horror, page 64 of 66

Haze is a short (40 minute) horror film from Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto, who also perpetrated that most harrowing of Asian horrors, Tetsuo (1989) about a man whose flesh sprouts metallic tentacles.

Haze has a similarly nightmarish quality. A man wakes up to find himself incarcerated in a subterranean concrete maze in almost complete darkness. The maze he works his way through is made up of a series of tortuous (and torturous) crawlspaces, which force him to contort himself claustrophobically, often at danger of injury. In one sequence, for instance, he has to shuffle sideways through an extremely narrow corridor. Barbed wire has been laid where his heels would naturally fall, so he has to do his shuffling on tiptoes. And, as if this weren’t enough, a thick metal pipe runs along the corridor, and the only way he can fit into the space is by opening his mouth as wide as possible and grinding his teeth along the pipe as he moves.

This last detail seems a bit forced, as surely all he’d have to do is turn his head? But the best way to watch a film like Haze is discard logic and accept it, just as you’re forced to accept one of your own nightmares till you wake up. At various points the man catches glimpses, through small apertures, of a room where people are being chopped up. He finally meets a woman who’s also trying to get out and the two are forced to make their way down a corridor almost fully submerged in water and floating body parts.

As a brief nightmare, the film works, but is let down by its attempt at an ending. The man speculates on why he’s in this horrific situation, wondering if he’s being punished after some terrible war, or if a millionaire has constructed this underground dungeon for his own perverse amusement. This speculation just serves to get the viewer expecting some sort of satisfying explanation, but in the end (if I’m interpreting the very brief & tacked-on ending right) it turns out to be a sort of pain-induced semi-conscious dream as the man struggles his way back to consciousness having been injured. So it was all “just a dream”, which is hardly satisfying. But I think the best way to enjoy (if enjoy is the right word) a film like this is to forget the ending and just accept it for the Pit & Pendulum-style nightmare that it is.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is one of those films I always felt I’d see one day, classic monster flick that it is. And surely I would — it was bound to come on in the classic Sunday afternoon slot on BBC2 wasn’t it? Well, in the old days maybe, the pre-digital, pre-satellite, pre-cable days, but now it probably shows on a constant loop on The Creature from the Black Lagoon Channel, and as I’ve only got an old-style non-digital TV, and Rupert Murdoch personally stops me from accessing Freeview in my flat, I decided to put it on my Amazon rental list. That’s what the Amazon rental list is for.

Alright, so the reason for that ramblous first paragraph is I really don’t have much to say about the film. It has no real plot to speak of, other than to get the scientists down the Amazon river into the Black Lagoon where they can have a series of encounters with the Gill-Man, and a number of dives into the lagoon itself to show off about 18 minutes of underwater footage (in glorious black & white 3D, when it first came out). No, the film’s only redeeming feature is the creature itself, which works really well, even though it’s a man in a suit. In the underwater sequences, the creature moves very sinuously; on dry land, its gasping breathing is quite convincing in a fish-out-of-water kind of way. And, it just looks good, for a monster. It works, visually, particularly in the grainy underwater sequences.

It was a given in 50s horror films that the creature would kill the men it came across while trying to kidnap the one and only woman. With Creature from the Black Lagoon, this “given” has become so accepted that the filmmakers felt no need to give any explanation as to why a fish-man should want to kidnap a female human, (other than that he’s a foot fetishist, I’d say, from the evidence of these two stills), particularly as, once he’s got her, all he does is take her to his cave and drape her (that’s not a euphemism) casually on a rock. But perhaps that’s just because the “main act” has already taken place between the two of them. Earlier on, in the film’s most aesthetically pleasing sequence, the creature swims (facing upwards) below the woman (facing down), at the height of which she performs some ecstatic (and no doubt symbolic) aqua-acrobatics. Shortly afterwards, back on the boat, we see her smoking a cigarette, which she casts, half-finished, into the Black Lagoon. So the Gill-Man, by kidnapping her and storing her away in his cave after this metaphoric lovemaking, is really just trying to do the decent thing. The film’s hero, after all, has been putting off proposing to her in lieu of other, far more square-chinned activities such as diving for rocks, so it’s no wonder she’s tempted to swim out into the lake and dally (that is a euphemism) with strange men. Even if they’ve got gills.

Pulse (2001, Japan) is the first addition to my Rough Guide to Asian Horror, and it’s a strange one. For the first hour or so, you might think it’s a standard J-horror about a ghostly menace lurking inside The Forbidden Room, a website that causes people to become depressed, then either commit suicide or fade away into nothing but a dark stain on the nearest wall. But as the meandering storyline follows its various characters’ growing awareness of the threat, you start to realise this film isn’t going to resolve itself like your standard horror. The depression-plague spreads and begins to depopulate the world. One character asks what if there was only limited space available for the ghosts of the dead, and what if that space was now full? In an echo of the “Crevices” episode of Dark Tales of Japan, rooms sealed with red tape act as incubators in which ghosts of the dead can re-form and return to our world. It’s their touch that spreads the depression-curse.

Pulse has its share of scary moments, including that Japanese standard, the spook stalking its victim in slow, surreal, jerky steps. In one Birds-like moment, while the camera focuses on one character making a phone call, in the background a young woman casually throws herself off a tower. But in the main, Pulse is not about the sort of scary thrill-fears you expect from Asian horror. It’s a more pervasive, less focused, but far more real, fear of isolation. The graduate student who speculates on there being limited space for the souls of the dead has developed a computer program. The movement of a series of blobs on a screen are controlled by two rules: they cannot get too far apart, and they cannot get too close together. This sums up the film’s rather bleak view of its characters’ attempts to overcome their feelings of isolation in a world where, as one character says, “Words said in friendship with the best of intentions always wind up hurting your friends deeply.”

As a film, Pulse is let down by its opening, creepy J-horror gambits, because they led me to expect something quite different. (The title, of course, doesn’t help. Having watched the film, I still have no idea why it’s called Pulse.) Although marketed in a similar way, this film is less along the lines of Ringu‘s pass-it-on-before-it-gets-you curse or the haunted house scenario of The Grudge and closer, by the end, to something like Day of the Triffids as the horror reaches worldwide-disaster proportions, and a truly bleak feeling at the end which even the most nihilistic of horrors (Audition, for instance) don’t manage. Not entirely successful, but certainly original.