58

Flesh and Blood: The Guinea Pig Films

Colette Balmain

Japanese pink cinema is the name given to low-budget, sexually explicit,

independent films with a running time of approximately one hour. These films
were generally shot on 35mm film and released theatrically. Censorship regula-
tions at the time dictated that shots of actual penetration could not be shown,
so that pink cinema, while often sexually violent, remained soft-core.1 Pink
film went mainstream when in response to declining box office receipts in
the early 1970s, major Japanese studios such as Nikkatsu and Toei, produced
their own lines of pink films with “romantic pornography” (roman porno) and
“pinky violence” respectively.2 Even the horror genre was pinkified, as Harper
notes, “the rise of the pinku eiga Japanese soft-core pornography also affected
the horror film, with tales like the Botandoro being ideally suited to sexually
explicit adaptations such as Chusei Sone’s Hellish Love (1972)” (2010: 179).
While it is possible, as I have argued elsewhere (Balmain, 2010b:249-252),
to view pink cinema as politically informed, it is not unproblematic in that the
undermining of the dominant order is often expressed through the violation
of the female body, standing in for the national body. Sexual violence is a key
feature of pink cinema and rape a common mechanism of its expression (Bal-
main, 2008:93-112). Nowhere is this clearer than in the work of Wakamatsu
Koji one of the key directors of political pink cinema in the 1960s in which
male violence and alienation is expressed through violence towards women. In
Violated Angels (Okasareta hakui, 1967) bodies of a male attacker’s victims,
covered in blood and laid in a circle on a white background, are used to pro-
duce a symbolic representation of the Japanese flag and explicitly critique the
repressive nature of the Japanese state at the time (Balmain, 2010a:262-264).
Such films proved popular with the exclusively male audiences of the
time. As the 1970s drew to a close, sexploitation cinema was being pushed
into the dark side of human sexuality with scenes of bondage, S/M, and torture
(Sharp, 2009:213). The arrival of the home video recorder changed the face
of sexploitation cinema by bringing about hardcore pornography, known as
adult video (adaruto bideo) or AV. AV was part of a wider production trend in
Japan known as V-Cinema or direct-to-video films which included adult anime
(hentai) and low budget genre films. As these films were aimed solely at the
home video market, there were considerably less restrictions in terms of con-
tent than was possible for mainstream cinema under Japan’s strict censorship
regulations, even though directors still had to use mosaics or other methods to
hide the actual sight of penetration itself for domestic distribution.

Experiments in Terror
Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011
 59

Just as AV and hentai anime catered to almost every kind of sexual procliv-
ity, V-horror concerned itself with the dark side of the human psyche, offering
gorefests and splatter films. With the success of Italian mondo and splatter films
such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980, dir. Ruggero Deodata) which outperformed
Spielberg’s E.T.:The Extra Terrestrial (1982) on video, it was clear that there
was money to be made from low-budget horror films. Grossman points out
that “many 1980s Italian gore films were made with an especial eye toward the
lucrative Japanese market” (2002).3 A variation of the mondo film, the death
film or shockumentary, purportedly compilations of “real” scenes of death and
carnage gathered from official and amateur footage, were also very popular in
Japan at the time. Saegusu who distributed the Faces of Death series (1978-
1966, dir. Schwartz) in Japan through the MAD Video label (which specialized
in death films), would also become involved in the distribution of the Guinea
Pig films, releasing the first and second films, along with the first “best-of.”
As was the case in all mondo films, in Faces of Death real-life footage was
spliced together with staged scenes for dramatic impact. In Offensive Films,
Brottman writes “what is especially fascinating about Faces of Death is the
way the genuine and ‘hoax’ sequences play off one another to negotiate their
own ‘authenticity’” (2005:143). The documentary techniques that function to
authenticate the fake scenes of death include “initially out-of-focus visuals and
shaky handheld camera” (2005: 149). In order to capitalize on the popularity
of the mondo film, the Guinea Pig series adopted both its cinematic strategies
and narrative form, while drawing on traditional and contemporary Japanese
culture at the time.
The Guinea Pig films were the brainwave of Satoru Ogura, a prolific
producer and writer, who also directed the first film. The Guinea Pig series
contains six official films, two “makings of” and two “best of” compilations.
As there is considerable confusion over the order in which the films were
made, and who distributed them and when, it is necessary to unravel the his-
tory of the films in the order in which they were made before analyzing the
films themselves. The films are: Devil’s Experiment (Akumano jikken 1985,
dir. Satoru Ogura); Flower of Flesh and Blood (Chiniku No Hana 1985, dir.
Hino Hideshi); He Never Dies (Senritsu! Shinanai otoko 1986, dir. Kuzumi
Masayuki); Devil Woman Doctor (Pita no Akuma no Joi-San 1986, dir. Tabe
Hajime); Mermaid in a Manhole (Manhoru no Naka no Ningyo 1988, dir.
Hino Hideshi) and Android of Notre Dame (Notorudamo no Andoroido 1988,
dir. Kazuhito Kuramoto).4
While ostensibly the first documentary, Making of Guinea Pig, also known
as Guinea Pig Special 1, (Mekingu obu Ginipiggu 1986), which follows the
making of the first three Guinea Pig films, was produced to ally media con-
cerns, it is just as likely that it was made to capitalize on the success of the
first three films. The second documentary is Making of Devil Doctor Woman

Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011

 60
(Mekingu obu Ginipiggu 4, 1986), also known as Guinea Pig Special 2. The
first compilation is Guinea Pig Special 3 or Guinea Pig: Slaughter Special
(Zansatsu supesharu, 1988) which is clips from the first four Guinea Pig films
which were produced by SAI Enterprise and distributed as Orange Video
House. As already mentioned, this “best-of” was distributed by MAD Video,
which means that at some stage, V&R Planning had the rights to the Guinea
Pig films, before Japan Home Video took over sometime between 1986 and
1988. The second is Guinea Pig Special 4 or Guinea Pig: Greatest Cuts (2005),
which is in fact the same as the first, but with the addition of clips from the
last two films in the series.
Fig. 1. Gardening for serial killers. Flower of Flesh and Blood.

The Devil’s Experiment and Flower of Flesh and Blood were made back
to back and draw on the conventions of both the splatter and mondo genres.
While The Devil’s Experiment was marketed as “found footage” of a real snuff
film: a description attested to by the lack of film credits, Flower of Flesh and
Blood is set up in the pre-credit sequence as a reconstruction of a “snuff”
video sent to the director by an unnamed fan. The Devil’s Experiment shows
a group of three young men abduct a young woman and then subject her to
a series of “experiments” in endurance. These include hitting her repeatedly
as a counter in the bottom right hand corner of the screen keeps track of the
number of blows, and pouring boiling oil over her, with the counter telling

Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011

 61

us the temperature of the oil. Flower of Flesh and Blood also focuses in on
the torture of a young woman, this time by a deranged “gardener” wearing a
Samurai helmet, who uses dismembered female bodily parts as substance to
his prized flowers (Fig. 1).
As critics have pointed out in relation to The Devil’s Experiment, the film’s
use of cinematic technique and editing is at odds with its supposed status as
“snuff” film (Fig. 2). In opposition to this, is the use of a mainly fixed camera
angle in Flower of Flesh and Blood which evokes a sense of authenticity lack-
ing in the former. However, the “film within the film” in which the deranged
gardener uses different colored filters for each mutilation of the female body
functions as a codification of gothic horror film aesthetics. This makes it dif-
ficult to understand how the film could have been taken as an authentic snuff
video especially in Japan where Hino was a famed horror mangaka (manga
author) and known for his grotesque and graphic imagery. This painterly
composition — something which Hino returned to in his second directorial
Guinea Pig outing -- is the opposite of the more realist mondo style adopted
by Satoru in the first film. In both, cinematic technique and composition betray
the meta-fictional origins or these supposedly “real” crimes, whether “found”
or “reconstructed.”
Fig. 2. The death of a beautiful woman. The Devil’s Experiment.

It is the lack of a narrative through which to contextualize and/or explain

such male violence and aggression which renders the early films so problematic
in terms of gender politics. Further and even more problematically drawing

Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011

 62
on the dominant representation of rape in Japanese mainstream and sexploi-
tation cinema both victims appear to “enjoy” their bodily tortures. While in
Flower of Flesh and Blood, the female victim is given a drug so that she feels
pleasure rather than pain as she is dismembered in excruciating detail, in The
Devil’s Experiment, the victim appears to be in ecstasy. This seems similar to
the manner in which Lacan uses Bernini’s statue, “The Ecstasy of St Theresa”
(which shows St Theresa caught in ecstasy as she is pierced by an arrow), as
a visual demonstrate of his concept of “feminine jouissance” through which
female suffering is linked to a mystic experience of [sexual] pleasure (Lacan,
1998: 76). Similarly, both films sexualize violence towards women, positing
suffering as an avenue to a heightened state of being, culminating in death. As
in the rape-revenge film, male identity is constituted through and by female
violation and victimization.
By making the relationship between violence and sex explicit, The Devil’s
Experiment and Flower of Flesh and Blood, are early prototypes of “torture
porn” or “gorenography” (often abbreviated to “gorno”) which has dominated
contemporary mainstream horror scene since the early 2000s with the popular-
ity of the Saw franchise (2004-2011, dir. Wan et al.) and Roth’s Hostel films
(2005/2007). Significantly, the enfant terrible of Japanese extreme cinema,
Miike Takashi, who began his career in V-Cinema, has a cameo part in Hostel.
This arguably functions to “orientalize” the genre by pointing to Japan as a
point of origin of such extreme images and ideas.
In her discussion on the rise of torture porn for The Guardian, Kira Co-
chrane argues that the problem lies not within the violence per se, but through
the marketing campaigns of such films:
In most of these films, both men and women end up being sliced, gored,
dismembered, decapitated. In that sense they offer audiences equal-opportunity
gore. But it’s the violence against women that’s most troubling, because it is here
that sex and extreme violence collide. The publicity campaigns for many of these
films flag up the prospect of watching a nubile young woman being tortured as a
genuinely pleasurable experience (2007).
Marketed as underground porno films by Sai Enterprise on their Orange
Video House label, The Devil’s Experiment and Flower of Flesh and Blood
similarly adopt the conventions of hardcore pornography through the implied
promise of sexual pleasure for the male viewer. Both were instant hits, with
Flower of Flesh and Blood hitting the top ten video rentals for two months
in a row. While Brottman finds extreme (including mondo and death films)
or what she terms “offensive” cinema as an example of the Bahktian carni-
valesque, she concedes that while the exhibition of violent death as spectacle
is nothing new, moral issues are raised by the fact “that such spectacles can be
experienced in the privacy of one’s home, which means: that the spectator can
now witness death in private, again and again, at different speeds, and from a
variety of angels, exactly as it happened in ‘the flesh’” (2005:151). Whether
watching sexually violent material leads to “real” life violence, remains an

Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011

 63

issue of contention and beyond the scope of this paper. In McRoy’s generally
thoughtful and insightful analysis of the Guinea Pig series, he argues that the
mutilation of the [female] body is a “gruesome exposition of a transforming
postwar Japanese body waging a ferocious war with itself” (2008:31). For
McRoy, sexual and gender politics are sublimated by larger national concerns.
However, the manner in which the films seek to undermine the distinction
between fantasy and reality through both their manner of production and dis-
tribution can be interpreted as representative of the reproduction of existing
gender relations through which the violence towards women is the building
blocks of a “masculine social order that seeks to continually renew its authority
through her violation” (Horeck, 2004: 25).

Bodies That Splatter5

Whether a direct result of the media furore that surrounded the first
two films’ releases or not, the next film, He Never Dies, signalled a change
in direction for the series from outright sadistic horror to a more fantastical
blend of horror and black comedy. Keeping to a pseudo-mondo framework,
the film begins with an American scientist (Rick Steinberger), introducing
strange footage from Japan in which a young salaryman, Yoshio (Masahiro
Sato), dissatisfied with his mundane existence, is seen repeatedly trying to

Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011

 64
kill himself using a variety of methods including cutting his wrists, manual
strangulation, and even disembowelment. By focussing on the [self] mutilated
male body and the revealing the mechanics of the special effects used in the
closing credit sequence, He Never Dies distances itself from the problematic
gender politics of the earlier films (Fig. 3).
This turn towards the comedic becomes high camp in Devil Doctor
Woman, in which a beautiful doctor, played by the transsexual actor Paul,
introduces a sequence of case studies of men and women with extraordinary
diseases, as well as a stomach-churning cannibal feast in which sexual organs
become delicacies to be savoured. In He Never Dies, it is the male body which
displays its interior abjection, while Devil Doctor Woman operates an equal
opportunities policy when it comes to imagining the abject and transforming
body as well as revealing the performative nature of gender through the cast-
ing of Paul in the central role. As such, both films break with the disturbing
“snuff” conventions of the first two films and the obsession with subjecting
the female body to the deadly desires of the assaultive male gaze.
Fig. 4. The painter and his model. Mermaid in a Manhole.

