Japanese Horror

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Noroi: The Curse

As I was putting together my horror double feature line up for October, I tried to pick a well-balanced and diverse group of films. I knew that I wanted to include as much international horror as possible, given that foreign horror is typically my favorite (and is just better, generally ), but I had the challenge of narrowing down my vast and ever-evolving horror watchlist. South Korean and Spanish horror is, for this critic at least, the scariest horror around. But when I think about iconic non-Western horror iconography and imagery, it often comes from Japan. Audition, House, Throne of Blood, Godzilla, and the many iterations of The Ring and The Grudge all come from Japan, so it was high time to dedicate a double feature night to Japanese horror. I’m happy to report that at least one of tonight’s films met the level of thrilling, chilling, and fulfilling that I was looking for, but it really wasn’t the film that I was expecting. First up was Shinya Tsukamoto’s trailblazing cyberpunk body horror film Tetsuo: The Iron Man (which in Japanese literally translates to “The Iron Man: The Iron Man”) that was released in 1989 and maintains a worldwide cult following to this day. This film is incredibly experimental, incredibly low budget, and incredibly impossible to describe. The film follows two men—Tetsuo, a metal fetishist who is seemingly addicted to machinery, and an unnamed “Salaryman” who meddles in metal as well. Set in a hyper-industrial Japanese underground, Tetsuo: The Iron Man has a profound answer for anyone with mechanophilia—and it presents itself in the form of some very cool, very disturbing makeup, prosthetics, and special effects. Its got the kind of ambitiously batshit concept that only someone insane would make this film, or enjoy it, so here I am. I often dislike experimental films, films that are too obsessed with their own enigmatic ideas to make them even remotely accessible to the average movie-viewer, because while art can certainly exist just for art sake, I think the best art is the kind that everyone can at least somewhat access. Tetsuo: the Iron Man, while bonkers and befuddling and assuredly gross, was completely accessible for my meager mind, and oddly enjoyable, too. Its experimental low budget-ness made for some pretty disorienting, pretty disturbing camerawork—and I’m gonna warn any people with photosensitivity who may be reading this to just go ahead and avoid this shaky film—but it was still easier to follow than most surrealistic cinema I’ve seen. The grimy, gritty, dizzying quality of this film would typically put me off, but it was just too fascinating and unsettling to turn away from. Tetsuo: The Iron Man explored humanity’s fascination with machines and technology in such curious and interesting ways, in ways that echoed Titane and pretty much any of the work of David Cronenberg (namely, The Fly and Crash). The melding of flesh and metal, skin and bone and cords and wires, was all so wacky and at times perverted, and I couldn’t look away. Its got a killer soundtrack and impressive special effects makeup that I’ve definitely seen redone and replicated in other projects since. Like most body horror films, Tetsuo explored and experimented with all of the different facilities that the human body can endure, and like most body horror films, there was a queer element as well. And while this film isn’t the scariest in the AHHH jump scare sort of way, it is increasingly strange and unpredictable, and therefore, quite unnerving. Even though the Iron Men in this film appeared to be more akin to Power Rangers villains by the end, I marveled at their journey to metallic monstrousness and kinda wanted to see more. I know for a fact that Tetsuo isn’t for everyone, and I also know that Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man will now just pale in comparison for me, but that’s okay. I can’t articulate exactly why this film’s brand of freaky was my kind of freaky. I may be a freak but I’ve certainly seen freaky films that I really did not vibe with. “Freaky” is a terribly subjective word—everyone has freaky media that they love and freaky media that they avoid, but if you’re looking to expand your filmic resume and dive headfirst into the bay of the bizarre, I’d say this film is a great place to start. It was grotesque but artistic, completely bizarro but brilliant, and that’s part of the reason why I was so disappointed by the next film: Kōji Shiraishi’s Noroi: The Curse. Noroi: The Curse is a 2005 horror mockumentary or pseudo-documentary that follows a paranormal researcher’s investigation into a series of strange events. The film begins by saying that this investigation was the researcher’s last, because his house burned down shortly after wrapping. Found footage films are severely hit or miss, in my opinion. They can be just the right amount of realistic to make you question typical fictional horror conventions, or they can be glaringly phony. The film Rec, which follows a Spanish news crew that gets stuck in a quarantined apartment building just as a violent outbreak begins, was uniquely, utterly terrifying. I don’t even have much to say about it beyond the fact that it is one of the scariest movies that I’ve ever seen. But then you have films like The Blair Witch Project, that incessantly teased its horrors while amounting to mostly nothing in the end, imo. Noroi: The Curse, unfortunately, fell into the latter category, and committed the worst crime a horror film can commit: it bored me. Listen, at this point in this blog, at this point in my life, I have seen a LOT of scary cinema. I will brave any film that is sold to me as scary, and I will keep an open mind about its storytelling methods, its ethos, or lack thereof, and its particular path to the spooky punchline. I say this to both prepare any non or new horror movie fans who may want to give it a try—if you’re not a jaded veteran like myself, I’m sure this movie is pretty frightening—and because I feel the need to express that I have paid my dues, I have done my homework, and therefore I at least kind of know what I am talking about. I was ready for anything and everything that Noroi: The Curse was gonna throw at me, I was fully prepared for all of the terror that was promised to me, and then …nothing happened. Objectively, yes, this film achieves certain atmospheric conditions of horror and a fairly unsettling set up that could’ve easily made for scary success. When I tell you all of the right pieces and elements were there and then they did nothing with them… not much else (within movie-watching) makes me more angry. At least, unlike Lake Mungo (one of the biggest cases of blue balls I have ever been stricken with), Noroi: The Curse utilizes a ton of different footage, from multiple settings and sources, like a real documentary would. But similarly to Lake Mungo, this film took foreverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr to get to the point and waited until the last five minutes to give us any significant answers. And I cannot divulge exactly how I feel about the ending because it would spoil it, but I will say that I found its resolution to be a bit troubling as a feminist, and a bit annoying and predictable as a horror movie fan. There were a handful of scary moments and about an hour and a half of slow, painstaking suspense. It makes wild promises that it never lives up to, alludes to creepy components that never materialize, and as whole revealed little to no significantly scary substance. When I think of all of the terrifying (or at least creepy!) Japanese cinema I’ve watched, on this blog, alone—Paprika, Perfect Blue, Funeral Parade of Roses, Pulse—my ability to find anything redeemable about this film vanishes. I could do a full, Tyra Banks-level “I was rooting for you” speech about this movie, but instead, I’ll sign off for now and say a spell that next week’s horror features will actually be horrific! Stay spooky, dear readers, let’s chat next week. 👹