As an ultraviolent new Japanese movie tries to up the ante in the schlock horror stakes, what’s up with our modern fascination with “torture porn”?

Koji Shiraishi is chuckling at the memory of shooting his movie Grotesque, proudly billed by splatter fans as the nastiest slice of celluloid ever to emerge from Japan. “So we’re using real pigs’ guts and they’ve gone off in the heat,” recalls the baby-faced 36-year-old. “They were stinking the studio up. I’m trying not to vomit, the actress is crying. It was pretty intense.”

A journeyman director with a knack for slapstick comedy and cut-price horror, Shiraishi says he jumped at the chance when his producer demanded the “cruelest movie ever.” On a minuscule budget of about ¥45 million and a bottom-drawer cast (minor porn star Tsugumi Nagasawa is the most experienced of the three actors), Shiraishi tried hard not to disappoint.

Eyeballs are gouged, nipples are snipped off, nails are driven into testicles; even in a genre rich in the cheap sadistic thrills beloved of slack-jawed teenage boys, Grotesque relentlessly pushes the envelope over 90 gore-splattered minutes. Irish censors have yet to experience its charms, but the British Board of Film Classification was suitably repelled. Director David Cooke refused it an “18” certificate, making it one of a handful of movies banned in the last few years.

“Unlike other recent ‘torture’-themed horror works, such as the Saw and Hostel series, Grotesque features minimal narrative or character development and presents the audience with little more than an unrelenting and escalating scenario of humiliation, brutality and sadism,” Cooke said. “The chief pleasure on offer seems to be in the spectacle of sadism (including sexual sadism) for its own sake.”

Was Shiraishi upset? Hardly. Face beaming, he says he was “honored” by the ban, which will add to his movie’s badass reputation and probably give it cult status. The BBFC decision is proudly advertised on the distributor’s Web site and sales of the Grotesque DVD are up, he claims, though he can’t say by how much. Online fan boys have reacted with glee, comparing it favorably to “anemic pretenders which fail to deliver the gore goods.”

Japan once enjoyed a pioneering reputation for pushing cinematic boundaries in the depiction of sex and violence. In 1960, Jigoku (Hell) out-gored Hammer Film and other horror studios with its famously Grand Guignol depiction of Buddhist retribution. Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 movie In the Realm of the Senses is still one of the most grueling explorations of sexual obsession and masochism ever put on screen.

Some even give Japanese directors the dubious credit of sparking the noughties’ plot-lite, torture-horror boom with a series of mock snuff movies in the 1980s, most notably Guinea Pig, depicting a samurai-like figure drugging and dismembering female victims. So disturbing was the violence considered at the time that its makers were summoned by the police to prove it was faked.

The West has caught up, however – and then some. Hostel, Wolf Creek, The Devil’s Rejects and the Saw series have replaced that lo-fi Japanese aesthetic with bigger production values and brought what were once illicit, straight-to-video thrills to multiplex audiences. Elements of splatter and slasher – though not the nihilism of “torture-porn” (a term, incidentally, despised by genre directors such as Eli Roth, who made Saw) – can be found in Antichrist, Inglourious Basterds and dozens of lesser-known efforts.

Critics have responded more often than not by shrugging their shoulders. Anthony Quinn, movie writer for Britain’s Independent newspaper, probably speaks for many when he says that he just wishes the people responsible would try something else. “I suppose you could defend it as a sort of necessary virus in the bloodstream; it satisfies certain macabre fantasies that might otherwise find more dangerous outlets. But you do wonder about the appetite for it nonetheless.”

He is not the only one. The modern taste for movies that take a fetishistic pleasure in inflicting pain on the fragile human body has been blamed on everything from the aftermath of 9/11, which dragged torture out of the dungeons and onto our TV screens, to the influence of post-Tarantino moviemakers, who have raided history’s bag of cinematic tricks while emptying them of moral or most other content. As horror maestro George A. Romero, whose zombie movies satirize modern consumerism, once stated, “I don’t get the torture porn films … they're lacking in metaphor.”

Still, who cares about making your audience think when you can simply shock the be-Jesus out of them? Grotesque director Shiraishi believes the demand for visceral, sometimes disturbing cinematic content in Japan may be rooted in social ennui and numbness: in such a peaceful but increasingly sterile and rule-bound society, audiences want to be reminded – at a safe distance – that life can be cruel, and fate random. For him, though, the attraction to the project was simple: “As a director, I was just extremely happy to get money to make a movie with no limits or rules,” he said during an interview at the FCCJ.

A fan of American directors Sam Riami and Brian DePalma, Shiraishi laughingly recounts how his principal actor pulled out of the project, repelled when he saw the script. “He probably thought it would damage his image.” Every other actor approached refused, until the producer found someone at the last minute to play the lead part of Tachikawa, a serial killer armed with power tools, knives and just enough medical skills to keep his two victims alive a little while longer.

Shiraishi was in school in the late 1980s when one of Japan’s most infamous modern serial killers, Tsutomu Miyazaki, was arrested after murdering and dismembering four girls aged 4 to 7. When police reported finding a vast collection of video tapes in Miyazaki’s house, including the entire Guinea Pig collection, Japan had its equivalent of the British video-nasties debate.

“The media went haywire, saying that those movies were responsible for causing the children’s deaths,” recalls Shiraishi. Video stores refused to stock the Guinea Pig series, which are now a collector’s item. Producers withdrew funding and Japan’s ’80s slasher boom was over. “Even as a child I knew that was ridiculous,” says Shiraishi. “I was a movie fan and knew the things they were talking about. I don’t believe those movies alone make people do bad things.

“Whether people imitate what they see in them really depends on the individual and his environment. Do people kill other people simply because of looking at a movie? That’s a completely mistaken view.”

Over the last decade, Japan has enjoyed a horror revival. But hit movies like The Ring and The Grudge are closer to the tradition of old-fashioned Japanese storytelling, relying on suggestion rather than schlock, say critics. “There is a long tradition of ghost stories that these movies draw on,” points out Mark Schilling, movie critic for The Japan Times. Audiences are always looking for novelty, however, and producers are usually happy to provide. “You can’t keep making films about dead girls with long black hair,” notes Schilling.

Enter Shiraishi, who brought a typically Japanese dark undercurrent of black humor to his otherwise relentless offal-fest. As Tachikawa prepares to finally kill off his victims, Aki (Nagasawa) delivers a mocking speech, belittling him. Enraged, he slices off her head with a chainsaw, which comes down and, improbably, bites into his jugular vein, fatally wounding him. The BBFC may have missed the joke, or they may simply have switched off in disgust beforehand. Either way, Shiraishi is happy with the final result.

“The producer probably just wanted something really brutal and cruel. But I also thought I could add some of my own expression to the movie. I think I did an OK job.” ❶