Page 36 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 23

1989: 80-1) that ‘reflects the diversity of Japanese society at a given
moment’, as well as its ability to ‘accommodate change throughout time’
(Martinez 1998: 3). Therefore, it is to the Guinea Pig series, arguably
Japanese cinema’s most extreme works of cinematic terror and body
horror that I now turn, endeavoring, over the next several pages, to note
the extent to which their themes and motifs may reveal a culture at once
increasingly nationalistic and global.

Bloody Fragments and the Body in Pain:
Devil’s Experiment and Flowers of Flesh and Blood

In her essay, ‘Horror and the Carnivalesque’, Barbara Creed notes that
‘(t)he image of the transforming body is central to the horror genre’ in
that ‘(t)he possibility of bodily metamorphosis attacks the foundations of
the symbolic order which signifies law, rationality, logic, truth’ (137). In
other words, cinematic representations of radical biological malleability
or violent corporeal disintegration disrupt notions of identity (national,
cultural, gendered) as ‘fixed’ or ‘natural’, even as some artists and
cultural critics with variably conservative, reactionary, or intransigent
subject positions mobilise such imagery to reify their political agendas.
Often cited as among world cinema’s most notorious motion
pictures, Satoru Ogura’s Devil’s Experiment (Akuma no jikken, 1985) and
Hino Hideshi’s Flowers of Flesh and Blood are works of ‘body horror
cinema’ in that they are ‘obsessed with limits – with the skin as a
boundary, with the tolerance of audience expectation and desire, and with
the connection between the two, as on-screen the visceral violation
provokes visceral response’ (Williams 2000: 34). Similar to Japanese
films like Ishii Teruo’s Joys of Torture series (Tokugawa onna keibatsu-
shi, 1965-9), Suzuki Norifumi’s Beautiful Girl Hunter (Dabide no hoshi:
bishoujo-gari, 1979), Sato Toshio’s Guts of a Beauty (Bijo no harawata,
1986), and Hashimoto Izo’s Bloody Fragments on a White Wall (Shiroi
kabe no kekkon, 1989), especially in their vivid depiction of the human
body tortured and dismembered, Devil’s Experiment and Flowers of
Flesh and Blood have become increasingly attractive texts to an ever-