Page 46 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 33

demons from Japanese folklore, and a gruesome, yet artfully arranged
tableaux of eviscerated bodies, skinned faces and jars of eyeballs,
vaginas, and chicken heads.
Unlike Devil’s Experiment, however, Hino’s film depicts the
victim’s abduction from an urban street through a grainy sequence that,
shot at night on location, is immediately reminiscent of a ‘direct cinema’
approach to filmmaking in both the camera’s mobility (the shots seem
hand-held) and the director’s use of available light within the mise-en-
scène. 8 As a result, the film’s action is rendered less ambiguous and
fragmentary. Viewers learn how the woman has come to be at the mercy
of her captor. Additionally, as the camera’s angle and motion suggests
that the images on the screen may in fact represent the stalker’s point-of
view, the viewer’s gaze aligns with that of the killer in a manner familiar
to audiences of mass-market horror films. Further, by coding the lone,
well-dressed woman (the object of the camera’s gaze and soon-to-be-
victim) as an office worker most likely on her way home at the end of the
day, Hino engages cultural apprehensions over not only the threat of
women entering the work force in larger numbers, but also, by extension,
the alteration in the woman’s role within the domestic realm (Napier
2000: 145). Walking both with purpose and without escort, the women in
the film’s opening scenes, including the film’s protagonist/victim, can be
read as figures representative of a wider, more discursive threat to
conventional notions of masculine authority, a fear ‘commonly
expressed’ within Japanese popular culture through images, both literal
and figurative, ‘of the socially respected white collar man becoming
impotent’ (145). This femicidal tone permeates the entire film, at once
revealing masculinist anxieties over changing gender roles, and
perpetuating misogynist representations of violence against women that,
like those in Satoru’s Devil’s Experiment, contribute to a larger
‘gorenographic’ imaginary (Caputi 1992: 213).

8 Indeed, the only moment when available light is not used during this sequence is in the
killer’s pursuit of his eventual victim. During this event, a small spotlight (most likely attached
to the hand-held camera) illuminates the scene.