The Forgotten Victims

of Sexual Violence in
Film, Television and
New Media
Turning to the Margins

Edited by
Stephanie Patrick · Mythili Rajiva
The Forgotten Victims of Sexual Violence in Film,
Television and New Media
 Stephanie Patrick • Mythili Rajiva
Editors

The Forgotten Victims

of Sexual Violence in
Film, Television and
New Media
Turning to the Margins
Editors
Stephanie Patrick Mythili Rajiva
Calgary, AB, Canada Institute of Feminist and
Gender Studies
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-95934-0    ISBN 978-3-030-95935-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95935-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
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 Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2014-1763. Principal
Investigator: Dr. Mythili Rajiva).
The editors would like to thank the following people, without whom
this book would not have been possible: The team at Palgrave Macmillan,
Nina Guttapalle, Arun Prasath, and Brian Halm, for all their support, and,
of course, the contributors, who worked tirelessly and responded to our
requests for revisions, without losing patience with us. Their outstanding
chapters are a testament to their professionalism.
The editors would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful com-
ments and helpful feedback.
Mythili would like to thank the following people: her co-editor,
Stephanie, who shouldered the burden of this book and who was, as
always, a pleasure to work with; her research assistant Marina Goma; her
sister, Suma, for her resources on Latin terms; and her partner, Tarun,
who engaged patiently in multiple conversations when she was trying to
work through the conceptualizing of her own chapter. Mythili would also
like to thank her sons, Arjun and Dhilan; despite being a source of con-
stant worry and exhaustion, they are the two great loves of her life, and
she wouldn’t have it any other way. Finally, she would like to thank her
beloved father, the late Dr. Stanley Frederic Rajiva, who passed away on
November 29, 2021. She wouldn’t be the person she is today without his
unwavering love and support.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Stephanie would like to thank Mythili, for all her support through this
project and beyond. She would also like to thank her colleagues at the
Institute of Feminist & Gender Studies for many insightful conversations,
as well as her family, her partner, and her dog for their understanding and
support.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Stephanie Patrick and Mythili Rajiva

2 Poison Ivy, Wild Things and Other Erotic Teen Thrillers of

the 1990s: The Class-­Shamed “Evil” Other of
Hypersexualized Girl Power 25
Susan Hopkins

3 Sexual Violence and Smallfolk: The Exploitation of the

Sex Worker in Game of Thrones 47
Louise Coopey

4 You Too: The Strategic Use of a Fictional #MeToo Story

in Netflix’s You 63
Alexandria Petit-Thorne

5 “The Devil Made Me Do It”: Jessica Jones as White

Feminist Hauntology 79
Mythili Rajiva

6 Taking What You Can Get and Taking Care of Yourself:

Mapping Fat Women’s Sexual Agency Through Television
Stereotypes101
Kristin Rodier

vii
viii Contents

7 “You Can’t Force Someone to Want You”: Investigating

Consent, Tokenism, and Play in Reality Dating Shows123
Sreyashi Mukherjee and Dacia Pajé

8 Sexual Violence in Testimonial Stand-Up Comedy:

A Case Study of Rape Is Real and Everywhere (2017)143
Melanie Proulx

9 #TimesUp for Siri and Alexa: Sexual Violence and the

Digital Domestic163
Lindsay Anne Balfour

10 Where the Violence Lies: Re-reading Rape and Revenge

in Freeze Me (Takashi Ishii, 2000)179
Jenna Ng

11 Uneasy Listening: True Crime and Structural State

Violence in Public Podcasting203
Stephanie Patrick

12 Afterword: Destroying the Cycle?225

Stephanie Patrick

Index243
 CHAPTER 10

Where the Violence Lies: Re-reading

Rape and Revenge in Freeze Me
(Takashi Ishii, 2000)

Jenna Ng

10.1   Introduction
The rape-revenge film is one “whereby a rape that is central to the narra-
tive is punished by an act of vengeance, either by the victim themselves or
by an agent” (Heller-Nicholas 2011, 19). With this usually lurid combina-
tion of sex and violence, the genre attracts accusations of being “the dregs
of the dregs of exploitation schlock” (Berlatsky 2016, 68). As will be dis-
cussed, Japanese rape-revenge films fall particularly prey to such charges.
However, the lex talionis logic of the rape-revenge cycle also enables
unique understandings of the meaning of rape. For instance, they may be
feminist statements on female agency responding to the violence they have
suffered (Clover 2015; Henry 2014; Projansky 2001). Vengeance as a

J. Ng (*)
Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media,
University of York, York, UK
e-mail: jenna.ng@york.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 179

Switzerland AG 2022
S. Patrick, M. Rajiva (eds.), The Forgotten Victims of Sexual Violence
in Film, Television and New Media,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95935-7_10
180 J. NG

response to rape also exposes culpabilities for the crime as rape survivors
pursue payback from those who have hurt them. As Claire Henry (2014)
writes, the genre is “a cultural key that can help to reveal and interrogate
the meanings of rape and the political, ethical, and affective responses to
it” (3). Rape-revenge films may be grisly and sensationalist, but some
bring to light important layers of the violence of rape and, as such, warrant
closer attention.
In this chapter, I argue that a film which sheds such light on rape is the
Japanese rape-revenge film Freeze Me (Takashi Ishii, 2000). Relatively
unknown in the West, the few existing English-language materials on the
film hail it as a unique work that breaks from the graphic sexual violence
which characterizes the historical canons of rape and revenge in Japanese
cinema. I do not disagree. However, in this chapter I advance my reading
of Freeze Me for a more radical understanding of rape. Namely, its violence
stems from not only male sexual attacks on the female body, but also social
apathy and institutional failure. I argue that the film shows rape as not
only—in fact, hardly—about the male-female dynamics of power per the
usual conventional readings of the genre and especially of Western rape-­
revenge films. More importantly, rape-revenge in Freeze Me presents a
powerful critique of Japanese society that exposes the oppressive social
expectations and cultural norms for women in a still-traditional East Asian
society which ultimately become complicit in sexual assault. Revenge here
is not so much a violent feminist payback for masculine domination, but
the recovery of independence in a society which shames rape, prefers
denial to the crime, and expects its women to cover up any hint of trau-
matic sexual past. In this sense, discussing Freeze Me not only pays timely
attention to the discourse of rape in the context of intersectional experi-
ence (gender and race), but also spotlights the consideration of women—
and their roles in society—in Japanese cinema. Together, they constitute
an expanded reflection on where rape and its violence truly lie.

