Page 65 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

52 Nightmare Japan

involved, and Mikami brings Eiji into her private world by showing him
her ‘sleeping installation’, a virtual reality unit that allows her to
experience a dreamlike state by showing her ‘the scenery’ of her heart.
Inevitably, Eiji’s experiment goes horribly awry. The other two
Myson test subjects become grotesquely self-destructive: the woman for
whom beauty equals ‘pleasure’ slowly transforms herself into a bloody,
albeit orgasmic, human pin-cushion, and the woman for whom eating is
‘joy’ literally consumes herself in what are undeniably some of the film’s
most unsettling moments. The narrative’s climax occurs when Mikami,
with whom Eiji has forged an uneasy yet intimate relationship, first kills
her fellow test-subjects, then slices a gaping vaginal-shaped wound into
Eiji’s mother’s stomach and, following a cyber-enhanced sexual
encounter with Eiji, kills the young genius by first injecting him with
Myson and then cutting his throat. In the film’s final scene, set several
years after Eiji’s death, we learn that Mikami and her young, camcorder-
wielding son – also named Eiji – are traveling about the country, spraying
the air with a substance that might be herbicide or might be Myson. As
Mikami drives off on a motorcycle equipped with a canister and spraying
tube (‘I think I’ll go west today,’ she tells her son. ‘It hasn’t spread there
yet.’), the child meets the viewers’ gaze and says, ‘the dream has not
ended yet.’
Controversial both in Japan and in the few Western markets and
film festivals in which it was publicly screened, Naked Blood continues to
provoke strong (if, at times, bewildered) reactions by film critics, movie
reviewers and cinephiles, some of whom have left written reactions and
thoughts about the film on the various on-line paracinema catalogues and
fan-based Internet websites dedicated to the celebration and circulation of
‘shock’ and ‘gore’ cinema. Thomas Weisser and Yuko Mihara Weisser,
authors of Japanese Cinema: The Essential Handbook (1998), Japanese
Cinema Encyclopedia: Horror, Fantasy, and Sci-Fi Films (1998), and
Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films (1998), label Sato’s
filmmaking as ‘bitter’ and composed in a ‘sledgehammer style’ (463),
and describe Naked Blood as rating ‘high on the gross-out level’ (417).
Similarly, an online fan review called the film ‘an incredibly
transgressive horror film’ (white pongo 2000: para 1), while a reviewer