Grimmfest/ J-Horror Day at Stockport Plaza
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
Japanese filmmakers have long pushed and probed at the outer limits of cinematic horror, exploring the possibilities of on-screen violence, the effects of breaking taboos and reflexively redefining the genre over and over.
This Halloween, as part of BFI’s UK-wide film season, Japan 2020: Over 100 years of Japanese Cinema, Grimmfest presents a marathon dedicated to exploring some uniquely Japanese terrors at Stockport Plaza.
Featuring four films released over a near-thirty year period, Grimmfest’s J-Horror Day starts with Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s 1989 Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a swift, 67-minute work of depraved body horror about a ‘metal fetishist’ who inserts iron rods into his body, before (quite naturally) losing his mind.
From there, the programmers have selected two of the big crossover hits of the turn of the millennium J-Horror wave. Audiences can catch Takeshi Miike’s squirm-inducing Audition followed by Dark Water, Hideo Nakata’s terrifying adaptation of Koji Suzuki’s ghost story.
Lastly, 2017 horror-comedy One Cut of the Dead is a lighter pick to end the night. Directed by Shinichirou Ueda, this acclaimed satire follows a film crew who, while making a zombie movie on the site of an abandoned WWII facility, are surprised to encounter the real undead.