10.2   Understanding Rape Through

Rape-Revenge Films
Concentrating first on Anglo-American-European examples, in general
rape-revenge films provide two, albeit related, junctures for further under-
standing the meaning of rape. The first is the heinousness of the act.
Andrews (2012) describes this connection between atrocity and vengeance
 10 WHERE THE VIOLENCE LIES: RE-READING RAPE AND REVENGE… 181

in terms of how “these rapes are perceived by the avenger figures in each
film as special crimes that deserve equally distinctive acts of vengeance”
(7). Some examples of distinctive acts of vengeance to illustrate this point:
for instance, I Spit On Your Grave (1978), Ladies’ Club (1986) and The
Last House on the Left (1972) depict castration as a direct reprisal for
“uncontrolled” male lust. In The Good Liar (2019), the rapist is led
through an elaborate scheme devised by the rape survivor until he ends up
being assaulted. A large number of rape-revenge films feature murder as
carried out in various ways. Examples include being shot in Ms .45 (1981),
stabbed in The Virgin Spring (1960), buried alive in Extremities (1986),
impaled by a television aerial in Mother’s Day (1980), electrocuted in
Taken (2008) and thrown over a stairwell railing in M.F.A. (2017). In The
Accused (1988), revenge takes the form of convictions of criminal solicita-
tion for bystanders who cheered on the rapists. These codings of justice
for rape in rape-revenge films are, thus, significant in undergirding what is
being avenged. As Carol Clover (2015) writes: “For revenge fantasies to
work, there must be something worth avenging—something egregious
enough to justify hideous retaliation” (144). The heart of the revenge nar-
rative is that egregiousness which places the spotlight on what the rape
survivor went through and, therefore, in what way vengeance needs to be
sought for justice.
The second juncture for understanding rape in rape-revenge films is in
terms of culpability for the act. This culpability generally refers to the
oppressions or hierarchies that underpin the rape. For instance, Carol
Clover (2015) reads rape in terms of class inequalities via a country/city
binary, rather than an act of violence by any specific character (124–137).
In this interpretation, the rape-revenge films of Deliverance (1972), The
Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Hunter’s Blood (1986) present rape as the
antagonism of country people on city dwellers for reasons ranging from
resentment due to wealth and social class differences to theft and pollution
of their land. However, the more conventional readings of culpability tend
to present male dominance over women or what Clover (2015) identifies
as “the power dynamic between men and women that makes rape happen
in the first place and, in the second, that makes it so eminently avenge-
able” (144). In these readings, revenge forms a second-wave feminist
response by women on those responsible either for their own rape or for
other women’s (Read 2000; Projansky 2001). Andrews (2012) similarly
notes how the rape-revenge film “is routinely wed to pro-female scenarios
that support female sexual agency at the individual level and that usually
182 J. NG

sympathize with rape victims” (7). As a feminist response, revenge on the

male rapist(s) in these films also tends to be carried out by the female sur-
vivor who undergoes some kind of empowering transformation after the
trauma of rape, such as learning how to shoot a gun or training to develop
greater physical strength.
In this respect, rape-revenge narratives are also notably turning the
spotlight on culpability beyond male rapists to a wider range of parties to
be held responsible. While not directly culpable for the sexual attack itself,
their guilt is for ignoring it, letting rape happen, and/or go unpunished.
The Accused (1988) is one of the earliest films to signal this wider culpabil-
ity in how the film turns its vengeance for rape onto prosecuting onlookers
for encouraging the act. But more recent films cast this net beyond
bystanders and onto those who have or should have active caring or pro-
tective responsibilities for the victims. In the 2017 film M.F.A., a student
at a fictional southern California university was raped by her classmate.
Beyond the sexual assault, the film also spends time showing the futility of
the student’s subsequent attempts for support, such as the school admin-
istrator who ignored her and the ineffective university’s rape advocacy
group. In turn, those fruitless moves led her to take more direct action for
herself. In Promising Young Woman (2020), this wider culpability colors a
large part of the film’s rape-revenge cycle, where the protagonist seeks
revenge for her best friend’s rape not only on the male rapist per the
genre’s convention. Notably, she also retaliates on the classmate who had
denied the assault, the school dean who had dismissed the case, and the
lawyer who had harassed the rape victim into dropping charges.
In other words—as is also this chapter’s argument—contemporary
rape-revenge films demonstrate that there is more at stake in rape beyond
the violent contestations of the male/female dynamic. Rather, the signifi-
cance of highlighting this wider culpability for rape is how it connects rape
not just with rapists but also with the failure of and lack of responsibility
by those who have or should have a duty to care and protect. This cate-
gory includes parents, teachers, partners, friends, law enforcers, prosecu-
tors, the law and its codes, courts and its judges. In films and readings
which concentrate on rape as male aggression, these culpabilities tend to
escape the focus of commentary. Yet it is these parties and institutions that
are most responsible for the vulnerable and marginalized, and most gravely
let them down when they are ignored or dismissed, fall through the cracks
of the systems, or are simply never protected in the first place. Rape-­
revenge thus becomes an important space that exposes and commentates
 10 WHERE THE VIOLENCE LIES: RE-READING RAPE AND REVENGE… 183

on these multiple victimizations to spotlight institutional failure as an

extension of rape, and one that is particularly relevant for the vulnerable
and the marginalized. The vengeance of the raped is not only for the vio-
lence by the rapists, but also an answer to the deficiency or perversion of
institutional redress for those failed by the system.

