Page 39 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema
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26 Nightmare Japan
physiognomies in the Devil’s Experiment and Flowers of Flesh and Blood
as emblematic of wider socio-cultural tensions resulting from a post-
colonial climate of economic development?
Composed of progressively brutal vignettes with brief, albeit
accurate titles (‘Hit’, ‘Kick’, ‘Claw’, ‘Unconscious’, ‘A Sound’, ‘Skin’,
‘Burn’, ‘Worm’, ‘Guts’, and ‘Needle’), Satoru Ogura’s Devil’s
Experiment, the most visually fragmented of the Guinea Pig films, is
explicitly concerned with testing the very notion of boundaries, be these
limit points corporeal, narratological, or political. This thematic agenda is
clear from the opening sequence, in which the anonymously penned text
that precedes the film’s action scrolls upwards against a black
background, spelling out, in the process, the film’s main premise:
Image 2: Pseudo-snuff or nostalgic nationalism? Hino Hideshi’s Flower of Flesh and
Blood (© Ecclectic DVD Distributors)
