The only two horror movies Takashi Miike has ever seen: “Horrible, horrifically scary”

Posted On October 16, 2024October 16, 2024

Takashi Miike is one of the most influential Japanese directors, with over a hundred films to his name and a style that has both offended and entertained audiences around the world. Known for his extreme gore and violence and a slightly cartoonish style, Miike is an auteur of transgression, blending aspects of Japanese history with horror to create something that both pays homage to traditions of the past and then destroys them by attacking our senses.

Miike began his career as a television director before making his first feature film in 1995, The Third Gangster, in which we can see the beginnings of his trademark style. However, he is perhaps most well-known for Audition, a film about a widower who stages a fake audition in order to find a new wife. Nevertheless, when his ruse is discovered by one of the applicants, she seeks to punish him in a series of torturous trials. His films aren’t for the faint-hearted, and whilst he has had commercial success with the likes of One Missed Call and The Great Yokai War, you could argue that Miike is at his best when not playing it safe and instead creates for the niche film lovers who can appreciate arthouse cinema and the way he pushes our collective comfort zone.

When asked about the horror films that have influenced his wonderfully perverted style, Miike only listed two films, Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Pulse, in which he said, “Those two were far too scary; horrible, horrifically scary.”

It’s difficult to imagine the man behind Visitor Q finding anything ‘too scary’, but who knows, maybe he watched them on an empty stomach.

It’s unsurprising that Texas Chain Saw Massacre was included as one of his influences, a cult classic that changed the face of low-budget horror filmmaking forever. Through its bold and grotesque imagery, ingenious production design and quiet dread that is intermittently interrupted by continuous screaming, the film defined the sub-genre that we now know as ‘the slasher’, with a group of people being stalked by one person who, one by one, kills the entire group, usually with only one person who escapes/survives, often known as the ‘final girl’. Miike is partly known for his slightly goofy and exaggerated set design, something that we can very much see in the dinner scenes in Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with a vivid and unsettling concoction of colours and rotting food.

Pulse is just as sick, which is no doubt why it had such an effect on Miike. It’s a film that slowly fills you with dread, an existential drama about ghosts that seek to infiltrate the real world through computers, with a commentary on modern technology that feels more horrific than the fictional reality within the film. It’s extremely cynical, and Miike’s own exploration of the human condition reflects similar ideas about loneliness and a world ravaged by technology.

Miike most recently made a documentary called Chain Reactions about the making of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a homage to a lost era of filmmaking and its impact on five different creatives.

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