Page 37 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

24 Nightmare Japan

wider array of horror fans and paracinemaphiles 5 hungry for films that
push the portrayal of violence and gore to new extremes. Merging the
aesthetics of cinéma vérité and cinema vomitif, they are ‘total theater’
(Brottman 1997: 3) impacting viewers on the most visceral level through
a consistent barrage of graphic scenes of physical and psychological
abuse framed by little more than scrolling title cards. Such a cinematic
presentation at once gestures towards alienating the viewer (in an almost
Brechtian sense) from the graphic content to follow, and threatens to
collapse the psychic distance between spectator and spectacle. Presented
in a visual style that mimics the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of ‘nonfiction films’ that
purport to document what André Bazin calls the ‘raw reality’ of everyday
life, these ‘topographical narratives of the human body split open,
infested, rendered asunder, penetrated, truncated, cleft, sliced, suspended,
and devoured’ (14) arise from a myriad of diverse Japanese cinematic
traditions, ranging from pinku eiga (the “pink” or soft-core film) to
chanbara eiga (the samurai film). In addition, the scenes of ritualised
brutality that define these texts provide a barometer of sorts for a plethora
of social concerns. The evisceration of the female body in Flowers of
Flesh and Blood, for instance, is reminiscent of rituals like hara kira, ‘an
ancient act in which female votives would offer up the “flower” of their
entrails and blood by a self-inflicted knife wound’ (Hunter 1998: 159-60),
while the apportioning of gender roles within both films address concerns
about the stability of traditional sex and, by extension, gender-based
divisions of labor at the height of Japan’s late capitalist ‘bubble
economy’.
Given their substantial focus on the body as a site of trauma and
radical reconfiguration, the Guinea Pig films’ position within Japanese
cinema seems appropriate for the period of economic prosperity, rapid
technologisation, and extreme cultural transformation that began with the

5
‘Paracinema’ is Jeffrey Sconce’s term for a set of reading practices clustered around a variety
of film texts that lend themselves to ironic and/or counter-hegemonic reading protocols in the
hands of viewers who focus their sophisticated reading skills on texts ignored by ‘legitimate’
taste cultures. In other words, paracinema is ‘less a distinct group of films than a particular
reading protocol, a counter-aesthetic turned subcultural sensibility devoted to all manner of
cultural detritus…[T]he explicit manifesto of paracinema culture is to valorise all forms of
cinematic “trash”, whether such films have been either explicitly rejected or simply ignored by
legitimate film culture’ (Sconce 372).