Tag Archives: Takashi Miike

How ‘The Happiness of the Katakuris’ Subverts Horror Movies – and Musicals

The moment a flying demon rises from a woman’s soup to steal her uvula at the top of The Happiness of the Katakuris, director Takashi Miike refuses to limit the unrestrained chaos of his lesser-known masterpiece. Sandwiched between the release of Miike’s two most well-regarded horror classics,  Audition and Ichi the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris stands as an undefinable departure from traditional horror form. But if forced to define it, Happiness is a horror musical.

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Set at the idyllic new White Lovers’ Inn, the six-member family of the Katakuris struggle to adjust to rural life as the patriarch Masao Katakuri leads them on his quest to run a successful family business.  As a soft remake of the Korean horror film The Quiet Family, the movie begins by following the dark trajectory of its Korean counterpart. Guests start dying in unexpected ways, and the family resorts to hiding the bodies to maintain the reputation of the Inn. But it takes little time for the film to shatter its simple horror narrative into a thousand musical pieces.  

It begins with the discovery of the first body, a guest who has mutilated himself with the Inn’s room key. As the camera pushes into the dark bedroom crime scene – complete with a few spooky jump cuts and eerie music stingers – the family of the Katakuris leaps into the room with a song and dance ripped from any great rock opera.  

This horror musical continues its blissful anarchy with love ballads, choreographed dance numbers, a disco music video, a zombie choir, and a finale ripped from the opening scene of The Sound of Music.  Even the tagline on the American poster calls it, “The Sound of Music meets Dawn of the Dead.”  The Happiness of the Katakuris torpedoes its horror narrative, transforming it into a ridiculous musical extravaganza.  And yet somehow the film retains its horrific elements – zombies, a volcanic world-ending eruption, and a crazed serial killer – and manages to merge two genres.  But how can these two conflicting genres function together?

To address how these two genres function as one, both, the horror and musical operate in heightened realities. In both cases, the audience is asked for a high level of suspension of disbelief. In one case the audience is asked to believe in mad scientists, zombies, and blood-sucking monsters, and in the other, audiences are expected to accept a character breaking into song and dancing around their world as if nothing about their choreographed lifestyle is strange.  

Within their heightened realities both genres use a similar approach to tension and catharsis regarding narrative release. In the horror movie, the audience is waiting for the kill, and in the musical, waiting for the song. In both cases, whether a character begins to scream or sing, both serve as the moment of release. And when the two genres are combined, these two moments are usually combined to act as one. As the knife comes down, the villain breaks into song.  

Horror and musicals are made from the same fabric, and yet the combination of the two genres also plays as a glorious recontextualization of the musical in particular. In horror musicals like Rocky Horror Picture Show, Little Shop of Horrors, and Happiness, the mode of musical is upended. The traditional fanatic jubilance of the musical and the grim macabre of the horror flick force a reevaluation of the musical setting.  

In director Frank Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors, the pop styles and music of 1960s Americana are contrasted with its dark man-eating plant B-Movie narrative. In Jim Sharman’s Rocky Horror Picture Show, the joyous marital musical narrative is thrust into the dark sexual world of Dr Frank-N-Furter. The world of zombies, murder, and suicide smash into the peaceful family story of Miike’s film. The horror narratives serve as a disruption of the “normal” happy musical.  

In all three films, the audience is at first presented with stories that promise to bring about a heteronormative happy musical ending. Little Shop’s Seymour pines for the lovely shop girl, Rocky Horror’s Brad proposes to Janet, and Happiness’ Katakuris look forward to the time when their Inn will provide the perfect family life for them all. Then the horrors begin. The horrors subvert and critique of the perfect happy musical. The horrors take the safety of the song and dance and make them deadly. 

Within the genre’s subversion, the horror musical uses its mode to assess and judge its cultural movement. Rocky Horror moves to play with the heteronormative expectations of the 1970s, Little Shop attacks the wild capitalism of the 1980s, but what does The Happiness of the Katakuris have to say with its subversions?

