Sometimes a film’s visuals are so visceral that they overpower your eyes entirely, pulling you in and setting your other senses ablaze. The putrid smell of rancid flesh stings your nostrils as you become acquainted with the Sawyer family homestead; your teeth chatter as MacReady and Childs stare each other down in the unforgiving Antarctic snow; the unwelcomed taste of pea soup miraculously appears in your mouth soon after Regan MacNeil spews forth a torrent of the stuff into poor Father Merrin’s face. Some of the horror genre’s best entries are more than just a story that haunts you: they’re a full body experience.
Legendary renegade filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto’s debut feature, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), shares this quality of sensual transcendence. Stifling waves of heat and humidity radiate from nearly every frame of the picture, and throughout its brisk 77-minute runtime you can’t help but detect the metallic taste of blood on the air. But its ability to intoxicate is just one of the many reasons why the movie is still overwhelming viewers 35 years after its release.
Explaining Tetsuo’s premise to the uninitiated can be a rigorous exercise in keeping a straight face. A salaryman (Tomorô Taguchi) and his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara) hit and kill a Metal Fetishist (Tsukamoto) with their car. Afterwards, the young office worker goes through a horrific transformation as metal growths and deformations begin to erupt from his body and, well, his penis turns into a massive drill. Things…happen with it. Eventually a final apocalyptic showdown between him and a resurrected Metal Fetishist (who now also has psychic powers) threatens to destroy Tokyo and the world.
Shinya Tsukamoto was born on January 1st, 1960, in Shibuya, a ward in the city of Tokyo. As a child, he had a fascination with monster movies (Gamera [1965] and Godzilla [1958] ranked among his favorites) before catching the acting bug after making his stage debut in an elementary school play. When he was 14 years old, his father came home with an 8mm camera, which quickly caught Shinya’s attention. With his brother Koji by his side, the two began to make short films together. It is here where he developed the philosophy of independent filmmaking that would make his style so economical: use friends and family as your crew, make what you need yourself, and shoot a movie.
After graduating from Nihon university with a focus in oil painting, Tsukamoto landed a job directing commercials for an advertising agency. While the gig allowed him to gain experience with equipment he wouldn’t have had access to otherwise, it didn’t do much to foster his sense of creativity. So, needing an outlet, he founded the Kaiju Theater Company, an underground acting troupe that would perform intense avant-garde productions to audiences in a homemade tent made to look like a massive underwater sea creature.
Two of these shows, The Phantom of Regular Size and The Adventure of Denchu-Kaza, would go on to be adapted into short films by Tsukamoto. Tetsuo: The Iron Man would ultimately be born from a melding together of ideas and images shown in these earlier works. Production would begin on the feature in September of 1987 and it would be 18 months before the movie was completed. During that time, Tsukamoto’s crew (who were all living together in the apartment of Tetsuo co-star Kei Fujiwara) would eventually abandon the project thinking it would never be finished. Undaunted, Shinya plowed on. He and the few who stayed would cover whatever jobs needed to be done, with Tsukamoto’s credits by the end of the project including director, writer, producer, actor, editor, art director, and cinematographer (a title shared with Fujiwara).
All of that hard work and risk (the director had quit his day job by this point) would pay off. After winning the top prize at Italy’s Fantafestival, Tetsuo: The Iron Man would be embraced by critics and audiences alike. It would go on to become a landmark entry in the Cyber-Punk movement and would be significant in the resurrection of Japan’s ailing movie industry on the world stage. “Not only was Tetsuo a film by a director from a new generation, it also brought a new generation of foreign fans to Japanese film,” writes Matt Wes in his essential book Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto. “Rather than being built on the remnants of the past, it gave Japanese cinema a future.”
While success is never guaranteed, especially when it comes to experimental filmmaking, the kind Tetsuo continues to experience today is perhaps not all that surprising. The movie itself fits comfortably amongst the ranks of other legendary body horror pictures, feeling like a sort of punk-rock cousin to the early works of David Cronenberg (one of Tsukamoto’s bigger influences). It certainly has the “ick” factor fans of the subgenre expect, featuring gruesome low-fi practical effects and gory set pieces that prove you can gross out even the most hardened splatter fans on any budget.
However, body horror is so much more than just nightmarish transformations and buckets of blood and/or puss. To be truly affecting, the visuals on the screen have to connect with the audience in a way that burrows under their skin and wriggles into their psyche. Tetsuo achieves this beautifully and does so on multiple levels. The most obvious interpretation of its protagonist’s transformation is that it’s a commentary on the dehumanizing effects of technology. This reading has certainly aged well and should hold relevance for years to come as advances in artificial intelligence continue to pose an existential threat to many of the aspects of ourselves that make us feel human.
Another aspect of Tetsuo that lends itself to the Cronenbergian school of body horror is its sexuality. In a 2012 interview with Third Window Films, Tsukamoto talked about his intention to show the eroticism behind the fusing of flesh and steel seen in his feature. One might hear that statement, think of Tetsuo’s infamous penis drill scene, and find themselves thinking “huh, you don’t say?” But that formidable biomechanical member only scratches the surface. There is a blurring of the salaryman’s sexuality that goes hand-in-hand with his physical form’s metamorphosis.
When he and the Metal Fetishist finally throwdown, it’s unclear as to whether they’re going to fight or fuck. As it turns out, it’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. In the concluding moments of the film, the two fuse into one grotesque mass of jagged edges and glistening chrome. Reborn, they dream aloud of the possibilities of their union (“Our love can put an end to this fucking world!”) before speeding away into the streets of Tokyo.
In many ways, their declaration represents the defining element of what makes Tetsuo so memorable: it’s a movie that’s fueled by rage. It lurks beneath the faces of nearly every character we meet in it, showcasing, as Jasper Sharp puts it in his video essay An Assault on the Senses, “the repressed violence within us all.” What is that fury being aimed towards? One could argue it’s anything and everything that polite society calls normal. We watch as the salaryman, a placeholder for all things ordinary, is transformed by the anarchy that is the Metal Fetishist. And as the frenzied chaos of the film unfolds, we’re given the opportunity to live through him vicariously.
If you stay to watch the closing credits roll during most of Shinya Tsukamoto’s post-Tetsuo pictures, you’ll see his name once again appear beside an almost inhuman number of titles. The fierce sense of nonconformity and legendary work ethic shown in his first feature was not just a product of a young artist doing what he had to do to bring his dream to life; they are characteristics that define Tsukamoto at his core. He continues to be a force to be reckoned with in the world of independent cinema and will always be kind of filmmaker whose visions have the power to decimate our senses.
Sources:
Wess, Tom. Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto. FAB Press, 2005.
Interview with Shinya Tsukamoto. Third Window Films, 2012.
Sharp, Jasper. Assault on the Senses. Arrow Films, 2020.