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New Terrors, Emerging Trends 197
persistently blur assumed distinctions between the ‘human’ and the ‘non-
human’. However, it is our base corporeality, in all of its porous fragility,
which remains, for Tsukamoto, the most recurrent site of horror. The
reasons for this include not only the body’s propensity for undergoing
radical biological transformations, but also its locus as the ultimate target
for, and last point of resistance against, the circulation of disciplinary
power in many late capitalist cultures, including Japan’s. The larger
implication of Tsukamoto’s focus on the human form, then, includes the
potential for viewing it as an apparatus for resisting oppressive ideologies
through an embracing of the processes of adaptation and change that have
always comprised our inexorable organicism. Thus, the primary concern
of Tsukamoto’s film is nothing less than the very ontology of fear. In this
sense, Vital and Marebito might be considered companion pieces. In
foregrounding human physicality through an almost clinically
orchestrated mise-en-scène, Vital dissects – or at least purposefully
agitates – those sickly logics most fundamental, or vital, to our
comprehension of the human as (and apart from), the ‘other’. For this
reason alone, Tsukamoto Shinya’s Vital (like Shimizu Takashi’s
Marebito) is not only an important contemporary Japanese horror film,
but an indispensable contribution to world cinema.
Conclusion
In short, as the excitement generated by recent works of contemporary
Japanese horror cinema remains high, influencing motion pictures and
other popular culture productions across multiple national and
international markets, one must not take pronouncements of the genre’s
impending demise too seriously. At the same time, filmmakers concerned
about the genre’s immediate viability must guard against redundancy,
both in terms of the iconography deployed to evoke fear in spectators, and
in terms of the film’s storylines; narrative reiterations without innovation
may not only decrease viewer interest, but jeopardise the chances of more
inventive texts reaching receptive audiences eager for more novel
approaches to the horror genre. If the works explored in this chapter are