At the end of both Rocky Horror and Little Shop, the characters are faced with near-world-ending calamities (see the Little Shop original ending). Both films are deeply bleak. Miike takes Happiness in a different direction. Instead of forcing his well-intentioned-but-criminal family to their rightful and just comeuppance, Miike gives them the one thing they’ve been dreaming of all along – a perfect valley for their Inn filled with snowy mountains, waterfalls, and elephants. The family dances in the sunlight, freed from the horrors of the bodies they’ve hidden, the serial killer on the loose, and the zombies that rose from the ground. While this happy ending seems to parody the musical genre’s common need for a clean resolution, Miike seems to be pushing for a different final tag to his film.

Takashi Miike’s finale for the Katakuris subverts the subversion of the horror musical. Instead of embracing horror’s dark twisting of the musical, Miike uses the musical to subvert the horror genre. Instead of infusing a musical with darker themes, it feels as though Miike is elevating his horror movie with joy, chaos, and ridiculous fun. Every element of The Happiness of the Katakuris drips with, well…  happiness. Both Rocky Horror and Little Shop are rooted in tragic story arcs, but Miike refuses to take his family story to its darkest conclusion, breathing a new life into a sub-genre that at its core is about taking itself less seriously.

The Grotesque Perversion of ‘Visitor Q’

In Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q, the perverse and the grotesque become one. The film draws on the erotic tones of body horror, with its principles based on the penetration of bodily integrity. The body is both violated directly and metaphorically in the form of the family.

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Like many films, this one begins when a stranger comes to town. The visitor introduces himself by bludgeoning a man on the head. Friendship is formed through a head wound, reversing the normal logic of pain and pleasure. He is an intrusive thought willed into being, the destructive conclusion of all subconscious inclinations willed into existence. He inevitably encourages each member of the family to give in to their darker impulses. Knowing that this visitor is violent, the father invites him into his home. The man celebrates the stranger’s penetration of his head and, later, his wife. 

Rather than protect the family, the father encourages its destruction. He is a documentary filmmaker obsessed with the spectacle of his own violation. His career is ruined when he publicly broadcasts a clip of himself being sexually assaulted by a group of teenage boys. He discovers his son is being bullied and films it, making a spectacle of his suffering. His act of voyeurism seems to be an effort to reclaim his power, to penetrate the world with the eye of his camera rather than be penetrated. Instead, it only makes him seem more passive and pathetic. 

The relationship between the bullies, father, and son comes to a climax when the bullies deploy fireworks into the family’s home, burning down the house. Once again, the father films it happening rather than intervening, questioning his emotions — “I don’t know how a father should feel,” he repeats. The house is a physical manifestation of the family, which is an extension of the body. Once the house is destroyed, the boundaries between the family and the outer world as well as their boundaries with each other begin to collapse.

Visitor Q heavily employs themes of abjection. In The Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines abjection as the oppositional disgust which disturbs the integrity of the self. The foundation of this feeling is the child’s “primal repression” of their attachment to their mother. This detachment is achieved through forming barriers of separation between natural processes like vomit, feces, and corpses/death by learning how to feed and clean oneself.

In Visitor Q, the son violently enforces his abjection by beating his mother senselessly. She provides everything for her family — cooking, cleaning, and financially supporting them. Her son needs her and cannot take care of himself, so he lashes out. This relationship culminates in the mother’s uncontrollable lactation, which inevitably drowns her son. 

Her husband and daughter experience an inverse relationship to abjection and become aroused by her lactation. In the end, they feed on her breast milk in an erotically charged scene of incestuous perversion. Sex leads to motherhood and breastfeeding, which is associated with the innocence of childhood. In Visitor Q, this order is reversed, and breastfeeding breeds eroticism.

As Kristeva suggests, the mother in this film is perpetually rejected and placed at the bottom of the symbolic order. Her body is deformed by beatings and a limp. The sanctity of her maternity is violated by her engagement in prostitution. This prostitution, though, is the only time she has any power. Her client is the only one that seems concerned for her and says she should go to the police for her lashings. He then pays her to whip him with a belt, pressing her to go harder. Just like the film’s other characters, his eroticism is tied up in violence and pain.

The father also inverts humanity’s natural aversion to dead bodies by having sex with a corpse. When rigor mortis occurs, his penis becomes trapped inside the body. The typical process of body horror is inverted. Instead of being penetrated by a foreign object that becomes incorporated into the body, like in Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the father penetrates a foreign body and is incorporated into it. Once again, the father attempts to dominate the Other and is instead rendered passive by it.

