Page 23 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

10 Nightmare Japan

Japanese horror cinema in important, visually-inventive, and
intellectually-engaging new directions.

Nightmare Japan

Nightmare Japan is divided into six chapters. Chapter One consists of an
extensive study of four short but brutal films, each an example of one of
world cinema’s most notorious genres: the ‘torture film’. Long popular in
Japan, this thorny branch of the horror genre has become increasingly
attractive to an ever-wider array of Western audiences searching for films
that push the portrayal of violence and gore to new extremes. Mobilising
brutal and, occasionally, darkly comical images of dismemberment and
biological violation, these films offer gruesome yet crucial insights into
shifting conceptions of corporeal, social, and national cohesion, exposing
a larger socio-political body in a state of cultural crisis. Shot primarily on
video, Satoru Ogura’s Devil’s Experiment (Za ginipiggu: Akuma no
jikken, 1985), Hino Hideshi’s Flowers of Flesh and Blood (Za ginipiggu
2: Chiniku no hana, 1985), Tabe Hajime’s Devil Woman Doctor (Za
ginipiggu 6: Peter no akuma no joi-san, 1990) and Kuzumi Masayuki’s
He Never Dies (Za ginipiggu 3: Senritsu! Shinanai otoko, 1986) mobilise
documentary aesthetics even as they deconstruct traditional verist
filmmaking practices. Infused with gruesome special effects and shot
with an amateur, guerrilla filmmaking aesthetic, these disturbing films
offer visceral visions interlaced with a degree of stinging social satire
rarely seen in works of Western horror directors. Flowers of Flesh and
Blood, for instance, differs so radically from virtually any Western horror
film that US actor Charlie Sheen famously mistook Hino’s text for an
actual snuff film.
Chapter Two likewise explores horror films that take corporeal
disassembly as their primary conceit. Specifically, it consists of close
readings of two works of postmodern body horror films by Sato
Hisayasu: Naked Blood (Naked Blood: Megyaku, 1995) and Muscle
(Kurutta Butokai, 1988). Positing the human body as an indiscrete,
transformative, and immanent space that reveals the potential for