10.3   Japanese Cinema: Rape, Revenge

and Their Discourse

In Japanese cinema, representations of rape abound. In recent years, rape

has appeared onscreen in acclaimed high-end works, such as All About Lily
Chou-Chou (2001) (see Ng 2009) and The Ravine of Goodbye (2013) (see
Cheng 2016). However, it was the notorious “pink” (pinku eiga, or soft-­
core pornographic films) and Roman Porno films (roman poruno)1 in the
1970s and 1980s which filled Japanese cinema with predominantly male
sexual and physical domination of women (see Sharp 2008). Rape consti-
tutes a large chunk of this filmic output, represented in almost every pos-
sible context—prisons (Female Prisoner: Caged! (1983); Female Prisoner
#701 Scorpion films (1972–1974)); nuns in convents (School of the Holy
Beast (1974)); newlyweds (Wet Rope Confession (1979)); female gang
rivalry (Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970)); and many others.
There is a similarly long tradition of revenge as a theme in Japanese
culture. The most prominent examples are the myths of the goryo ̄ and the
onryō. Respectively, they are “the deified vengeful spirit of a martyred
person” (Iwasaka 82) and the vengeful female ghost of “the jealous or
ruined woman” in Edo Gothic (Balmain 2008, 50–69; see also Crandol
2021). The latter, in particular, has “inspired generations of Japanese
ghost stories, Kabuki drama, painting, and Gothic fiction” (Hughes 2000,
65). For instance, the popular 1825 Kabuki play Yotsuya Kaidan “recounts
the story of Oiwa, poisoned by a samurai husband seeking a wealthier,
younger woman,” only for Oiwa to return as a vengeful ghost to haunt
him (Hughes 2000, 71). Another example is the ancient Edo ghost story
(kaidan), “How a Man’s Wife Became a Vengeful Spirit and How Her

1
Some scholars (e.g. Balmain 2008, 13; Schubart 2008, 26) translate the Japanese term of
roman porno as an abbreviation of “romantic pornography.” Conversely, Sharp (2011)
argues that roman porno is derived from the French term roman pornographique (“porno-
graphic novel”) “to lend it more literary associations as opposed to… pink film” (208).
184 J. NG

Malignity was Diverted by a Master of Divination.”2 This story depicts a

wife who was deserted by her husband but remains in their house even
after her death, haunting it with her corpse whose “bones stayed together,
and her long black hair only grew longer” (Davisson 2015, 162). Her
ghost is only exorcized by the husband sitting astride his wife’s corpse like
a horse and grabbing her hair as if it was reins. Vengeful women are also
writ large in Japanese films, most famously via the Ringu and Ju-On fran-
chises. Both film series feature multiple stories about murdered women
returning as vengeful ghosts that wreak death and destruction on innocent
victims who cross their paths. Revenge in Japanese culture also extends
beyond vengeful women. For example, Iwasaka (1994) writes of Japanese
legends which enact revenge for various crimes. One tale is “The Hunting
Dog’s Revenge,” where a hunter killed a loyal dog and eventually died
from an infected leg injured with a bone from the dog’s skeleton after he
kicked it (91). In these ways, vengeance plays out thematically in Japanese
culture in multiple forms and contexts.
However, rape-revenge is a more unusual convergence. For instance,
the traditional vengeance of the onryō usually relates to familial failures. As
Iwasaka (1994) puts it, the legend of Oiwa is really “a dramatization of
Japanese attitudes on marital obligations, betrayal of family, and selfish-
ness” (44). A starker example is the legend of “The Spirit of a Loving
Bondwoman.” In Iwasaka’s (1994) recounting of this story, a bond-
woman is raped by her rich owner, after which she kills herself in shame.
However, her suicide is cast as fidelity to her paramour, as the bondwoman
continues to return as a ghost to meet him in their nightly rendezvous
(Iwasaka 1994, 114–115). Any repercussions for the owner in relation to
his rape are omitted. Rather than be exposed as a heinous act, rape becomes
a plot point to convey female devotion.
As a film genre, the rarity of female-driven rape-revenge is even more
pronounced when considered in proportion to the amounts of rape shown
in Japanese cinema. Of course, there are Japanese films with rape and
revenge. For instance, All Night Long (1992) and Sea (2018) feature sto-
rylines of male protagonists who avenge rapes of women associated with
them in some way. But as Projansky (2001) points out, films in this cate-
gory of rape-revenge are not really about rape in terms of the women’s

2
This story comes from the multi-volume tome of Collected Tales of Times Now Past
(Konjaku Monogatarishū). However, the publication date of Collected Tales is unclear
beyond being somewhere in the twelfth century and author unknown (Davisson 2015, 31).
 10 WHERE THE VIOLENCE LIES: RE-READING RAPE AND REVENGE… 185

trauma. Rather, they “depend on rape to motivate and justify a particularly

violent version of masculinity, relegating women to minor ‘props’ in the
narrative” (Projansky 2001, 60). There are also other films which do fea-
ture women’s revenge for their rapes, such as Female Demon Ohayku
(1968), Rica the Mixed-Blood Girl (1972), Girl Boss Revenge: Sukeban
(1973), and Blood Sisters (2000). But they are unabashedly lurid, exploit-
ative fare, and similarly difficult to justify as genuine feminist statements
on either women or rape.
Nevertheless, there are a few exceptions. Kuroneko (1968) adapts a
folktale in the kaidan tradition to tell the story of a widow and her
daughter-­in-law who were raped and murdered by samurai. They returned
as vengeful spirits to the soldiers, where their “thrilling caresses mask a
lethal intent” (McDonagh 2011, np). The figure of the Japanese female
survivor-avenger itself gains a veritable incarnation in the form of actress
Meiko Kaji, star of the first two Female Prisoner Scorpion films and the first
two Lady Snowblood films.3 The latter Snowblood films inspired Quentin
Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003) with its own resonances of rape and revenge
and launched Kaji’s international profile. In the first Female Prisoner
Scorpion film, Kaji’s eponymous character kills her rapists; in Lady
Snowblood, Kaji’s again eponymous character avenges the rape (and mur-
der) of her mother. In both films, Kaji portrays the “woman with a ven-
geance” with imperious grace and fiery resistance (Schubart 2007,
107–122, 2008). Her work and legacy form a rare feminist statement on
the response of Japanese women to rape.
With such few exceptions, there is unsurprisingly scant English-­
language scholarly discourse on rape-revenge in Japanese cinema. But
beyond the issue of the corpus, there is also a seemingly wider reticence in
general about rape and East Asian women. There is excellent scholarship
on race and rape and certainly on race and screen representations of rape
(Moorti 2002; Henry 2014; Projansky 2001). Yet none offer extensive
discussions in relation to East Asian women. In its section of rape-revenge
films “around the world” from her book, Heller-Nicholas (2011) reviews
selected films from the movie powerhouses of Hong Kong, India and
Japan as its Asian contributions, albeit really as a whistle-stop tour. Japanese
rape-revenge films and the wider filmic treatment of women in that vein

