Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
After years of organizing a series of dinners that gathered together horror’s finest, horror master Mick Garris evolved the idea by curating a horror anthology series for Showtime, Masters of Horror. Each hour-long episode was written and directed by those that had attended the dinners; names like Don Coscarelli, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Joe Dante, and many more. Masters of Horror only ran for two seasons, beginning in 2005, before Showtime opted not to renew (Garris then continued the series’ concept via Fear Itself in 2008 on NBC), but Showtime refused to air Takashi Miike’s season 1 episode, Imprint, at all. Disturbing and extremely graphic content was cited as the reason for shelving the episode.
For those familiar with Miike’s eclectic oeuvre, it’s pretty easy to imagine that he’d create something that would offend; his films don’t just test boundaries, they steamroll right past them. Dead or Alive, Ichi the Killer, Audition, and Visitor Q all featured taboo-breaking moments that induced squirming, cringing, or the gag reflex (often all three at once). His catalog is so extremely diverse, spanning everything from kid-friendly films to westerns to more traditional fare, but it’s his work in horror and genre spaces that garnered him international attention. With his Masters of Horror episode Imprint, he crafted a kaidan – a traditional Japanese scary story- based on Shimako Iwai’s novel Bokke e, kyōtē. The title roughly translates to an Okayama idiom that means “really scary.”
It should also be noted that Iwai is a woman, who played the creepy torturer lady in the episode. She was going through a tumultuous period in her life and wanted to write a story about women, particularly women with no place to escape.
What was meant to be a tragic story wound up being terrifying in the end.
Like the traditional kaidan, Imprint is a period piece. It revolves around a Victorian-era American journalist, Christopher (Billy Drago), traveling through Japan in search of his lost love Komomo, a prostitute he’d once promised to rescue and bring back to America. His search leads him to a remote brothel island where no one seems to have heard of Komomo, save for one disturbed and disfigured prostitute who claims Christopher’s love died. Distraught, he demands to know how. The disfigured prostitute proceeds to tell Christopher various stories of “truth” surrounding Komomo’s demise, each tale grislier than the last.
This means that it starts off innocently enough, save for the grotesque syphilitic brothel worker encouraging Christopher to partake in the caged prostitutes. You begin to wonder what it was that triggered the execs at Showtime to pull the ep. And then the lengthy torture sequence begins. A sequence that feels like a perfect companion to Audition, with needles driven slowly into nailbeds with brutal precision, and lit incense is used to burn sensitive areas of skin. Still, it’s a premium cable channel, so as gruesome as it is, it’s not that bad, right? The disfigured girl’s final tale presents a rough upbringing in which her mother helps other women abort their babies, and the fetuses are flushed down river. It likely didn’t help that the special makeup effects were created by Yuichi Matsui (Kill Bill vol. 1, Audition, Ichi the Killer). This, combined with incest and abuse, pushed Miike’s episode past the brink. And yet, there are still more surprises that Miike has in store for the viewer.
The irony is that despite the graphic nature of the torture, it’s understated for Miike. He consistently tried to check himself to make sure he wasn’t going over the line of what American television would allow. Garris requested some edits to tone down the controversial elements of the episode, and even then, it was deemed too disturbing for television. Luckily it made its way onto DVD with loads of extras (and it’s also available for streaming on Vidmark Channel on Roku). In terms of horror, Imprint shows a restraint from Miike that you don’t see in a lot of his other notable entries, but broaching the always controversial topic of abortion in such an overt, primitive way proved too much. It’s expected, though there’s a lot more to unpack with this episode’s story than its graphic depictions, especially thanks to Iwai’s source story.
