T
HE SERIAL KILLER HAS BEEN A FIXTURE OF ASIAN FICTION FOR MUCH LONGER THAN ONE MIGHT EXPECT. TAKE THE JAPANESE NOVEL DAIBOSATSU TOGE, FOR INSTANCE. PENNED IN 1913 BY KAIZAN NAKAZATO, IT’S THE TALE OF A PSYCHOPATHIC SAMURAI WHO TRAVELS
AROUND THE COUNTRY INDISCRIMINATELY MURDERING PEASANTS, PRIESTS AND FELLOW SWORDSMEN. FILMED COUNTLESS TIMES, THE BEST-KNOWN SCREEN VERSION REMAINS KIHACHI OKAMOTO’S TRUNCATED BUT INTENSE SWORD OF DOOMFROM 1966, STARRING TATSUYA NAKADAI.
In 1931 Japan’s master of erotic grotesque, author
Edogawa Rampo, wrote Moju: The Blind Beast, in which a sculptor kidnaps, murders and dismembers several pretty girls. The killer incorporates some of their body parts into a grotesque statue and discards the rest in various inventive and macabre ways. Film- maker Yasuzo Masumura delivered an adaptation in 1969 that features dismemberment and mutilation, but only a single victim and thus no serial killing. It would take another decade before a fellow Japan-
ese master, two-time Cannes Palme d’Or winner Shôhei Imamura, directed Vengeance Is Mine (1979). Starring Ken Ogata, the film is based on the real-life case of Iwao Enokizu, who went on a sociopathic mur- der spree through working-class Japan in the mid- 1960s. Eschewing horror conventions, Imamura shoots the goings-on in a naturalistic style that pre- dates John McNaughton’s similarly unflinching ap- proach in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. While the 1980s were prime years for the slasher
genre in North America, the decade offers little cinematic serial killing of note from the Asian continent. It would take the invention of the Category III (adults only) rating in Hong Kong for the violent floodgates to open in the then-Crown colony. Still standing tall amid the carnage is The Untold Story (1993), featuring Anthony Wong’s un-
Murder By Numbers: (clockwise from top) Sword of Doom, Cure and The Untold Story.
hinged and oft-imitated (not in the least by himself) turn as the cook who grinds the corpses of his victims into meat buns, which he then serves up to unsuspecting customers. The serial killer boom of the 1990s in the wake of The
Silence of the Lambs made more than a few ripples in the East as well. Perhaps the greatest of all Asian entries in the genre is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s profoundly unsettling Cure (1997). The brilliance of the film lies in the fact that its villain, a dazed young drifter, never actually kills with his own hands. Through a form of hypnotism, initiated with the deceptively simple question, “Who are you?”, he awakens primal instincts in those he meets. The result is a series of murders that seem entirely unrelated were it not for an identical M.O.: a large “X” slashed across the victims’ chests.
Kurosawa’s chronically underrated countryman
Sogo Ishii (Burst City, Electric Dragon 80,000V) al- ready delivered a similarly creepy exercise in at- mosphere three years earlier with Angel Dust, which proved prophetic in foretelling the deadly nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system of 1995. Ishii returned in 1997 with Labyrinth of Dreams, in which a young woman falls for a handsome young bus driver who may or may not be a murderer. Shot in dreamy black and white, it goes almost against the genre in its emphasis on atmospherics over chills. In more recent years, Korea has been the place
to go for fresh, inspired takes on the template. The pitch for Woo-suk Kang’s Public Enemy (2002) – in a nutshell: Bad Lieutenant versus American Psycho – is of such superb simplicity that it’s a miracle no one in Hollywood thought it up first. Joon-ho Bong’s Memories of Murder (2003) echoes Imamura’s Vengeance Is Mine for its fact-based, vivid portrayal of killings in a working-class milieu, made all the more disturbing for devoting ample coverage to the police brutality and stupidity that allowed the per- petrator to go uncaught. With Hong-jin Na’s aston- ishing The Chaser (2008) and now Ji-woon Kim’s I Saw the Devil, the killing continues in Korea.
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