Page 66 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Cultural Transformation 53

for the Sex Gore Mutants web site, while lauding the film for being ‘one
of the most depressing movies ever’, also characterises Naked Blood’s
plot as ‘raw, existing to frame a raw emotion, not to tell a story’
(Gruenberger 2002: para 4). This last observation is not surprising,
especially given the film’s surreal imagery and complicated storyline, as
well as the movie’s intentionally disorienting and ambiguous closing
scenes that explore the tenuous distinction between what constitutes
reality and what represents a part of virtual reality’s ‘consensual
hallucination’ (Gibson 1984: 51).
Manipulating audience understanding of what is real and what is
imaginary is a popular narrative gesture in films that speculate upon the
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promises and pitfalls of an ever-emerging cyberculture. What separates
Naked Blood from many comparable Western films, however, is that
Naked Blood, as is the case with many of Sato’s productions, was not
backed by large budgets and extensive marketing strategies. Rather,
Naked Blood emerges from Sato’s work both within and against the
Japanese pinku eiga cinema, a largely uniform and highly regulated
tradition of ‘soft core’ films that, especially within the subgenres known
as Best SM Pink or Violent Pink, have become increasingly notorious for
emphasising partial male and female nudity coupled with narratives
depicting ‘the rape and brutalization of young girls’ (Alexander 2001:
para 8).
In other words, unlike Western films with comparable plots, Sato
Hisayasu’s works arise from a largely low budget cinematic tradition with
a distinctly formulaic, yet surprisingly flexible visual iconography. Yet,
as I will demonstrate in the paragraphs to follow, pinku eiga’s frequently
violent and misogynist tropes, coupled with prohibitions against the
depiction of pubic hair and genitalia enforced by Eirin (Japan’s

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See, among others, such high-profile films as Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (USA, 1995),
Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor (Germany/USA, 1999), Alejandro Amenabar’s Abre Los
Ojos (Spain, 1997) and its 2001 US re-make, Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, the Wachowski
Brothers’ The Matrix (USA, 1999) and its two sequels, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (Canada,
1999), and Tarsem Singh’s The Cell (USA, 2000). The theme of ‘illusion’ or ‘hallucination’
versus ‘reality’ also appears in Sato’s Genuine Rape (1987), the film from which many of the
concepts behind Naked Blood eventually developed, and The Bedroom (Shisenjiyou no Aria,
1992).