The relationship between the erotic and grotesque (or “ero” and “guro”) has been observed in Japanese modern society by sociologists like Yasuda Kiyoo, author of Erotic Film. Kiyoo says that “the border between ero and guro is one sheet of paper. Depending on the performer, the same physical actions can become entirely different in feel.” Miike seeks to parse out this paper-thin distinction in Visitor Q by bringing the extremes of arousal and disgust together in one film, one family, one act. Sexuality, typically compartmentalized from the family and the grotesque, is put in direct association with it. By eliminating this border, he inspires the viewer to define their own border more firmly — to protect the integrity of their sexuality from their subconscious impulses, or perhaps to prove that this will never be possible.

Miriam Silverberg, who authored Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, incorporates absurdity into this equation. The relationship between the erotic and grotesque can be found in the ridiculousness of comedy, which seeks to defy logic and order. Silverberg associates this humorous mentality towards sex and violence with the dissolution of social order in Japan. This violation of tightly organized Japanese social systems and the integrity of the national identity mirrors the violation of the body in body horror and the family in Visitor Q. 

The erotic and the grotesque are met with an absurdity that Silverberg says is characteristic of Japanese modern society. Like Miike’s other films, his 2001 horror is tonally ironic and almost playful. The film’s extreme moments of sexuality and violence are excessively theatrical to the point of comedy. Even the tragic figure of the mother is made into a caricature by her limp and lactation. She, too, inevitably gives in to absurd perversion.

Miike finds an intersection between abjection and sex in the penetrative nature of body horror. An incestuous family’s boundaries are penetrated from the outside and within — their perversions are wedded with products of new life (breast milk) and new death (rigor mortis). Visitor Q finds the sharp comedic edge of humanity’s most horrific impulses and bludgeons us over the head with it.

Looking for Truth in the Violent Films of Takashi Miike

(Content and spoiler warnings: this essay discusses school shootings, and gives away many plot details for Takashi Miike’s Lesson of the Evil and As the Gods Will.) 

Takashi Miike has made two films on the subject of violence towards teenagers at school, Lesson of the Evil and As the Gods Will. The response to the former was one of the most negative in Miike’s career. A story that plays as outlandish fantasy in Japan looks more like social realism in the U.S., especially without the markers of gravity that American films about school shootings—like Ben Coccio’s Zero Day and Gus van Sant’s Elephant—brought to this subject. 

But in an American context, it’s a sardonic flip of the idea—so often touted by gun enthusiasts and lobbyists—that teachers and security guards should be armed to protect students from shootings. In actuality, this could lead to a scenario like the one shown in Lesson of the Evil, where a teacher massacres his students. Here, the violent nihilism comes from authority figures, not the youth they’re supposedly leading. Yeah, this is in bad taste, but the fact that Alex Jones made a fortune causing material harm to school shooting victims and their families while this film was effectively banned in the United States—it has never been released legally in any form—is much worse. 

Even if this connotation is unintended, As the Gods Will suggests the unproduced sequel promised at the end of Lesson of Evil. Its view of authority is just as jaundiced, but expressed through the prism of unreality. As in Battle Royale, violence is turned into a game. The structure copies a video game, with students ascending to a new level if they survive the previous one. The title suggests a metaphysical dimension. The “gods” could be people playing The Sims or a realm of supernatural beings with the power to toy with ordinary people.

The Scholastic Slaughter of ‘Lessons of Evil’

Takashi Miike had used a slow-burn structure in Audition, whose first half could have led into a polite rom-com. Lesson of the Evil makes no attempt to hide its intentions. The very opening scene reveals that Hasumi (Hideaki Ito) is a killer, just as the second scene of As the Gods Will leaps into the film’s murders. But it’s very elegantly shot and cut, going back and forth between his parents discussing the then-teenage boy’s violent behavior and Hasumi heading up the stairs to their room, knife in hand. 

Apart from flashbacks to his origin story as a young serial killer, most of Lesson of the Evil is set at the school where the adult Hasumi teaches. Angered by cheating students, he hatches a plan to block them from using their cell phones to send each other answers. He learns about various scandals among the wealthy students. One girl is being sexually harassed by the gym teacher—he responds to this by sleeping with her himself—while art teacher Mr. Kume (Takehiro Hira) is sleeping with a boy. Over the first hour, he tracks down his targets and kills them. 

