Japanese Body Horror and Ero Guro
The entire sphere of popular culture revolves around recognisability. We are drawn to forms and symbols we can easily identify, clear cut representations of ideas in understandable formats that do not confuse. In essence we relate to what we know. It’s why abstraction as a concept has never successfully breached into the mainstream and why we have the idea of sensationalism of celebrity figures. One of the most recognizable forms we understand is the body, we see them every day and we all have them, they’re immediately relatable as their own empathetic vessels. What I mean by that is that we can relate to certain physical aspects that we see, specifically physical feelings like pain. When we see someone in pain we can’t help but feel sorry for them, or if we imagine an uncomfortable injury we automatically cringe at the thought, it’s a natural bodily reaction to help our fellow man and prevent the cause of pain in order to stave off the relation pain presents: Death.
Yet with the taboo of death comes the previously mentioned fascination with it, and its cousin pain. This is apparent in pop culture, with the horror fiction genre of body horror, a genre in which the horror aspect is derived from the graphic transformation, degeneration, and destruction of the human body through decay, disease, parasitism, mutation, and mutilation. This sub-genre of splatter cinema has been prevalent within western society since the mid 1900’s with movies such as George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. These films use the topics of pain and death to stimulate the audience’s emotions, to get their heart racing and then allow reassurance when they realise their objective safety. These films once again use the trope of recognisability to help them succeed, the all use human forms as their ‘villains’ as well as a driving force that we can understandably relate with whether it be fear of the unknown, supernatural malevolence, or the common man deranged. What I wish to focus on however is when we deal with the unrecognisable, fear through the indescribable and the hideously grotesque. This is where the genre of body horror truly shines, through its creation of abstract, Lovecraftian horrors that we cannot hope to understand.
These types of body horrors can be seen in works such as John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and Ridley Scott’s Alien, films that leave us unsettled in their displays of inhumanity, where the full forms of these indiscernible pulps of flesh are so peculiar and impossible to describe that we find them immensely troubling. This level of abstract grotesqueness is not often seen within western societies, but in the east and most notably Japan, it is much more understood and even weirder. The most famous examples of the Japanese classes of body horror films can be seen in films like Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime Akira which sees a character mutate into a large, fleshy, all-encompassing mass which eventually settles in the form of a giant infant. Another example is Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, in which an unnamed character (titled Salaryman) is cursed by having his body slowly form metallic growths until he is eventually almost entirely metal and begins trying to destroy humanity. In recent times the genre of Japanese Body Horror has taken on a much more humorous and spectacular approach instead of the bizarre yet enamouring storytelling of previously mentioned works. Titles such as Noboru Iguchi’s The Machine Girl and RoboGeisha to Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police. The newer generations of films seem purposefully bizarre in an effort to seem both funny and grotesque but with their predecessors they share an often satirical underlying comment on Japanese media and society, a point I wish to expand on later. With the medium of manga (comics) the grotesque horror can be expressed through a more traditional visual art format as well, often with gruesome results. Notable artist Junji Ito has seen moderate western success with series such as Uzumaki, which tells the story of a city plagued with an affinity for spirals, so much so that they begin carving never-ending spirals into their own flesh or the disturbing Tomie, where the titular character’s beauty drives men and women to do unspeakable acts. While these films and mangas are useful in helping me research elements of death and the grotesque, I believe that they alone are not substantial enough to affect my work. Fortunately in my research I have managed to find a related element that can help me.
Ero guro nansensu often shortened to ero guro or simply guro, is a literary and artistic development found circa 1930’s Japan. The movement’s name displays its intent, with ero meaning “erotic”, “guro” meaning grotesque, and “nansensu” meaning nonsense, the genre literally means “erotic grotesque nonsense” seemingly perfect for my project. Despite the name implying a sense of the absurd abandon, the artistic movement is firmly cemented within real world Japanese social topics through representations of corruption and decadence. This relevance to the Japanese social and political landscape gives the works of the movement a difficult line to follow but allows for a larger field of artistic liberty, the work may not even include elements of sex or death but rather figures similar to the previously mentioned body horror, where the subjects are malformed, horrific and generally unnatural. In the opposite vein, items that do focus on the pornographic and gory are not necessarily to be classed as ero guro which in recent times has become bastardized within Japanese media to simply mean the combination of gore and porn in order to arouse, rather than to satirize the cultural climate.
The satirical elements of the period were set within the pre-war phenomenon that explored the deviant, bizarre, and the ridiculous, usually taken up by Japan’s bourgeois during the liberal Taishō period in Japanese history where the social atmosphere was described as being “skittish” and perpetuated in “nihilistic hedonism” by historian Ian Buruma, in simpler terms it was a calm before the storm that would be World War II. The art symbolized an intellectual rebellion within the tail-end of the Taishō period, when Japan as a country became increasingly militant, spawning an expanded sense of artistic revolution paired with the eruption of hedonistic sensationalism in exploring Japan’s long-standing fascination with the taboo. Inspirations for the taboo-breaking nature of ero guro can be found within Japan’s history, the most famous example being The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, a traditional shunga woodblock print completed in 1814 by artist Katsushika Hokusai, which represents an ama diver engaging in a sexual affair with two octopi. Other artists belonging to the traditional ukiyo-e genre began exploring elements of death and sexuality during the latter part of the 1800’s, usually with the theme of representing Japanese historical moments, examples are found in Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s representations of decapitation and disembowelment and Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s portrayals of bondage and sexual violence. The theme of the unnatural and surreal body horror also have examples here, with one of Kuniyoshi’s prints showing an anthropomorphic tuniki (commonly referred to as a Japanese racoon dog) with a large, bug-eyed monster emerging from under his robe, which is actually one of his testicles. While the Japanese respect for history and legacy does explain its recognisable relation to their predecessors, the ero guro movement is also steeped in present day context at the time, such as the 1936 Sada Abe incident, where a geisha and prostitute erotically asphyxiated her lover and proceeded to castrate his corpse and carry his genitals around in her kimono which was a key moment in the movements history, with the elements of bondage, sadomasochism and sexual mutilation cropping up in several ero guro works. As it is a difficult artistic movement to understand, especially for western audiences, their remains little research on the subject and few seminal pieces to analyse, but I think ero guro’s legacy far exceeds its humble status.
Ero guro’s explorations of the grotesquely unnatural and the sexual taboos in such an bombastic, radical and ground-breaking manner has gone on to cement it within Japanese culture in mediums such as pinku eiga (meaning pink film) a type of Japanese theatrical film that features nudity and sex as the main focus, to the previously mentioned body horror movies that all see their own satirical commentaries underneath, over-the-top and veiled representations hidden under the guise of fear or comedy, a way of expressing ideas not just limited to eastern media but visible in the west too. With the disturbing ero guro and bizarre Japanese body horror films they use their ridiculousness or moral abhorrence as a way of radical expression in a famously conservative country, a creative way to “stick it to the man” while also inspiring younger generations. These direct dealings with sex and death also act as draws, either sexual arousal or morbid curiosity help bring people in and create publicity. It makes people turn their head and gawk, either making them offended or, in some cases, inspired, a form of garnering attention we see in western media as well. It’s similar to a bait-and-switch, draw them in with the taboo visuals, the un-mundane exploration into the darkest parts of the mind, and when they pay close attention, they will realise that the piece is steeped in a deep history and contextual relationship with the current culture. Yet this approach can often be ham-fisted and lame, ero guro pulls it off simply, and while some of this interest might be manifested within the idea of the “orient”, I believe that with understanding its method can be utilised within my own work.
