Page 48 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 35

the result of intravenous drugs administered to silence her screams and, as
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the killer informs us, impose a state of rapture.
Thus, Flowers of Flesh and Blood, documents more than the
mutilation of a Japanese woman. It reveals a paradoxical tension within
postmodern Japanese culture, namely the struggle to construct and
maintain an imagined homogenous cultural identity within an
increasingly transformative and ‘heterogenous present’ (Harootunian
1989: 66). This contradictory impulse positions the Japanese social body
as a ‘body in pain’, to borrow Elaine Scarry’s term, a body under attack
from its own ‘regimes of power’, its integrity threatened by assaults from
‘inside and outside alike’ (1985: 53), by a will to nationalism and a
recognition of the demands of an increasingly global society.

Exhuming the Past, Dissecting the Present: Devil Woman Doctor

The final two Guinea Pig films under consideration in this chapter, Devil
Woman Doctor (Peter no akuma no joi-san 1990), directed by Tabe
Hajime, and He Never Dies (Senritsu! Shinanai otoko,1986), directed by
Kuzumi Masayuki, share Devil’s Experiment’s and Flowers of Flesh and
Blood’s fake documentary structure, as well as the films’ depiction of the
tortured and disarticulated human form to advance a socio-political
critique of a transforming Japanese culture. Unlike the two Guinea Pig
films discussed above, however, Tabe’s and Kuzumi’s contributions to
the notorious series mix gore with dark humour in a fashion that
inevitably evokes comparisons to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead films
(USA, 1981-93), as well as Troma Studio’s most extreme productions,
like Redneck Zombies (USA, Pericles Lewnes, 1987) and Tromeo and

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Coincidently, as in Devil’s Experiment, the last organ removed from the captive woman is an
eye, which the killer fondles lovingly as he sucks it clean of blood. While lacking the visceral
impact of the eyeball piercing sequence in Satoru’s film, the dislodging of the woman’s eye in
Flowers of Flesh and Blood possesses a metaphoric power that justifies its status as the film’s
ghastly denouement. For the killer, and the multiplicity of cultural imperatives for which he
stands, the eye represents the quintessence of female physicality. As the killer in samurai
armour states: ‘Well, now, for the finishing touch is to take out her precious jewels. Ah, this is
the most beautiful thing of a woman’s body. This is it!’