3
These films starring Kaji would be, respectively, Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion (1972)
and Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972); and Lady Snowblood (1973) and Lady
Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (1974).
186 J. NG

continue to be relatively overlooked even in contemporary collections on

Japanese cinema (see, e.g. Crandol 2021; Fujiki and Phillips 2020; Inuhiko
2019; Miyao 2014; Phillips and Stringer 2007).
It is true that the vast majority of the genre is lurid, sensationalist and
grisly. They are by and large classified in notorious categories such as
“pink” or other labels synonymous with soft porn, excessive violence and
other unsavory elements. Overall, these films make for difficult watching
and even greater challenge in generating worthwhile analyses. For instance,
Jaspar Sharp’s (2008) book, Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete
History of Japanese Sex Cinema, is exceptionally detailed in its reviews of
the films on the topic and often fascinating in its insights of the Japanese
movie industry in the relevant eras. However, it offers little to no redemp-
tion for the films, with frequent free admission of the gratuity of their
depictions.
Having said that, gendered violence in relation to East Asian films does
seem to be a relatively muted convergence. Feminist scholarship by
Western media scholars drive much of the attention on rape-revenge films
and, as discussed earlier, raise valuable insights on the meanings and
understandings of rape and sexual violence. Yet, that work tends to focus
on American films featuring white women. Correspondingly, reticence in
the scholarly discourse also colors the relative silence on Japanese or East
Asian women’s narratives of sexual assault. Cheng (2016) discusses what
she openly describes as “the culture of silence that surrounds the issue of
sexual violence within Japanese society” and offers some reasons for it.
Some of these include legal infrastructure and societal norms. But not
least of all are also problematic representations of rape in the culture, such
as the “formulaic style” in pinku eiga of raped women “begging for more,”
which have received little critique.
However, understanding rape crucially extends beyond feminist read-
ings of male aggression or oppressions of patriarchies or paternalism. Rape
is also about other abuses, such as freedom from social mores, personal
privacy and individual agency. These values are certainly also subjugated
by male dominance and patriarchy. However, in the East Asian context
whose societies are the most resolute in establishing social conformity and
asserting the importance of the family over the individual, these interpre-
tations ring particularly clarion for its women. East Asian women still face
unique struggles. As the case in point, Japan consistently performs poorly
in gender equality comparisons (Estévez-Abe 2013). Japanese women
cope daily with the expectations of presenting impeccable exteriorities on
 10 WHERE THE VIOLENCE LIES: RE-READING RAPE AND REVENGE… 187

manifold levels and deal with criticisms which sometimes border on the
incredible. As one recent (at the time of writing) example out of many, in
February 2021 Yoshiro Mori, the then head of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics
organizing committee, was quoted remarking how women “talked too
much at meetings” and how their talking time had to be “regulated”
(McCurry 2021). Despite protest, Mori was defensive and refused to
resign. (On further pressure, he later both apologized and resigned.)
Chosen as this chapter’s tutor text, Freeze Me as a rape-revenge film
thus stands out as a valuable film to study because it demonstrates how
vengeance is not only about getting even with male aggressors. It is also
about retrieving values for women that are particularly hard won in tradi-
tional sexist societies. In the process, it underscores the unique meanings
of sexual violence in Japanese culture, to which the next sections turn.

10.4   Freeze Me as a Rape-Revenge Film

Freeze Me’s rape-revenge story is relatively straightforward. A young
female office clerk, Chihiro (Harumi Inoue), is beaten and raped one
night in her Tokyo apartment by Hirokawa (Kazuki Kitamura). Their
paths had crossed before—five years ago, Hirokawa and his two friends,
Kojima (Shingo Tsurumi) and Baba (Naoto Takenaka), had gang raped
Chihiro in her home village, after which Chihiro moved to Tokyo. As
Hirokawa terrorizes her in Tokyo, she ends up killing him. Kojima and
Baba subsequently also turn up at her Tokyo apartment and attack her
again. She kills them, too, in seemingly straightforward payback for their
past and present violence to her. After each murder, she buys a large home
freezer in which she stores each body. However, her crimes are discovered
when the electricity power fails and the bodies rot. The film ends on an
ambiguous note with a penultimate shot that shows Chihiro standing
naked on her apartment balcony on a stormy night, her back to the cam-
era. As the lightning flashes, she disappears and the balcony stands empty.
As mentioned, the few English-language materials on the film immedi-
ately note Freeze Me as a work that breaks from the historical canon of rape
and revenge in Japanese cinema, most closely identified with the graphic
sexual violence of pinku eiga and roman porno. Film critic Mark Schilling
(2000) comments on how in Freeze Me, Ishii “takes [this mix of exploita-
tion and entitlement for revenge] to new levels of obsession—and art”
(np). Comparing Freeze Me against the pinku eiga corpus of Japanese cin-
ema, obscenity law scholar James R. Alexander (2005) reads the film as a
“maturation” of “Japanese rape-genre films,” principally due to the “more
188 J. NG

complex” drawing of Chihiro. First of all, the film’s non-gratuitous and

relatively little amounts of nudity do not objectify her. As Alexander fur-
ther notes, “[Chiro] is endearing and full of the kind of spunkiness that
characterized showgirls in the light-hearted American comedies of the
early 1930s. Hers is an intimate, common and close-up portrayal, full of
everyday happenings and concerns” (9). In comparison, working women
in pink rape films are portrayed as rebels against the system, whose rape is
warranted as “punishment for display of ambition beyond one’s expected
role in society” (6). Relatedly, Japanese rape films generally do not feature
women’s resistance. As Alexander writes, “[r]arely in pink films did a rape
victim struggle throughout the ordeal of her rape… but rather always
reverting to a resigned catatonic state” as signification of her shame (7). In
these ways, Freeze Me’s explicit treatment of rape-revenge prompts
Alexander to underscore the film’s unusual exposure and condemnation of
Japanese women’s restricted roles in public society, as well as the oppres-
sive social stigma of rape.
On a similar track, film scholar Frank Lafond (2005) interprets rape and
revenge in Freeze Me as a wider statement about male/female dynamics in
Japanese society. Lafond reads Chihiro’s vengeance as a “violent attack on
patriarchal oppression” that is “an act of despair, since there is no activism
for women’s rights in the film” (84). To Lafond, Freeze Me is about the
culpability of violent men, where it presents a “condemnation of mascu-
line violence towards women in contemporary Japanese society, unam-
biguously linking Chihiro’s rape with men’s behavior in the domestic
realm” (84).
Conversely, Colette Balmain (2008) departs from the association of
Freeze Me with the rape-revenge sub-genre and instead reads the film as a
continuation of “the oppressed, violated and open body of the woman in
mainstream romantic pornography [sic] during the 1970s and 1980s”
(98). Balmain links Freeze Me to the graphic Angel Guts film series by
sheer dint of their associations with Ishii, who wrote and drew the manga
series on which the Angel Guts films are based, and also directed the last
two films of the series. Balmain, thus, concludes that “the contemporary
Japanese rape-revenge film is a continuation of, rather than a break with,
the violated, traumatized and raped body commonly found in roman
porno” (112). In making this argument, she essentially ignores all similari-
ties and traditions of genre as well as the noticeably diminished nudity in
Freeze Me.
 10 WHERE THE VIOLENCE LIES: RE-READING RAPE AND REVENGE… 189

