Page 77 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

64 Nightmare Japan

This is not to suggest that Naked Blood is by any means an
exclusively progressive body horror film. Although Naked Blood
advances an oppositional politics of identity, the film does not necessarily
end on an optimistic note. In the film’s final moments, when little Eiji
tells us that ‘the dream has not ended yet’ and raises his camcorder to
follow Mikami’s progress as she rides her motorcycle westward, the
audience feels a palpable sense of dis-ease well in keeping with the
discomforting tone of the film’s previous seventy-five minutes. Social
theory has long contended that ‘the growth of civilization requires
simultaneously the restraint of the body and the cultivation of character in
the interests of social stability’ (Turner 1992: 14-15); texts that render
human corporeal and social formations indiscrete – displaying, in the
process, the various ideological veins and cultural sinews that keep the
fragile, and yet alarmingly resilient, physiognomies intact – disturb, if
only momentarily, this ‘stability’. Confronting heterogeneity – that first
step towards attaining Bataille’s ‘durable orgasm’ – is a messy business.
Sooner or later you’re bound to get some on you.

‘Lunatic Theater’: Sato Hisayasu’s Muscle

While Naked Blood’s powerful social critique illustrates Sato Hisayasu’s
acute understanding of Japanese splatter films as an instrument for
serious socio-cultural excavation, it would be short-sighted to overlook
the important visual and ideological groundwork Sato set forth several
years earlier in his hour-long homoerotic horror film, Muscle. Proffering
a less subtle, and thereby more pointed, critique of Japanese censorship
practices, Muscle occupies an interesting position in Sato’s oeuvre. A
melding of pinku eiga tropes with the horror genre’s visual and
narratological motifs, Muscle anticipates the extreme images and
spectacular storylines that have become a staple of Sato’s increasingly
unorthodox cinematic vision. Specifically, Muscle advocates the
contestation and collapsing of filmic and socio-cultural limits through an
explicitly self-conscious probing of their very parameters and the social
mechanisms frequently mobilised to police them. Muscle is also one of