Page 40 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 27

Several years ago, I obtained a private video under the title GUINEA PIG. Its
commentary said that ‘this is a report of an experiment on the breaking point
of bearable pain and the corrosion of people’s senses’…but it was, in fact, an
exhibition of devilish cruelty as three perpetrators severely abused a woman.
Note: ‘Guinea Pig’ is defined as any experimental material.

The use of the ambiguously plural ‘people’ is particularly instructive, as
the ‘breaking point’ that this filmed/filmic ‘experiment’ purports to test
extends beyond that of the victim, whose suffering the director presents
as ‘real’ torture captured on tape, to include the audience as well. Indeed,
as is the case with many films and film genres, audience perceptions of
the ‘reality’ of the action transpiring before them is perhaps the most vital
component of all when considering the text from an aesthetic and socio-
political perspective.
Episodic in its portrayal of the torture and mutilation of an
unidentified female by three male figures clad in black pants, black T-
shirts, and dark sunglasses, Devil’s Experiment is a gut-wrenching forty
minutes of ‘video’ designed to confound viewers expecting the narrative
and visual trappings of traditional horror film. It is, instead, a text that
increases the viewer’s dis-ease via a process of continuous visual and
narrative dislocation; through a layering of anonymity within the film’s
diegesis, as well as a series of meticulously orchestrated compositions,
Saturo’s lens evokes simultaneously sadistic and sympathetic viewing
positions. The scrolling, written text that opens the film, for instance,
constitutes a carefully articulated rhetorical gesture deliberately poised to
blur audience distinctions between fact and fiction, thus heightening the
visceral impact generated by the ‘experiment’s’ verisimilitude. Whether
the images that form the body of the text are a re-creation of the original
‘experiment’ or the ‘real’ ‘experiment’ is likewise left ambiguous, and
the absence of a traditional credit sequence further confounds spectator
assumptions of what is ‘real’ or ‘simulated’, investing the images with an
aura of ‘authenticity’.
However, once a prudent viewer closely examines the film’s
deeper structures, dedicating special attention to Satoru’s practiced
manipulation of not only what is shown, but also of how (and in what