The hallucinogenic cinema of Japan: 7 cult films to watch now

Interestingly, the man who directed the 150-minute Making of ‘Dreams’ documentary (drawn from 190 hours of footage, and included on Criterion’s re-release of the film) was renowned for a tendency towards experimentalist and even psychedelic visual media. Nobuhiko Obayashi, a former TV advertising icon who helmed 3,000 commercials during his lifetime, would later find acclaim with quirky movies like 1983 time-travel drama The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and the dazzling 2019 anti-war fantasy Labyrinth of Cinema. But his most infamous work is easily the cult classic House – one of the most out-there horror films ever made.

With an aesthetic that combines collage-style animation with the kind of kinetic editing usually reserved for advertising flashy new products, House takes a simple story concerning a group of young girls forced to shack up in a haunted house and turns it into something utterly mind-boggling. The movie’s bleeding grandfather clocks, floating heads, and severed fingers dancing fingers on piano keys, meanwhile, would be pure nightmare fuel if it wasn’t all so whimsical – the result of the story conceived by Obayashi’s pre-teen daughter.

Available on home media via Criterion

This kaleidoscopic noir – a reaction to the experimentalist works produced elsewhere at the height of the Japanese New Wave – has been described by some critics as a pre-cursor to the vividly colourful 90s arthouse cinema of Wong Kar-wai (In the Mood For Love). This symbiosis is plain to see in a stunning restoration of the former, a relative obscurity which arrives on home media in the UK via Radiance Films this month.

The story of a corrupted bar hostess, forced into the seedy world of prostitution by her hoodlum boyfriend, feels like a beautiful bad dream, with saturated blues, pinks and yellows dominating the red light district setting. It’s a film that feels utterly devoid of natural colour, with barely a glimpse of greenery to be found beyond the pre-eminent strip lighting, murky shadows and fade-to-blue transitions. As a result, TheShape of Night is positively dripping with an unnatural, almost ominous atmosphere.

Screening at the Prince Charles Cinema, London, on April 24 and released on home media via Radiance Films on April 29th

Given that it opens with a shot of a rainbow-coloured clown emerging from a tiny car to announce “the greatest showtime” to the viewer, it’s hardly a surprise to find that the sci-fi mystery of Paprika is a wild, logic-defying spectacle. 

Set in the near future, the film concerns a rogue scientist who has developed a device that “opens the door to our dreams”, allowing her to interact with the visions of sleeping psychiatric patients. One of those is a detective plagued by a recurring nightmare in which he witnesses a shooting in an impossibly long corridor, but finds himself unable to catch the perpetrator. Meanwhile, a third party wreaks havoc in the dream world. As they do so, fantasy and reality begin to merge.

It’s not the easiest narrative to follow, but the fourth and final feature by the great Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue) is a cerebral marvel nonetheless. With a richly detailed and mind-boggling world on display – meticulously animated in vibrant technicolour – the film would be nominated for the Venice Golden Lion in 2006. Four years later, Hollywood imitation would prove a great flattery when Christopher Nolan’s Inception recycled much of the plot and key scenes to even greater success in the West.

Screening at the Prince Charles Cinema, London, on Apr 27, May 15 and May 31

Given his propensity for such delirious subjects as schools run by murderous teen gangs (Fudoh: The New Generation); naff superheroes battling slimy extra-terrestrials (Zebraman); and vampiric yakuza bosses (Yakuza Apocalypse), it should be no surprise to know that Takashi Miike is also responsible for some of Japan’s weirdest movies.

While the 2001 musical-horror-comedy The Happiness of the Katakuris would achieve cult status thanks to its unlikely combo of zombies, claymation, and karaoke sequences, the director was at his Lynchian best when he delivered the mind-boggling Gozu in 2003. Perhaps the greatest V-Cinema production of them all, the film concerns a rookie gangster looking for his unhinged missing partner — and elsewhere features minotaurs, soup-ladle sex toys, and a scene in which a woman gives birth to a fully-grown man. 

It screened at Cannes in 2003 despite originally being planned as a straight-to-video release, and Miike’s reputation for oddball filmmaking has stuck ever since.

In Gakuryū “Sogo” Ishii’s 1994 classic Angel Dust, forensic psychiatrist Setsuko Suma (Kaho Minami) is called upon to investigate a series of killings in the Tokyo subway in which victims were unknowingly injected with a neurotoxic substance. The perpetrator remains a mystery, but a clue seems to lie in a victim’s association with a religious cult called the ‘Ultimate Truth Church’. Meanwhile, news reports allude to a clinical experiment gone wrong, in which the patients have committed suicide.

Utilising a Matrix-like bottle green colour filter, bizarre CCTV footage, and recurring images of a pitch-black cave in the infamous “suicide forest” of Aokigahara, Angel Dust offers a truly foreboding viewing experience that is also profoundly dreamlike in its execution. But perhaps the most unnerving aspect of the film is how it seems to anticipate one of Japan’s most infamous terror incidents, with the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult’s sarin attacks on the Tokyo subway taking place just six months after the film’s release. 

One of the best psychological thrillers of the 90s – foreshadowing the likes of David Fincher’s Se7en and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure – Angel Dust remains frustratingly obscure in the West today due to similar rights issues to those that have stricken Ishii’s other transcendental masterpiece of the era: August in the Water.

A cello player stands desolate before a puddle of bright red water, as black-veiled figures gather nearby. An orgy takes place within a rainbow-coloured circus tent, as a lethargic performer waits for her fatsuit to be inflated. A woman in a red shawl jerks beneath a yellow sky, pausing to munch on the flowers growing from the craggy outcrop.

Shūji Terayama’s experimental, semi-autobiographical carnival of re-imagined adolescent memories – enriched by his use of kaleidoscopic lens filters and bizarre production design – is a fascinating and esoteric visual spectacle from start to finish. A Palme d’Or nominee at Cannes 1975, the film takes the hand of surreal marvels like Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 ghost story anthology Kwaidan and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 psychedelic cult film The Holy Mountain and goes full Fellini, utilising a film-within-a-film structure to tell the story of a director’s struggle to complete a production based on his own childhood. 

In many ways, Terayama’s phantasmagoric images would foreshadow Kurosawa’s Dreams – a marvel of similar scope that arrived some 15 years later.