Page 152 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Spiraling into Apocalypse 139

technology are projected onto fantastical physiognomies that engage in
battle but rarely perish. In their depiction of the simultaneous dread of
atomic disaster and trepidation over rapid industrialisation, daikaiju eiga
resemble American giant monster films of the 1950s, like Gorden
Douglas’ Them! (USA, 1954), in which mutant ants threaten civilisation,
and Bert I. Gordon’s The Beginning of the End (USA, 1957), in which
irradiated grasshoppers attack Chicago. Specifically, both cinematic
traditions depict a socio-cultural discomfort over ‘processes of social
development and [scientific, technological, and cultural] modernization’
(Jancovich 1996: 2). However, the tropological shift Napier recognises in
daikaiju eiga suggests that monsters like Gojira and Gamera are
ultimately products of Japanese popular culture. Accordingly, these films
‘offered [their] immediate postwar Japanese audience an experience that
was both cathartic and compensatory, allowing them to rewrite or at least
reimagine their tragic wartime experiences’ (1996: 240), as well as to
confront apprehensions accompanying economic recovery through rapid
industrialisation.
In recent decades, daikaiju eiga have given way to a proliferation
of techno-/body-horror films that literalise the darker side of a process of
nation-wide industrialisation largely orchestrated as a result of, and in
direct response to, Western (primarily US) military and cultural
imperialism. As discussed in my earlier explorations of the Guinea Pig
films and Sato Hisayasu’s Naked Blood, techno and body horror films
contribute to a discourse of boundary violation and body invasion,
graphically enacting, in the process, perhaps the most dreadful apocalypse
of all – the perpetual intimate apocalypse of the human body revealed not
as a consolidated and impregnable citadel, but as a flexible assemblage
that disallows for illusions of corporeal integrity or for ideologies
privileging the sovereignty of the human form. In their focus on issues of
‘biological privation, technological instrumentality, and the loss of
biological control’ (Thacker 2002: 111), these works closely adhere to
what Eugene Thacker describes as ‘biohorror’, a union of ‘futuristic
dystopia produced through science and technology’ and ‘the violent
monstrosities that manifest themselves within the human body’ (112).