Demons and Angels: Metapoetic Horror in the Sixties (II)

Since it is Nakagawa Nobuo cathartically revitalized domestic narratives of horror and terror in the late 1950s, it was natural - with inevitable metapoetic effect - that the same author would usher Japanese horror film into the new decade. Drawing on the exceptionally rich tradition of depicting hell in Japanese painting, Nakagawa Jikogu (Hell, 1960) draws ambiguous conclusions from the process where the description of negative transcendence is carried out.

Ghosts are emissaries from the other world, sent to take the guilty to hell where they will experience eternal suffering. That is why it is no coincidence that Nakagawa's key film is the one that imaginatively wants to offer a description of that very place in accordance with Buddhist theology, a place that is the ultimate destination of the fate of the director's numerous heroes: Jigoku is an infernal vision in which philosophical assumptions and speculations from the author's earlier works receive their visceral explication. The last thirty minutes of the film are a hallucinatory catalogue of tortures that the condemned go through in the circles of hell, an almost 'larpurlartistic' experience (or reliving) of the despair of the damned. This is the very center of Nakagawa's oeuvre: the extended ending Jigoku represents a double peak of the director's expertise. Thematically, it rounds out the concept of morality in the auteur's ghost films; stylistically, it completely unravels his visionary mise-en-scène.

The most effective example, in the Japanese context, of how the inevitable consequence of treating horror as an eminent art project is the principled notation of the metapoetic horizon, powerfully demonstrates Omniba (Appearance, 1964) Shindo KanetaTogether with Kobayashijevim waidan which came out the same year, Omniba introduced to the West a Japanese variant of horror in which atmosphere was more important than narrative and in which the fundamental ingredient of the genre, the figure of the Other, was 'weakened' in order to emphasize fantasy rhetoric in contrast.

Omniba tells the story of two women, a mother (Otowa Nabuko) i snahi (Osakamura Jishinko), who survive by killing stray samurai and selling their armor. When Hachi (Sato Kei) who informs them that their son and husband have been killed, and who then moves in near them, the balance between the two women is thrown off as the daughter-in-law begins to show erotic interest in the neighbor. To prevent this relationship, the mother uses a mask to scare the superstitious girl overnight.

The horror that is articulated in Omniba It stems both from the setting itself (the heroines live in a vast field of tall reeds) and from the internal tensions that separate and tear the women apart: Shindô tries to establish causality between jealousy, greed and sexual hysteria, transgression and fear, so that in a symbolic and literal sense, the hole in the title stands at the center of the film, where the women put away the murdered samurai and where the ending and point of the plot unfold. The intensity of the director's mise-en-scène It seems that, in such an intertwining of opposing energies, Omniba acquires a striking cultural and anthropological connotation.

That art and exploitation can possess very similar metapoetic interests is indicatively confirmed by Okasareta hakui (The Tortured Angels, 1967) Wakamatsu Kôjija. Based on a true story when Robert Speck In 1966, he killed several nurses in a frenzy in Chicago, Okasareta hakui continues Wakamatsu's exploration of the causal connection between sexuality and violence, or rather the relationship between male aggression arising from sexual instability and the female victim who is simultaneously a figure of adoration and contempt.

As in When Taiji is about to meet (The embryo hunts in secret., 1966), again the whole event - a young man (Kara Jûrô) breaks into a room with nurses and then tortures and kills them - set in a dark, enclosed, almost uterine space: framed by opening pornographic images and closing police photographs, Okasareta hakui perhaps he just wants to fashionably draw a then-current parallel between eroticism and politics, but when it comes to emphasizing male sexual inadequacy (which can range from asexuality to impotence) that is not released anywhere else but in violence, Wakamatsu is much more convincing.

At the beginning of the film, a young man shoots a gun into the sea, which is at the same time a synecdoche of the mother and an oceanic emotion, a trope that unites both materiality and infinity. From such a constellation, only more violence can follow: the unfortunate sisters try in various ways to stop the young man, but only the last of them succeeds, who manages to embody for him the ideal of tenderness and regression to childhood. Given the reduced space and the objects it can encompass, the repetitiveness mise-en-scène It gives the film a ceremonial character, culminating in a theatrical, completely artificial shot in which the victims are arranged in a circle with a young man in the center - of course, in the fetal position.

It was just a question of when Edogawa Ranpo - the greatest Japanese horror writer - to be taken as a basis not only for film adaptations, but also for further analytical questioning of the metapoetic perspective. After his series, aptly named The pleasures of torture radicalized the representation of violence in Japanese cinema to the point of sadism or absurdity, with Edogawa Ranpo Zenshû: Kyôfu kikei ningen (The Complete Works of Edogawa Ranpa: The Horror of Distorted People, 1969) Ishii Teruo added a touch of phantasmagoria and grotesque to the previous excess. The film itself functions as a dementedly inspiring combination Wells's Doctor Moreau's Islands i Browning's Freaks (1932), where the horror caused by a deformed body is treated as a surrealist trope.

An even better adaptation is Mine (The Blind Beast, 1969) Masumure YasuzaIn the film, the director turns to the lack around which the erotic economy, the economy of desire and passion, is organized: the main character of the film is Michio (Funakoshi Eiji), a blind sculptor who kidnaps - with the help of his mother (Sengoku Noriko) - model Aki (Midori Mako) in order to create a perfect statue of her, the 'art of touch'. Michi's studio - on the walls there are various and enlarged parts of the human body, and in the middle there are two huge female sculptures - literally embodies the configuration, the relief of his desire: touch as sexual communication and an artifact that conveys a 'pragmatic' function, a perverse intersection of the erotic and the artistic.

In the first half of the film, Aki often comments on Michio's relationship with his mother and women in clearly Freudian terms, which Masumura allows since Mine as it ends, it punctuates the pathological explanations in the absolutist and ecstatic sadomasochistic love that will be realized between the artist and his model. In the dark studio, the pleasure of touch will progressively lead the two to the ultimate destination of the tactile world: to pain and death that merge agony and orgasm in the act of cutting and butchering, thus completing Michi's fetishization of the human form - Aka's limbs become the limbs of the sculpture.

Effectiveness Mine, both as a horror and a perverted love film, lies in the director's decision to distill extreme sadomasochistic 'extravagance' through a metapoetic vision: the scopophilic structure of the cinematic apparatus - the action is set in a dark space that evokes both the womb and the cinema hall - is 'forced' to present a delirious and orgasmic touch. Aki's descent into ecstasy takes place when she begins to go blind: the tactile is ineffable for the film, just like the discourse of love.