Page 28 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Chapter One:

Guinea Pigs and Entrails:

Cultural Transformations and Body

Horror in Japanese Torture Film

Will You Be My Guinea Pig?

In 1990, Charlie Sheen, the Hollywood actor and star of such spectacles
of cinematic violence as Red Dawn (USA, 1984), Platoon (USA, 1986),
and The Wraith (USA, 1986), viewed a video tape containing Flowers of
Flesh and Blood (Chiniku no hana, 1985), an episode from the Japanese
Guinea Pig series. ‘[B]elieving it to be a real snuff film’, Sheen
‘contacted the Motion Picture Association [of America]’ (Weisser and
Weisser 1997: 123), and then immediately initiated a crusade dedicated to
ensure that the roots of this cinematic flora would never find terra firma
on the shelves of US video stores. Although this incident has been
recounted so frequently among ‘hard core’ aficionados of world horror
cinema that, with each re-telling, it comes closer and closer to assuming
‘urban legend’ status, Charlie Sheen and the authorities he alerted are far
from the only people who have found themselves compelled to
investigate the origin of these controversial texts. In Sweden, police
called upon a physician to determine whether an episode of the Guinea
Pig series was a recording of an actual or simulated murder, and in 1992,
a 26-year old British man named Christopher Berthoud was fined ₤600