Asian Horror

Andy Richards

• Publisher: Kamera Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781842433201
• eBook ISBN: 9781842434086
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Since Japanese horror sensations The Ring and Audition first terrified Western audiences at the turn of the millennium, there's been a growing appreciation of Asia as the hotbed of the world's best horror movies. Over the last decade, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Hong Kong have all produced a steady stream of stylish supernatural thrillers and psychological chillers that have set new benchmarks for cinematic scares. Hollywood soon followed suit, producing high-profile remakes of films such as  The Ring, Dark Water, The Grudge, and The Eye. With scores of Asian horror films now available to Western audiences, this guide helps viewers navigate the eclectic mix of vengeful spooks, yakuza zombies, feuding warlocks, and devilish dumplings, discussing the grand themes of Asian horror cinema and the distinctive national histories that give the films their special resonance. Tracing the long and noble tradition of horror stories in eastern cultures, it also delves into some of the folktales that have influenced this latest wave of shockers, paying tribute to classic Asian ghost films throughout the ages.

MODERN JAPANESE HORROR: ESSENTIAL VIEWING

Blind Beast/Moju (1969)

Directed by: Yasuzo Masumura

Cast: Eiji Funakoshi (Michio), Mako Midori (Aki), Noriko Sengoku (Mother)

Story

Michio, a psychopathic, blind sculptor, kidnaps beautiful model Aki and locks her up in his warehouse studio under the guard of his overbearing mother. Michio wants to use his prisoner to create a new genre of art. Artist and model subject each other to a series of sado-masochistic mind and body games, involving murder, rape and – eventually – love. As her affection for Michio deepens, Aki starts to go blind herself, and they begin to explore the limits of sensation by biting, clawing, beating and whipping each other, before pushing their bizarre love affair to even more perverse extremes.

Background

This film remains one of the most fascinating examples of the first wave of pinku eiga that ran from 1964 until 1972. Masumura’s other works include the lesbian melodrama Manji (1964) and the frontline nursing saga Red Angel (1966). In his disdain for the cosy conservatism of mainstream Japanese cinema, he was a big influence on other Japanese New Wave directors of the sixties – including Shohei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima, whose In the Realm of the Senses (1976) owes a significant debt to Blind Beast (and to its outrageous finale, in particular). This film was based on a story by Edogawa Rampo that was first serialised in the Asahi national newspaper in the early 1930s. Rampo’s writings have been adapted into other notable horrors like The Palette Knife Murder (1946), Kinji Fukasaku’s Black Lizard (1968), Teruo Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men (1969), Noboru Tanaka’s Watcher in the Attic (1976), Shinya Tsukamoto’s Gemini (1999) and the portmanteau Rampo Noir (2005), while the man himself was given an unorthodox biopic treatment in 1994’s bizarre Rampo.

Verdict

This exceptionally lurid blend of horror and sexploitation really has to be seen to be (dis)believed, and those wanting to sample the occasionally dubious but frequently inspired delights of ero-gro should start here. Laughing in the face of any notion of political correctness, Masumura’s film – like Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) many years later – explores the outer fringes of sexual ecstasy, where desire mutates into something deeply destructive, curiously beautiful and altogether new. Heavily Freudian, much of the action is set in artist Michio’s jaw-dropping warehouse studio – a surreal dreamscape of giant body sculptures and clusters of oversized body parts protruding from the walls. At one point, the heroine, Aki, realises that the enormity of the body parts is based on her captor’s vision of the world as a baby, before the onset of his blindness. Michio, a teetotal virgin, literally ends up destroying his mother in order to progress to the next stage of his deeply perverse sexual development. In its depiction of a twisted romance that goes well and truly off the rails, Blind Beast anticipates Miike’s Audition, while, as Rampo Noir (2005) has recently demonstrated, the writer’s brand of hallucinogenic horror is once again in vogue.

Evil Dead Trap/Shiryo no Wana (1988)

Directed by: Toshiharu Ikeda

Cast: Miyuki Ono (Nami), Aya Katsuragi (Masako Abe), Hitomi Kobayashi (Rei Sugiura), Yuji Honma (Muraki)

Story

TV host Nami is sent a videotape showing the torture and killing of a young woman. The tape also reveals directions to a disused army base, where Nami promptly heads with four members of her production team to investigate. They meet an enigmatic individual who claims to have grown up on the base with his disturbed brother, Hideki. A sinister figure in a raincoat starts killing off each member of the team in gruesomely extreme ways, until only Nami remains to learn the shocking truth about the monstrous Hideki.