Given Freeze Me’s unusual treatment of rape in Japanese cinema, the

film warrants a closer examination. I agree with Lafond (and, thus, dis-
agree with Balmain) that Freeze Me is indubitably situated in the traditions
of Western rape-revenge films such as I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45,
whose women enact violence as a specific response to their suffering at the
hands of their male attackers. Freeze Me’s echoes of this definitive generic
theme are clear, right down to a similar bathtub scene where Chihiro kills
her first rapist as he relaxes in her bathtub by lobbing his head with a filled
bottle of water and letting him bleed to death. The scene unmistakably
echoes Jennifer’s notorious revenge scene in I Spit on Your Grave, which
had her castrating her first rapist in a warm bath and letting him bleed
to death.
However, I argue that Freeze Me also presents two subtle yet important
departures from its Western counterparts, which to date have not been
examined: (1) the film’s unusual rape-revenge structure and, more impor-
tantly, (2) its particular representation of sexual violence. Taken together,
both departures present significant nuances in not only the film’s messages
about sexual violence in Japanese society, but also its more damning pin-
pointing of the wider culpabilities at stake.

10.5   Re-reading Rape-Revenge in Freeze Me (1):

The Film’s Rape-Revenge Structure
As noted in the introduction, the definition of the rape-revenge film is a
film that centrally features both rape and an act of revenge that punishes
it. This definition, thus, suggests a binary structure composed on (1) the
rape, which immediately precipitates (2) revenge, with a possible interme-
diary stage of the survivor’s transformation for her vengeance (Read 2000).
However, in Freeze Me, Chihiro is raped twice—once in her home vil-
lage and again five years later in her Tokyo apartment. The film begins
with Chihiro’s life in Tokyo, with flashbacks of her first rape intercutting
the present events in Tokyo. Existing discussions of Freeze Me, such as
those by Alexander and Lafond, premise their readings of the film’s rape-­
revenge cycle on those attacks from five years ago, for which Chihiro’s
killings in Tokyo also constitute payback. Rape—as the wrong to which lex
talionis applies—then at least also partially rests on those past violations of
Chihiro’s body, or, as Balmain (2008) puts it, “the oppressed, violated and
open body of the woman” (98).
190 J. NG

However, this reading does not make sense in relation to the film’s
structure. The film’s opening minute clearly elides the events of five years
ago. This opening begins with a few seconds of dark shots. There are
sounds of struggle and a female voice crying and protesting. The next shot
is a somber-looking girl standing alone in the dark night under a streetlamp
illuminating falling snow, which dissolves into the bright city lights of
Tokyo. The sequence then cuts to a close shot of Chihiro sitting in an
office, meticulously made-up, attired and manicured, staring into a com-
puter screen and typing furiously. The montage’s message appears to be
that the first rape had had no visible consequences. The next ten minutes
of the film confirm this: the five years have passed with Chihiro moving to
the capital and forging a new life for herself. She is now happy with an
office job, colleagues with whom she socializes on boozy nights out, a
respectable boyfriend and living in her own apartment. In other words,
the revenge drama of the film stems from not the first rape, but the second
attacks in Tokyo which immediately precipitate Chihiro’s vengeance. This
unusual structure thus reveals that there is more to the film’s rape-revenge
cycle than its usual trigger of sexual assault. To understand rape in Freeze
Me therefore requires a much closer look at what happened in Chihiro’s
Tokyo apartment.

10.6   Re-reading Rape-Revenge in Freeze Me (2):

The Film’s Representation of Sexual Violence
The most glaring anomaly of the Tokyo attacks is that their sexual violence
is neither shown explicitly nor even given much screen time (as is also the
case of the representations of Chihiro’s earlier rape in her home village, to
be discussed later). The first rape in Tokyo by Hirokawa is implied from a
shot of him entering Chihiro’s apartment and the door closing shut, which
then cuts to a naked Chihiro rising wearily from the floor, nursing bruises
and a bleeding lip. The second rapist turns up at Chihiro’s apartment and
he grabs and gropes her, but does not rape. Her third attacker, Baba, rapes
her on the floor behind a bed and, thus, out of view; the scene also cuts to
its aftermath relatively quickly.
For a genre (and a national cinema history) so visually focused on vio-
lated and traumatized female bodies, this omission appears odd. That
there is rape and physical violence in the film is without question—Chihiro
also gets beaten and kicked by her attackers (though these scenes are
 10 WHERE THE VIOLENCE LIES: RE-READING RAPE AND REVENGE… 191

