Page 25 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

12 Nightmare Japan

‘dispassionately’ at the meeker animal ‘until it’s dead” (1997: 21). This
theme, best illustrated by the works that comprise Matsumura Katsuya’s
dark and ‘controversial’ (21) All Night Long series (All Night Long [Ooru
naito rongu, 1992], All Night Long 2: Atrocity [Ooru naito rongu 2:
Sanji, 1994], and All Night Long 3: Atrocities [Ooru naito rongu 3:
Saishuu-shô, 1996]), as well as films as seemingly diverse as Iwai
Shunji’s quietly brutal meditation on ijime (or bullying), All About Lily
Chou-Chou (Riri Shushu no subete, 2001), and Miike Takashi’s
sadomasochistic splatterfest, Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1, 2001). These
works present viewers with protagonists that seemingly embody the most
destructive and extreme consequences of scholastic competition,
economic recession, shifting gender and sex roles, and cycles of sadism
and masochism informing constructions of group and individual identity.
Chapter Five analyses three prominent apocalyptic horror films.
In their representation of contemporary civilisation under assault or in
ruins, the ominous yet captivating images that comprise Sono Shion’s
Suicide Circle (Jisatsu saakuru, 2002), Higuchinsky’s Uzumaki (2001),
and Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Pulse (Kaïro, 2001) recall a history of
annihilation and reconstruction that has resulted, both nationally and
internationally, in the correlation of the Japanese social body with cycles
of cataclysm and rebirth. Similarly, Chapter Six, the book’s final chapter,
engages notions of demolition and renovation as social and generic
transformations. Consequently, Nightmare Japan’s sixth and final chapter
interprets some of the emerging visual, narratological and philosophical
trends in contemporary Japanese horror cinema. In the process, I
speculate upon some of the potential new directions in which this
important cinematic tradition is progressing, as well as how it may
continue to develop in the future. In the process, I consider multiple short
and feature films that, despite occasionally contributing to a creative
climate that encourages derivative plots and clichéd images, nevertheless
provide avenues for forward-looking artists to innovate in important new
ways. Ochiai Masayuki’s Infection (Kensen, 2004) and Tsuruta Norio’s
Premonition (Yogen, 2002), for example, advance sophisticated meta-
filmic considerations of the cultural fears and anxieties informing the
social functions of not only horror movies, but also the visual