Page 21 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

8 Nightmare Japan

Pacific, these mutated monstrosities’ aquatic and aerial assaults seem
only appropriate, as do their intentional, and sometimes unintentional,
annihilations of major cities. Tokyo in particular endures repeated
destruction, a narrative device that has received notable critical attention
in texts ranging from Darrell William Davis’s Picturing Japaneseness:
Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Films (1995) to Mick
Broderick’s anthology, Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the
Nuclear Image in Japanese Film (1996).
Such apocalyptic visions also found articulation in films that
correlated the Japanese social body with ‘apocalypse’ and
‘transcendence’ (La Bare 2000, 43). The cataclysmic events that bring
about the ‘end of the world as we know it’ can be technological, religious,
or both; similarly, bodies undergoing radical disassembly can be
individual, national, or global. In their fusion of the technological and the
biological as a locus for terror, films like Honda Ishirô’s body horror
masterpiece, Attack of the Mushroom People (Matango, 1963), and
Matsubayashi Shuei’s World War III fantasy, Last War (Sekai daisenso,
1961), are particularly noteworthy. Not only do these texts function as
exemplary models of this cinematic tradition, but they anticipate the
fusion of cyberpunk and splatterpunk conceits that permeate Tsukamoto
Shinya’s techno-fetishist nightmare, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988), one of
the most influential Japanese horror films ever produced and a picture
that, along with Ishii Sogo’s Burst City (Bakuretsu toshi, 1982), Fukui
Shozin’s 964 Pinocchio (1991), and Ikeda Toshiharu’s Evil Dead Trap
(Shiryo no wana, 1988), spurred the emergence of an increasingly
visceral and graphically violent wave of Japanese horror films in the mid
1980s. The success of these latter films was instrumental in refocusing
international attention upon the works of numerous Japanese directors
inclined towards frightening audiences with their visions of liminal
entities and human bodies undergoing radical transformations or extreme
physical trauma.
Finally, this introduction would be incomplete if it failed to
acknowledge the influence of Tsuruta Norio, whose kaidan-inspired
video productions Scary True Stories (Honto ni atta kowai hanashi, 1991;
Honto ni atta kowai hanashi: Dai-ni-ya, 1992) were a direct influence on