There are no satisfying explanations for his actions. In fact, Hasumi delivers a voice-over near the end where he says such rationalizations are up to the police. Miike himself offers ridiculous answers, like the presence of two crows spying on Earth for the Norse god Odin—Hasumi electrocutes one—and his hallucinations of a personification of Brecht and Weill’s “Mack the Knife” (several versions of the song are played throughout). 

More subtextually, the influence of both Germany and the U.S. on Japan underlies the action. In addition to Brecht, the suicide clusters inspired by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther are a reference point. It’s a nightmare of Japan turning as violent as the U.S. 

Miike’s direction never loses the grace of its opening hour. But while most of the explicit violence early in the film takes place offscreen, the end embraces a blood-splattered nihilism. The film does not benefit from its thin characterizations, even if they’re intentional. Most of the teens who get mowed down are simply disposable bodies. The last 45 minutes show teenagers being killed, over and over again. As a response to the school’s various scandals, it’s literal overkill. But the twisted moralism isn’t far from ‘80s slasher movies. The notion that watching the slaughter of teenagers should be unpleasant comes across. The purple light of the haunted house created by the students suggests giallo. 

While a few students survive to the end of Lesson of the Evil, many chances to stop Hasumi are foreseen and blocked by him. When a student tells another teacher about his suspicions, Hasumi finds out by bugging the room. He stages the teacher’s suicide in a subway train and binds the student with duct tape, torturing him with a soldering iron. He’s become an expert on faking suicides and accidents, getting away with murder since he was a teen himself. The film’s dark sense of humor becomes purposeful. The initial charm just allows him to get a pass for his violence. The moralistic pretext for his crimes wears thin when he mows down everyone in sight.

The Deadly Games of ‘As the Gods Will’

The use of animal avatars in As the Gods Will subverts Japan’s “culture of cuteness” concept known as kawaii. Cuddly-looking bears come to life to kill people that don’t obey their whims. In As the Gods Will, these images buckle under such weight and turn on humans. A Daruma doll, based on a traditional Japanese model of Zen Buddhism’s founder Bodhidharma, forces Tokyo students to play a game of “red light, green light.” The doll allows them to try and turn his power button off while his head is turned away, but it kills anyone still moving when it turns back to face them. Shun Takahata (Sota Fukushi) is the only survivor of this round.

In the second “game,” students are forced to dress as mice and play basketball in the school gym, under the supervision of a giant cat doll whose head darts out to scoop them into its mouth. They go through five levels of gameplay, each with a different setting and look. The rules grow increasingly strange and difficult to understand, much less follow. 

The first game is the goriest, although even the image of students’ heads exploding is made less real by the red balls that flow out of their dead bodies rather than blood. The use of cartoonish images of the doll avatars actually makes them more chilling. The game’s design has deliberately corrupted and weaponized childhood fun, while targeting people in their final years of youth. It also helps that the avatars have their own personalities and voices. The giant cat licks the floor much like a real animal. The Daruma doll sports bloodshot eyes and a mean giggle. These dolls have an intelligence and consciousness of their own. 

As the Gods Will is a triumph of style, finding a deathly hollowness in the uncanny valley of CGI. It communicates through that unease. The sets grow increasingly dependent on special effects. By the fourth level, in which a polar bear traps the teenagers in an icy lair, the film combines obviously animated greenscreen with live actors. The fifth level flips its style once again, moving to a castle with glaringly artificial sunlight. Throughout, the colors are bright and hyper-saturated. 

Conclusion

Writing about Lesson of the Evil in MUBI, Ben Sachs described “In making a work so deliberately tasteless, Miike raises a worthwhile question: What would a responsible mainstream film about a mass shooting look like if it’s going to take the shootist’s perspective into account?” Throughout his career, the violence in Miike’s films has been a provocation, often deliberately “irresponsible.” Lesson of the Evil dares to suggest that from an extremely twisted perspective, mounting a school shooting could feel like a rational act. As the Gods Will backs away from its precursor’s confrontational nature, but it still rubs the audience’s noses in cinema’s power to put cruelty on screen. It would’ve been easy to turn this approach into a goofy gorefest a la Evil Dead 2. These films speak from and about worlds as ridiculous as they are extremely dangerous. As fanciful as they are, is there a better way to describe the way modern life feels? 

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