The last films, Mermaid in a Manhole and Android of Notre Dame, were

produced and distributed by Japan Home Video, and continued with contex-
tualizing violence within a coherent narrative and developed characteriza-
tions. Mermaid in a Manhole is arguably the best of the Guinea Pig films.
At the beginning of the film, a famous painter, Hayashi, discovers a beautiful

Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011

 65

mermaid down a manhole where he goes to find inspiration for his paintings.
Enraptured by her beauty, Hayashi takes her home with him. However, she is
suffering from a terrible disease which corrupts her flesh, and he struggles to
capture her image on canvas using her expelled bodily fluids as paint before
she succumbs to the ravages of the disease (Fig. 4).
The most disturbing scene is when a foetus is expelled from her disease
ridden body. After her dead body is discovered by the painter’s neighbors, we
discover that the mermaid was actually Hayashi’s wife who was dying from
terminal cancer and that we have been watching the deranged vision of a mad-
man or have we, as a close up shot shows a fish scale in the bath where the
mermaid/wife was kept. The last film, The Android of Notre Dame, is a varia-
tion on the Frankenstein myth in which a scientist, Karazawa, tries to prevent
his sister from dying by conducting medical experiments on first dead bodies,
and then live victims. However, while he manages to bring his sister back to
life, by performing a crude heart transplant, she berates him for his efforts.
Through the integration of the comedic and the horrific, these films operate
very much within Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. As Brottman notes,
Bakhtin “points out that one of the most expressive features of the carnival is
the way at which, at carnival time, death becomes comic, as in the Rabelaisian
mocking of death” (Brottman, 2004:155).
The series came to an end when in 1989, Miyazaki known as the “otaku”
killer -- was arrested and charged with the abduction, torture, and murder of four
young girls. Miyazaki was found to have a collection of over 6,000 sexually
violent manga, anime, and films, including one or more of the Guinea Pig films,
and had produced his own “home videos” of his crimes.6 Due to the negative
press arising from this case and other subsequent cases, a continuation of the
Guinea Pig series was no longer financially viable. So came to an end, one of
the most notorious horror series in the history of cinema.

Marketing the Myth

It is Chas Balun, the founder of Deep Red Magazine in 1986, who is

credited as bringing the Guinea Pig films to the attention of the West, and if
the story is to be believed, to Charlie Sheen. This apocryphal story has become
the stuff of urban legend, a marketing strategy beyond any that Satoru could
have dreamed up, creating controversy and thus opening up a global audience
for the films. As such, it is the notoriety of the films, rather than any inherent
artistic or cultural value, that has made the series so “desirable.” The Guinea
Pig series are the holy grail of horror cinema, gaining the viewer entry into an
exclusive club composed of only the most hardened viewers and connoisseurs
of cult cinema, with DVDS exchanging hands at more than four times their
retail price. While the films were not officially released in the West until the
German Company Devil Pictures released a limited boxset in 2002, bootleg

Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011

 66
VHS copies were already circulating around the underground market. In 2005,
an American company specializing in cult cinema, Unearthed Films bought
the rights and released four double feature DVDs covering all the films in
the series as well as the two “making of’” with Guinea Pigs: Greatest Cuts
completing the set.
Fig. 5. Recent promotional material on Unearthed Films website.

The website, Unearthed Films, advertizes the company as specializing

in underground cinema. Stephen Biro, president of Unearthed Films, explains

the philosophy behind the company: “Well, we hope to offer our audience an
alternative to what mainstream America is shoving down our throats every
day” (nda). This is similar to Matt Hills’ argument that the cult status of a
film is often anchored to spatial differences which rely on “the text’s distance
in terms of their distribution and circulation from mainstream cinemas and
video/DVD outlets.” (2005:163). The codification of Asian film as extreme was
perpetuated by the Tartan’s Asia Extreme label (1984-2008) whose “publicity
material stresses the subversive and explicit aspects of its titles” (Shin, 2009:
92).7 The consequence of this is the construction of “Asia” as a place noted for
its shocking and extreme films whose otherness from the mainstream [West],
“feeds many of the typical fantasies of the ‘Orient’ characterized by exoticism,
mystery and danger” (Shin, 2009: 96).

