Page 200 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema
P. 200
New Terrors, Emerging Trends 187
of viewing in an age of technological mediation. Hence, Marebito’s most
visceral and unsettling sequences recall the notorious video-based Guinea
Pig films discussed in Chapter Two, as well as Western horror fare, from
John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (USA, 1986) – in
particular the sequence in which Henry and his homicidal roommate,
Otis, watch a slow motion replay of a murder they videotaped – to mock-
‘found-footage’ classics like Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust
(Italy, 1980) and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch
Project (USA, 1999).
Where Marebito’s digital video aesthetic breaks exciting new
ground, however, is in its extension of the conceit of the reproduced
image as authenticated vision, a trope deployed famously, albeit far less
frequently, by Michael Powell in the aforementioned Peeping Tom.
Consistently conflating Masuoka’s POV with the image on his digital
video camera’s LCD screen until the perspectives become not only
interchangeable but indistinguishable, Shimizu posits Masuoka’s POV as
a product of technological mediation. In other words, Masuoka’s camera
becomes a prosthetic eye that at once enriches and circumscribes his
vision. In addition, Shimizu’s copious digital manipulations during the
film’s editing include the occasional dissolution of the film’s image via
pixilation, an effect that results in an innovative disruption of
conventional viewing pleasures through a ‘counter-cinematic’
foregrounding of the work’s artifice. Similarly, Shimizu reiterates this
embrace of cinema as a technological construct in his overt use of painted
backgrounds during one of Marebito’s signature moments: Masuoka’s
discovery of the Lovecraft-inspired ‘Mountains of Madness’. The scene’s
composition evokes a strain of heightened theatricality in cinema that
audiences can trace as far back to the late nineteenth century ‘trick films’
of the magician-turned-special-effects-pioneer, Georges Méliès. This
embrace of the fantastic through a reminder of cinema’s inherent two-
dimensionality further obviates the art form’s mendacity.
These gestures, taken collectively, comprise merely one
component of Shimizu Takashi’s larger exploration, in Marebito, of the
horror film’s continued allure. Indeed, the film’s preoccupation with the
process of variably viewing and interpreting the world around us reveals