woman’s head with a jagged
piece of concrete, the workers scatter, leaving Kaoru for dead. Kikuo, true
to form, secretly watches the sexual assault from a distance. Within
seconds after his fellow employees flee the scene, he picks up the
wounded woman and conveys her back to his tiny apartment. There, he
keeps meticulous records of the brutalised thief’s biological functions.
When she finally regains consciousness enough to tell him that he is ‘just
filth!’, he strangles and dismembers her. Additionally, Kikuo’s attempts
to woo Nomura Hitomi fail, and when he realizes that she had become
merely another conquest for one of the love hotel’s regular customers, he
goes on a bloody killing spree.

Shot on video like the Guinea Pig films, the All Night Long series
differs from larger budgeted horror films in that the images possess verist
immediacy comparable to home video or television news footage. Such a
mise-en-scène conveys the illusion of objectivity that Yiman Wang,
evoking Raymond Williams, describes as conveying the illusion of
‘social experiences that are still in process, “present and affective,” often