similarly framed so they take place out of view). However, on closer exam-
ination, the attacks on Chihiro in Tokyo play out in other ways and with
subtle expansion of the meaning of their violence beyond physical brutal-
ity. Having said that, it is important to note that such a reading in no way
downplays the heinousness of rape as sexual physical violence—numerous
scenes show Chihiro’s bodily injuries, pain and emotional distress. Nor
does it discount the egregiousness of male dominance and competitive-
ness in Freeze Me’s rapes: the men use their physical strength to subdue
Chihiro, boast of their intention to hurt (e.g. “I will split you”), and con-
stantly refer to how many times they or the others have “had” her. My
argument is that, besides these, Freeze Me also demonstrates further attacks
on the Japanese woman and, more significantly, their precipitation of
Chihiro’s vengeance. Hence, rape is a violation not only of the female
body, but also other important personal intimacies. Specifically, per Freeze
Me in its Japanese context, these are attacks on the woman’s domestic space
and privacy.
To demonstrate the violence of the rapists’ attacks on Chihiro’s domes-
tic space, Ishii takes notable pains in the first ten minutes of the film to
demonstrate the security of her home. This is shown literally via close
shots of double locks on her front door and security locks on her balcony
sliding door, notwithstanding that her apartment is on the fourth floor.
More importantly, security manifests in Chihiro’s comfort and freedom in
her apartment. Returning home (for which there is a specific Japanese
verb—kaeru) is a happy and comfortable scene for Chihiro before the
Tokyo attacks begin. She kicks off her shoes at will. She undresses by
throwing her clothes around the flat with abandonment. In her bra and
underwear, she walks carefree around her tiny apartment. She takes a
shower, reveling in refreshing herself. She chats unrestrained to her boy-
friend on her phone. This set-up of Chihiro’s activities in the closed pri-
vacy of her home also echoes anthropological identifications of dwellings,
or parts of houses, as female spaces (cf. male spaces) along the lines of
privacy, comfort and safety. Bourdieu’s (2003 [1971]) well-known study
of the Berber house in its symbolic significance and oppositions of female
and male spaces in the house’s domestic spatial patterns applies equally
well here. He characterizes these gendered oppositions as

between the house and its garden, the place par excellence of the haram, i.e.
of all which is sacred and forbidden, and a closed and secret space, well pro-
tected and sheltered from intrusions and the gaze of others, and the place of
192 J. NG

assembly (thajma’th), the mosque, the cafe, the fields or the market: on the
one hand, the privacy of all that is intimate, on the other, the open space of
social relations. (133; see also Aureli and Giudici 2016)

Freeze Me’s early scenes set up unique parameters of Chihiro’s female space
along these same lines. Her femininity lies with her body, for sure, as
paraded in underwear and with implied nakedness in the shower scene.
But the film carefully establishes that they are also in the comfort, security
and privacy of her domestic space.
As such, it is fitting that the attacks on Chihiro in Tokyo begin with
Hirokawa’s forced entry into her apartment. Significantly, his invasion is
filmed in shots which deliberately subvert the earlier scenes of Chihiro’s
happy domesticity. As Hirokawa first pushes his way into the apartment
uninvited, he takes off his shoes with ironic care before proceeding to
undress and throw his clothes around the flat. He strides around the flat
while Chihiro cowers in a corner. He takes a shower in her bathroom,
reveling in refreshing himself, while Chihiro agonizes over how to escape.
After he rapes her, Hirokawa continues to stay in the apartment and
increasingly takes over Chihiro’s space and freedom. He barks orders at
her to make him food and bring him beer, reducing her to being his ser-
vant. Chihiro sleeps sitting by the kitchen stove, while Hirokawa sprawls
out on her bed. She whispers into her mobile phone in the bathroom,
fabricating excuses for not turning up for work. In these ways, the film
takes care to present her current terror not only as caused by a previous
attacker who remains a physical threat to her, but also through a distorted
mirror of her earlier domestic bliss.
The considerable screen time and details in these scenes with Hirokawa
are a marked contrast with the non-visibility of his sexual assaults on
Chihiro in her Tokyo apartment. Freeze Me’s wider message thus emerges:
the violations to Chihiro here are not only to her body. In contrast, the
actual scenes of rape and beatings by Hirokawa are either cut or take place
off-screen. Of unmistakable note, rather, is how Hirokawa’s aggressions
against Chihiro are the breach of her home as a space where she feels safe,
is independent, relaxed and free from rules. His attacks are nightmarish
echoes of her previous security and privacy in her home. Agitated and
tense in Hirokawa’s threatening presence, her domestic comforts are now
literally appropriated by him and her independence is withdrawn; she is at
his beck and call to serve and cook. It is key that Chihiro first forms the
idea of killing Hirokawa while she is chopping up food to cook for him.
 10 WHERE THE VIOLENCE LIES: RE-READING RAPE AND REVENGE… 193

This twist churns the logic of Freeze Me’s rape-revenge cycle: what precipi-
tates revenge is not so much the physical assaults, but the subservience
into which she is forced and, in that wider sense, the breach of her domes-
tic home and privacy as also part of her female space. The latter violation
is as heinous as the man’s assaults on her body.
The second attack, then, is on Chihiro’s personal privacy. Privacy is
neither a unique nor new battleground. If anything, it is one of the most
relevant today as media consumers and regulators in a post-Snowden
world battle over privacy and data protection in the face of digital and
social network surveillance (e.g. Andrews 2011; Mai 2016), contesting
the right to be forgotten (e.g. Tirosh 2017; Jones 2016; Mayer-­
Schönberger 2009) and resisting surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019).
In contemporary contexts, privacy is not generally considered a gendered
issue. However, here is again where Freeze Me extends the male-female
dynamics of rape specifically into the form of privacy via confidentiality of
a woman’s sexual history and the overriding of consent of its disclosure to
a highly judgmental society. If the first key to Hirokawa’s violations in
Freeze Me is the invasion of Chihiro’s domestic space, the second is in his
revelation to her that her first rape had been recorded on videotape and
his subsequent threat of distributing its images to her neighbors. Again,
Ishii plays out this scene with careful detail, principally in the events that
lead to her rape by Hirokawa in Tokyo. When Hirokawa first intrudes her
flat, Chihiro initially fights him off by locking herself in her bathroom. At
this point, Hirokawa launches his next attack: he reveals to Chihiro that
her first rape by him and his friends in her home village had been recorded
into distributable videotapes, which they sold. He boasts of how it was a
“bestseller.” Now he has printed images from the videotape, which he is
sure Chihiro’s neighbors would enjoy. Filmed in a medium shot, Chihiro
listens to his words, cowering and distressed behind the bathroom door.
She hears him leave. The flat falls silent. Technically, she is now safe. She
can lock the front door and keep him out.
However, a zoom shot reveals her widening eyes as she realizes
Hirokawa is now carrying out his threat of distributing the images. She
peeps out from behind her front door and sees Hirokawa slotting photo-
copied images into her neighbors’ letter boxes. Horrified, she runs out to
grab an image out of the letter boxes, and realizes that they are of her rape
from five years ago. She tries to gather the photocopied papers, but
Hirokawa continues stuffing them into her neighbors’ letter boxes. At this
point, Chihiro capitulates. She opens the door to her flat, silently inviting
194 J. NG