Background

Japan Home Video stumped up the money for Nikkatsu Studios veteran and pinku specialist Ikeda to make this modern exploitation classic, and were keen to showcase the talents of a pair of the adult movie actresses in their stable – hence the inclusion in the film of a couple of steamy sex scenes just before the slice-and-dice gets underway in earnest. The film’s screenwriter, Takashi Ishii, was a former manga artist, and would go on to become a respected director with the yakuza thriller Gonin (1995) and the rape-revenge saga Freeze Me (2000). Two inferior sequels, the first made without the involvement of Ikeda and Ishii, followed over the next five years. Ikeda made several erotic thrillers and yakuza films in the nineties, before returning to the horror genre with the teen-manga adaptation Shadow of the Wraith in 2004 and the playful serial-killer pastiche The Man Behind the Scissors (2004).

Verdict

This superior slasher is a great example of the ways in which eastern and western horror films have always fed off and renewed each other in a mutually beneficial cycle. Ikeda’s film harks back to American classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Evil Dead, but its biggest debt is to the baroque Italian giallo thrillers of Dario Argento (Deep Red [1975], Suspiria [1977], Tenebrae [1982]). Tomohiko Kira’s synthesised score is a direct lift from the soundtracks produced by Goblin for Argento’s films, while the highly stylised, expressionist lighting and the gory coups de grâce delivered to the comely female characters are very much the Italian maestro’s modus operandi. Not content, though, with having a killer who is merely psychotic, Ikeda and Ishii up the ante in the final reel and throw in a dose of demented Cronenbergian body horror for good measure. Splatter hounds have a host of creatively executed gougings, garrottings, impalements and decapitations to enjoy, while the slick pacing, clever visuals, entertaining psychobabble (‘Mama-freak, or split personality?,’ Nami asks the putative murderer) and comic-book garishness of the whole enterprise are also to savour.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988)

Directed by: Shinya Tsukamoto

Cast: Shinya Tsukamoto (Metal Fetishist), Tomorowo Taguchi (Man), Kei Fujiwara (Woman)

Story

A Tokyo salaryman kills a metal fetishist in a hit-and-run incident. The salaryman is pursued through the subway by a woman whose body has been taken over by the fetishist. The salaryman’s own body begins to mutate into a flesh and metal hybrid. Unable to control his transformation, he ends up killing his girlfriend with a drill formed from his mutated penis. The salaryman then engages in a protracted and violent homoerotic duel with the fetishist.

Background

This was Tsukamoto’s first 16mm film after his earlier 8mm works, and was an international cult hit. His follow-up, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, was actually a bigger-budget ‘revisioning’ (as was Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 [1987], for example) rather than a direct sequel, while the English-language Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2010) would develop on the original’s storyline. Tetsuo’s female lead, Kei Fujiwara, did half of the film’s cinematography and would go on to direct several features, including the phantasmagorical Organ (1996).

Verdict

Tsukamoto’s brilliant feature is one of cinema’s key works of ‘body horror’ and leaves an indelible impression on all who see it. A total assault on the senses, the film uses manic pacing, visual distortions, a percussive industrial soundtrack punctuated by grunts and groans, and grotesque, staccato, stop-motion FX sequences of bodies wrenched painfully into monstrous biomechanical hybrids to create a nightmare vision of a society in post-technological meltdown. Incorporating a delirious blend of influences – ranging from cyberpunk, manga and Toho’s kaidan eiga to rock videos, pinku misogynist violence, Svankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), Cronenberg’s ‘New Flesh’ and Eraserhead’s (1977) post-industrial monochrome nightmares – this landmark work of Japanese horror is a hysterical articulation of a culture’s repressed terror at the technologies it has become enslaved to.

