Page 30 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 17

texts, this chapter understands the infamous series as a collection of texts
that mobilise images of corporeal disintegration, and the (on-screen)
forces responsible for their methodical yet gory disassembly, as
metaphors for shifting conceptions of corporeal, social, and national
cohesion. They are films, in short, about bodies in crisis. Narratives in
perhaps the loosest sense of the term, the films under examination in the
pages to follow nevertheless chart the trajectory of a culture in transition.
By turns sadistic and contemplative, gruesome and elegiac, each film is
its own ‘flower of flesh and blood’, sprouting forth and blooming its
bloodiest shade of red where traditional conceptions and emerging
notions of gender, class, and nation intersect.

‘A Japanese Thing’: Social Bodies, Cinematic Horror

Western horror films have long been obsessed with bodies – both
corporeal and social – and the rhetoric (including visual and
philosophical) of embodiment. Frequently marked by a thematic
preoccupation with monstrosity in all its polymorphic, anthropomorphic
and ‘all-too-human’ manifestations, horror films provide insight into not
only a culture’s dominant ideologies, but also those multiple subject
positions that question or contest the status quo. This has particularly
been the case in much of western culture, where analytical approaches
from the ‘psychoanalytic’ critiques advanced by scholars like Robin
Wood, Barbara Creed, and Steven Jay Schneider, to the ‘Marxist’
inquiries set forth by theorists like Christopher Sharrett and Tanya
Modleski, have offered valuable insights into the extents to which horror
literature and film facilitate or challenge the circulation of capitalist
disciplinary power. In short, western horror films, whether progressive or
ideologically recuperative, function metaphorically, participating in a
larger discourse of embodiment by mobilising notions of containment,
flexibility and identity (individual, national, etc.). In the process, these
texts reveal volumes about the socio-political geometries from which, and
against which, they arise.