him back in so that he will cease distributing the images. As Hirokawa

stalks into her apartment, Chihiro follows him and the door swings shut.
The next shot cuts to a bruised and bleeding Chihiro picking herself up
from the floor, with the implication that she has been raped.
Yet the detailed orchestration and direction of events portrayed in the
film point to how the sexual assault on Chihiro is fundamentally facilitated
by the attack on her privacy and the social necessity for her to conceal her
traumatized sexual past. At a later point in the film, the viewer learns that
Chihiro has not even told her mother about what happened to her, so
deep must she bury the disgrace. The violence to Chihiro is thus two-fold.
The first is the assault to her body but that is really a coda to the other
violence meted out on her privacy and by the pressure of her neighbors’
(and society’s) judgements should they find out about her past. The latter
sets up the former.
As such, Freeze Me also demonstrates how the violation of a woman’s
privacy entangles with the oppressive weight of Japanese society’s expecta-
tion of external perfection from her. The film presents a careful scene
where Chihiro dabs on concealer makeup to cover her bleeding lip. She
makes up imaginative excuses for her injuries, rather than reveal that she
had been raped. Even as she lets Hirokawa back into her flat, she grabs
from the floor the bag of groceries she had dropped in the communal cor-
ridor when she was fleeing from him—nothing must besmirch the perfect
tidiness of the exterior. When the third thug Baba attacks Chihiro, her
neighbor yells at them to keep down the noise. As Baba roars back at the
neighbor, Chihiro’s reaction is to try to quieten the commotion rather
than scream for help. In the same vein as Hirokawa’s slotting of images of
her defilement into her neighbors’ letterboxes, Baba’s attack is as much a
violation of the respectable façade Chihiro must present to the outside
world as it is of her body.
The rape-revenge framework of Freeze Me, thus, highlights the
embroiled nature of independence, privacy, dignity and bodily hurt in
these various attacks on Chihiro. That the physical assault of rape is aug-
mented by these other violations is underpinned by the revenge: neither
castration nor mutilation, but murder so as to silence their exposé and
have their bodies stuffed into home freezers. The last also presents a twist
that echoes the storage of food and beverages Chihiro had been constantly
commanded to prepare and serve to her attackers as part of her servitude
and the subversion of independence in her domestic space. This relegation
of Chihiro as provider of food and sex might also reflect the broad arcs of
 10 WHERE THE VIOLENCE LIES: RE-READING RAPE AND REVENGE… 195

feminist history itself in terms of the role and labor of women in the pri-
vate sphere (e.g. Arneil 2001; Vogel 2000). This history, of course, in turn
highlights the hierarchies and inequalities of women’s historical roles,
range of independence and degrees of freedom. Chihiro’s vengeance here
in stuffing the rapists’ bodies into freezers is thus as much payback for her
sexual assaults as it is an ironic reclamation of agency via a tool of domestic
labor—the freezer now in its double role as kitchen appliance and murder
accessory. This recovery of power bears out in other ways too. The man
who delivers to Chihiro the first freezer (for Hirokawa’s body) jokes about
buyers who use the appliances to freeze their deceased pets. Chihiro
delights in the idea as she realizes the irony of her rapists now being frozen
as her pets. When Chihiro orders her third freezer for Baba’s body, she
continues this thread by joking to the seller that she needs it as she has
acquired a new pet. Where many Western rape-revenge films are about
getting even for male violence, Freeze Me is about keeping it quiet and
reclaiming hard-won independence.
On this reading, then, it is also clear that rape in Freeze Me entails more
than immediate retribution against male sexual aggressors or the patriar-
chy, as Balmain (2008) and Lafond (2005), respectively, identify in line
with other feminist readings of rape-revenge films. Once the nature of the
attacks on Chihiro is clear in its augmented levels, the complicity of mul-
tiple other parties—and hence the role of systemic failure—is likewise
manifest. These multiple parties include the neighbor who allows Hirokawa
through the communal apartment door, oblivious to Chihiro fleeing (and
bumping into the neighbor in the process) in abject and visible terror.
They are Chihiro’s colleagues who turn a blind eye to a clearly terrified
Chihiro when Hirokawa’s charges into her office looking for her and bark-
ing “I will tell them.” They are the mother to whom Chihiro cannot tell
her deepest troubles, but to whom she sends money every month to sup-
port. They are the police whom Chihiro cannot call because they will not
believe her. They are the boyfriend who ignores her pleas for protection
because he is more focused on having sex with her and who literally walks
away from Chihiro when he learns that she had been raped. Systemic fail-
ure is also about the social mores of outer impeccability as imposed on
women, such as Chihiro ensuring the corridor outside her flat is tidy
before she is raped inside her apartment. It involves the complicity of con-
versations around sex as being acceptable only in the context of procre-
ation within marriage, such as when Chihiro and her colleagues jovially
discuss another colleague having to watch pornography during his
196 J. NG

wedding night to “get it up,” with the “triumphant result” of his wife
becoming pregnant a month later. Yet Chihiro’s sexual past, scored with
trauma, ordeal and anguish, cannot be spoken. The film’s ambiguous end-
ing of Chihiro having jumped from her balcony further suggests she must
ensure that silence to her death.
In this respect, the film’s presentation of the rape which took place five
years before is also significant. As with the Tokyo attacks, the violence is
not shown in graphic or sustained form. Rather, it appears as seconds-long
flashback snippets in grainy black and white video as a clear reference to the
recording made of Chihiro’s first rape. Watching those fragments, the
viewers become voyeurs who hold power over whom they are looking.
Tanya Horeck (2004, 138–155) discusses the difficult ethics of being a
spectator to footage of rape that renders the woman’s humiliation and
trauma a public spectacle. However, Horeck’s discussion focuses on the
precarious constructions of meaning from such images. In particular, she
discusses the difficulties of the meanings of rape from such images in their
tricky interpretations between sex and violence. My point here, though, is
not so much about construing rape from videotape recordings. Rather, it
is with the choice of the video aesthetic which draws in the viewer’s com-
plicity as consumers of the videotape that humiliates Chihiro and is itself
part of the violence done to her. In effect, they become voyeurs to
Chihiro’s violation. Media scholar Annette Kuhn (1987) notes the con-
trolling power of the voyeur: “The voyeur’s pleasure depends on the
object of this look being unable to see him: to this extent, it is a pleasure
of power, and the look a controlling one” (28). In relation to watching
this video in which the victim is unable to look back, the viewer, too,
become part of the shame that oppresses and victimizes her. They not only
contribute to Chihiro’s degradation, but also stand in for the systemic
failure that does not protect her and even promotes the shame that is part
of her assault. As a rape film, Freeze Me, thus, casts a wide net of perpetra-
tors. This net ultimately includes even the viewer.