Splatter: Naked Blood/Megyaku: Nekeddo Buraddo (1996)

Directed by: Hisayasu Sato

Cast: Sadao Abe (Eiji), Misa Aika (Rika), Masumi Nakao (Yuki)

Story

Seventeen-year-old boy genius Eiji, while attempting to devise the ‘ultimate painkiller’ to improve mankind’s happiness, creates a new drug called Myson which causes the human brain to experience pain as pleasure. He secretly tests the drug on three young women who are participating in medical contraceptive experiments being run by his mother. One of the women is narcissistic and ends up mutilating herself. Another is gluttonous and starts to slowly eat herself. Eiji is attracted to the third girl, Rika, an insomniac. She introduces him to her ‘sleeping installation’, a virtual reality unit that allows her to experience dreamlike states by showing the scenery of the heart. Gradually, Eiji begins to comprehend that Myson has transformed Rika into a homicidal sadist.

Background

Sato was one of the major players in the Japanese sex film industry of the eighties and nineties, with over 50 movies under his belt. However, despite the generic constraints he was working under (i.e. a prescribed number of sex scenes), he often had considerable latitude to experiment with form and narrative, leading to the creation of some memorably extreme V-Cinema sex/horror hybrids. Splatter: Naked Blood is, in part, a remake of his pinku eiga from 1987, Genuine Rape, which also explored the boundaries between hallucination and reality. Many of his works were released under impressively lurid titles (samples include Promiscuous Wife: Disgraceful Torture [1992] and S&M Group Wax Torture [1992]), and some are gratuitously repulsive in their blatant misogyny. Sato later directed the Caterpillar segment of the ero-gro anthology Rampo Noir (2005) and Tokyo Zombie (2005).

Verdict

As an example of the ‘extreme’ fringe of Japanese filmmaking, Sato’s notorious splatterpunk/cyberpunk mash-up takes some beating. There had been a tradition of self-mutilation in certain Kabuki plays, in which women ritualistically cut off their fingers: Sato takes things to a whole other level when one of his characters dips her hand in boiling fat and proceeds to eat her digits as if they were tempura snacks. And that scene turns out to be a mere appetiser for the excruciatingly graphic depictions of corporal consumption to follow. These scenes would be wholly unpalatable if not for the intriguing elements of existential sci-fi that Sato throws into the mix: his film is fixated on virtual realities, altered states, designer drugs and body modification in ways that will endear it to fans of Cronenberg and Philip K Dick. Like other strains of modern Japanese cinema, Sato’s film expresses the alienating and isolating effects of modern urban environments, and a gnawing ambivalence about the vaunted benefits of technology.

Ring/Ringu (1998)

Directed by: Hideo Nakata

Cast: Nanako Matsushima (Reiko), Hiroyuki Sanada (Ryuji), Rikiya Otaka (Yoichi)

Story

Tokyo TV journalist Reiko sets out to investigate a series of mysterious deaths caused by a terrifying ‘video curse’. Each of the victims who watched a particular videotape received a phone call immediately afterwards informing them they had a week to live. Reiko herself becomes exposed to the curse when she travels to a resort cabin on the Izu peninsula where some of the victims had stayed. Having enlisted the help of her ex-husband Ryuji, they gradually uncover the bizarre history of a psychic woman, Shizuko, who hurled herself into the volcano on Oshima Island 40 years before. They learn that the source of the curse is Shizuko’s daughter, Sadako, who was buried alive in a deep well under the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• THIN PARTITIONS: ASIA & THE SUPERNATURAL
• JAPANESE HORROR FILMS: MODERNISM & MONSTERS
• CLASSIC JAPANESE HORRORS 1953–1968
• SOCIAL SICKNESSES
• JAPANESE MODERN HORROR MASTERS: THE BIG FIVE
• MODERN JAPANESE HORROR: ESSENTIAL VIEWING
• KOREAN HORROR CINEMA
• KOREAN MODERN HORROR MASTERS
• MODERN KOREAN HORROR: ESSENTIAL VIEWING
• HONG KONG HORROR CINEMA
• MODERN HONG KONG HORROR: ESSENTIAL VIEWING
• THAI TERRORS
• THAI TERRORS: ESSENTIAL VIEWING
• EAST GOES WEST: LOST IN TRANSLATION?
• INTERACTIVE TERRORS
• REFERENCE WEBSITES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Copyright
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