Enemies of the State: the Films and Filmmakers of the Underground — Part 3 “Ero-Guro”

Today’s article concerns itself with the October season-appropriate genre of exploitation film: Ero-Guro. As the portmanteau suggests, Ero-Guro is the cinema of erotica and grotesquery: two designations that dilute the human body into its most rudimentary biology. These films’ decadent exploration of these themes — of sex, sexual corruption, mental and physical malformation, crime, violence, horror — give them the perverse-watermark of something like Giallo.

Fig. 1  “Blind Beast” (1969)

Fig. 2  “Blind Beast” (1969)

Fig. 3  “Blind Beast” (1969)

Fig. 4  “Blind Beast” (1969)

Fig. 5 “Blind Beast” (1969)

Fig. 6 “Blind Beast” (1969)

EXAMPLES OF ERO-GURO AND ITS BIRTH

Unlike other self-explanatory genres of exploitation, e.g. Women in Prison or Cannibal films, Ero-Guro both as a title and as a genre is far more nebulous and cerebral. Examples of these types of stories includes the 1925 story “The Human Chair,” wherein a man hides inside an armchair to feel a woman sit on him. “The Caterpillar,” about a woman who abuses her limbless, paralyzed Veteran husband. And “Stalker in the Attic,” which follows a man who spies on his neighbors through their shared attic, becoming fixated on a woman after spying on her while she bathes. Each of the above examples comes from the Japanese novelist Edogawa Ranpo. While the genre spanned theater, illustration, manga, fashion, and later, films, its catalyst was arguably literature, and the godfather of said literature was Ranpo. Ranpo’s work was made up of the pulp of Western crime serials, mixed with macabre stuffings of Edgar Allen Poe (Edogawa Ranpo went so far as to steal Poe’s name: say the Japanese novelists name fast, and you realize that it is simply Poe’s name transferred to Japanese characters). In the Taisho-era (1912-26), Ero-Guro-nonsensu (erotic grotesque nonsense), was a term of urban pop culture used to describe media fascinated with sex, crime, and Japan’s westernized culture. With the passage of time, the term grew to be recognized as a genre. While its popularity diminished with the Showa-era (1926-89), becoming more chic — less concerned with the present; more nostalgic of the past — it never died. Ero Guro was survived into the 21st-century by Mangaka like Suehiro Maruo, and filmmakers who, while not directly working within the genre, were certainly influenced by it.

Fig. 7 (from Junji Ito’s adaptation of “The Human Chair”)

Fig. 8

Fig. 9  (art by Suehiro Maruo)

Fig. 10 “the Dancing Dwarf" (Suehiro Maruo)

Fig. 11  “the Dancing Dwarf" (Suehiro Maruo)

Fig. 12  “Binzume no Jigoku” (Suehiro Maruo)

TERUO ISHII ERO-GURO FILMS

Teruo Ishii is one of the most prominent directors associated with Ero-Guro. His quasi-trilogy of films “Shogun’s Joy of Torture,” “Orgies of Edo,” and “Inferno of Torture,” along with the adjacent “Horrors of Malformed Men,” are all essential works of the genre. Though the period of late 60s Japan limited a substantial portion of the Ero in Ero-Guro, there is certainly plenty of the latter — and just enough of the former to ensure its genre status. All of Ishii’s mentioned films focus violence, torture being central to the plot of each. This is one of the most important, transgressive aspects of the genre. It has a Freakshow-like morbid curiosity with the human body. It objectifies humans as spectacle the same way science does as atoms. It answers questions of how a wife would make love to her limbless, paralyzed husband.

Fig. 13  “Blind Beast” (1969)

Fig. 14  “Blind Beast” (1969)

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