Page 62 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Chapter Two:

Cultural Transformation,

Corporeal Prohibitions and
Body Horror in Sato Hisayasu’s

Naked Blood and Muscle

I want to make a film which has the influence to drive its audience mad
to make them commit murder.
- Sato Hisayasu

Social (Dis)eases and the Body Horrific

Sato Hisayasu’s cinematic vision, particularly as realised in his films,
Naked Blood (Naked Blood: Megyaku, 1995) and Muscle (Kurutta
Butokai, 1989), is often compared by Western critics to that of Canadian-
born director David Cronenberg. Though rarely explored beyond the
basic acknowledgment that both filmmakers blend ‘the visceral, the
psychopathological and the metaphysical’ (Hunter 1999: 139), this
association helps to point out that Sato, like Cronenberg, is a ‘literalist of
the body’ (Shaviro 1993: 128). Accordingly, Sato posits the body as an
indiscrete, transformative, and immanent space that reveals the potential
for imagining new economies of identity. He is a filmmaker who explores
both the abject dread and infinite possibility of the human body in a state