Page 204 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

New Terrors, Emerging Trends 191

Correspondingly, terror and horror need not signify a moment of
culmination or death; such intense states can also provide points of entry,
as well as lines of flight, for those seeking experiences beyond those
acknowledged or endorsed by the status quo. Masuoka, after all,
voluntarily returns to the underworld with ‘F’ at his side, surrendering
control (via his digital video camera) to a figure that not only confounds
gender- and familial-based classifications (Masuoka treats ‘F’ as a pet, a
daughter, an infant, and a wife), but also surpasses binary categorisations
of human/non-human. Masuoka’s final line of dialogue identifies him as
having entered a realm in which he has ‘no need for human words.’
Closer to attaining his goal of touching the infinite through horror,
Masuoka now occupies a space beyond the parameters of dogmatic
verbal/linguistic structures. No longer confined by systems of
referentiality, he embraces liminality in all of its potential dread and
promise.

Posthuman Striptease: Tsukomoto Shinya’s Vital

Like Marebito, Tsukomoto Shinya’s recent film, Vital, embarks upon an
interrogation of the politics of ‘seeing’. In particular, it provokes a critical
consideration of the ideologies and desires informing simultaneous
enticements by, and anxieties over, the unknown, a subject position
largely responsible for the horror genre’s effectiveness and survival.
Formally, however, Marebito and Vital are quite distinct. Where
Marebito embraces digital video as an emerging medium, Tsukamoto
modifies his trademark avant-garde approach to shot composition and
editing by deploying a surreal mise-en-scène that is by turns coldly
clinical and conspicuously sensuous. The result is an atypically restrained
approach to his oeuvre’s principle preoccupation: the perils and promises
of the human body’s practical and ontological status in a high-tech,
increasingly posthuman environment. A visceral variation on the