10.7   Conclusion
In this chapter, I have offered a re-reading of rape via the Japanese rape-­
revenge film by Takashi Ishii, Freeze Me, as a violence which extends
beyond the immediate attack on the woman’s body. I supported this read-
ing by first highlighting the unusual rape-revenge structure of the film
which warrants a closer look at the violence that precipitates the
 10 WHERE THE VIOLENCE LIES: RE-READING RAPE AND REVENGE… 197

protagonist’s vengeance. I then argued that the violence of rape in Freeze

Me extends to the breach of the woman’s domestic space and comfort, as
well as the violation of her privacy of sexual history and the cruel weight
of public humiliation at her sexual trauma. In turn, the net of culpability
for such violence to women widens to include neighbors, colleagues, par-
ents, partners and social opprobrium as part of a larger systemic failure
that not only fails to protect and defend them, but also contributes to the
attack with its oppression and stigmatization.
In making this argument, my broader suggestion is that an expanded
understanding of rape beyond violence to the body of the woman needs
to draw attention to the wider culpabilities in play. Raped women are let
down by their communities, the law and even whole systemic failures. In
recent times, these failures have become shockingly clear, such as the
exposure of decades-strong legal armories of rich and powerful rapists
such as Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and Jimmy Savile (with allega-
tions against many more) when they are finally brought to justice (e.g.
Kantor and Twohey 2019). Systemic failure is also manifest in disbelieving
police because of their inexperience with sex crime and/or prejudice of
some aspect of the woman’s background (e.g. Armstrong and Miller
2009). The continued tolerance of far right forums hosting misogynistic
“incel” culture which discuss, among others, mass rape fantasies (Nagle
2017) extends systemic prejudices against women. The criminal justice
system in England and Wales brings charges for fewer than 1 in 60 rape
cases; in June 2021, the UK Justice Secretary apologized to rape victims
for low conviction rates (Barr and Topping 2021). In short, rape entails far
more than a rapist.
In this wider context, there are encouraging signs of recognition of
such systemic failures in relation to rape and, more importantly, actions to
acknowledge and address them. For instance, anti-rape movements, such
as SlutWalk (2011–2012), expand the discourse of rape by addressing sex-
ist prejudices. The more recent 2017–2020 social media movements of
#MeToo and #TimesUp enabled women to break their silence as survivors
and advocate for solidarity of sexually harassed women. Their calls for,
among others, freedom for women from harassment and sexual assault in
the workplace likewise highlight the systemic failures of how women face
constant threat and danger. The tragic case in the UK of Sarah Everard,
kidnapped and murdered in March 2021, again brought to mainstream
attention the issue of women’s safety. Significantly, it sparked a widespread
discourse on social media of how women feel unsafe at the hands of men.
198 J. NG

This discourse included men acknowledging their complicity in violence

toward women, such as ignoring others’ behaviors (Lyons 2021).
The rape-revenge cycle of Freeze Me highlights these two junctures for
understanding rape: the crime and the culpabilities involved. The film is
set in and underscores the East Asian context, but it also stands for a wider
message. Revenge is not a continuation of gore and violence, but a much-­
needed prompt to the viewer to think about rape, its perpetrators and the
meaning of its violence. Women still remain unsafe today. These consider-
ations must continue to resonate.

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Film References
Accused, The (dir. Jonathan Kaplan, 1988).
All About Lily Chou-Chou (dir. Shunji Iwai, 2001)
All Night Long (dir. Katusya Matsurama, 1992)
 10 WHERE THE VIOLENCE LIES: RE-READING RAPE AND REVENGE… 201

Blood Sisters (dir. Daisuke Yamanouchi, 2000)

Deliverance (dir. John Boorman, 1972)
Extremities (dir. Robert M. Young, 1986)
Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (dir. Shunya Ito, 1972)
Female Demon Ohayku (dir. Yoshihiro Ishikawa, 1968)
Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion (dir. Shunya Ito, 1972)
Female Prisoner: Cage (dir. Masaru Konuma, 1983)
Freeze Me (dir. Takashi Ishii, 2000)
Girl Boss Revenge: Sukeban (dir. Norifumi Suzuki, 1973)
Good Liar, The (dir. Bill Condon, 2019)
Hills Have Eyes, The (dir. Wes Craven, 1977)
Hunter’s Blood (dir. Robert C. Hughes, 1986)
I Spit On Your Grave (dir. Steven R. Monroe, 1978)
Kill Bill (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2003)
Kuroneko (dir. Kaneto Shindo, 1968)
Ladies’ Club, The (dir. Janet Greek, 1986)
Lady Snowblood (dir. Toshiya Fujita, 1973)
Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (dir. Toshiya Fujita, 1974)
Last House on the Left, The (dir. Wes Craven, 1972)
M.F.A. (dir. Natalia Leite, 2017)
Mother’s Day (dir. Charles Kaufman, 1980)
Ms .45 (dir. Abel Ferrara, 1981)
Promising Young Woman (dir. Emerald Fennell, 2020)
Ravine of Goodbye, The (dir. Tatsushi Omori, 2013)
Rica the Mixed-Blood Girl (dir. Ko Nakahira, 1972)
School of the Holy Beast (dir. Norifumi Suzuki, 1974)
Sea (dir. Kensei Takahashi, 2018)
Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (dir. Yasuhau Hasebe, 1970)
Taken (dir. Pierre Morel, 2008)
Virgin Spring, The (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1960)
Wet Rope Confession (dir. Koyu Ohara, 1979)