Conclusion

Brottman foregrounds what she sees as the progressive nature of films

Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011

 67

such as mondo films as the repressed Other of mainstream cinema, which, for
those who are able to “appreciate its progressive nature fulfils the functions
of the horror film narrative, but more explicitly, more offensively, and more
defiantly” (2005: 159). One has to wonder though whether the majority of
horror film viewers appreciate the progressive nature of such films, or whether
the films are indeed progressive? And while, as we have seen, the Guinea Pig
films can be interpreted as examples of the carnivalesque, questions of gender
politics remain important as the sado-pornographic male gaze objectifies and
depersonalizes the female victim of the first two films in the series. In addition,
these films were produced and distributed along with hard core pornography
to a male demographic, collapsing the horrific into the pornographic through
the process.
When the Guinea Pig films became available in the West, first through
underground video distribution networks and then on DVD (and most re-
cently on YouTube), they were marketed in terms of their extreme imagery
and realistic cinematic strategies rather than as narrative horror cinema, thus
perpetuating Orientalist myths about Japan as a place of extremism and exoti-
cism. Taking into account their historical and cultural context, and as a series
of films exploring interlocking themes around oppression and violation of the
body politic by a repressive state, the Guinea Pig films can be interpreted as
“pathologising multiple aspects of contemporary Japanese culture” (McRoy,
2008:41). Yet, at the same time, it is the female body or perhaps more appro-
priately the body as feminine that suffers, and this remains problematic. Here,
gender politics is rendered invisible, subsumed under either large national or
cultural concerns and/or negated through theoretical paradigms which seek to
interpret the subversive nature of such films produced and distributed outside
the mainstream. Instead, I would argue, following Horeck’s incisive discussion
of rape in mainstream cinema, that the mutilated female body in the Guinea
Pig films is “used to shore up an image of the invulnerability of the masculine
social body” (2004:64). As such, it is essential to make such gender politics
visible as they inform us about societal attitudes towards women and the persis-
tence of modes of representation which may well enforce and normalize male
fantasies and possibly have a repercussion outside of their cinematic framings.

Endnotes

1. However, as Sharp correctly notes that there are substantial differences

between independent pink cinema and the mainstream studio versions, such
as Nikkatsu’s romantic pornography. He writes, “If we define pink not solely
by its adult content, but also by its points of production, distribution and
exhibition, then Nikkatsu’s films certainly aren’t pink” (2009:120).
2. See Balmain, 2010a: 249-250.
3. The first mondo film is Mondo Cane (A Dog’s Life, dir. Cavara, Jacopetti

Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011

 68
and Prosperi, Italy: 1962).
4. It is clear from extant VHS covers of the films showing that SAI Enterprise
released the first four (therefore the Series could not have been transferred
to Japan Home Video until after Devil Doctor Woman) and the contents of
Slaughter Special, that Devil Doctor Woman was the fourth film in the series,
and not the last. Neither does it make any sense that the series continued
after the furore surrounding the trial of Miyazaki in 1989 (some sites have
Devil Doctor Woman as being released in 1990, with the “making of” in
the following year).
5. This title is paying homage to Halberstam’s seminal 1995 monograph on
“spatter cinema.”
6. For a discussion of Miyazaki’s crimes, see Lewis, 2008.
7. Tartan Films went into administration in 2008 with their back catalogue
since being taken over by Palisades Tartan.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Balmain, Colette. 2008. Introduction to Japanese Horror Film. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Balmain, Colette. 2010a. “Review of Violated Angels (Okasareta hakui).” In
Directory of World Cinema: Japan, edited by John Berra, pp. 262-264.
Bristol: Intellect Books.
Balmain, Colette. 2010b. “Pinku Eiga/Pink Films.” In Directory of World
Cinema: Japan, edited by John Berra, pp. 249-252. Bristol: Intellect
Books,
Biro, Stephen. (nda). “Interview with Mark Walker.” Unearthed Films.
Retrieved from: http://www.unearthedfilms.com/
Brottman, Mikita. 2005. Offensive Films. Nashville: Vanderbilt University
Press.
Clover, Carol. 1992. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cochrane, Kira, 2007. “For Your Entertainment.” The Guardian. May 1.
Retrieved from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/may/01/gender.
world
Galloway, Patrick. 2006. Asia Shock: Horror and Dark Cinema from Japan,
Korea, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press.
Grossman, Andrew. 2002. “The Japanese Pink Film: Tandem, The Bedroom,
and The Dream of Garuda on DVD.” Bright Light Film Journal. Issue
36: April. Retrieved from: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/36/pinkfilms1.
php
Halberstam, Judith. 1998 [1995]. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the

Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011

 69

Technology of Monsters. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Harper, Jim. 2008. Flowers From Hell: The Modern Japanese Horror Film.
Hereford: Noir Publishing.
Hills, Matt. 2005. “Ringing the Changes: Cult Distinctions and Cultural
Differences in US Fans’ Readings of Japanese Horror Cinema.” In
Japanese Horror Cinema, edited by Jay McRoy, pp. 161-174. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Horeck, Tanya. 2004. Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film.
London/New York: Routledge.
Hunter, Jack. 1998. Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood and Madness in Japanese Cinema.
London: Creation Books.
Lacan, Jacques. 1998. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Book 20: On Feminine
Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, encore (1972-1973),
translator Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Layne, Bryan. 2007. “Interview with Media Interview: Getting DEEP RED
with CHAS. BALUN.” Fear Zone. Sept. 25. Retrieved from: http://www.
fearzone.com/blog/media-interview-getting-deep-red-with-chas-balun
Lewis, Leo. 2008. “Japanese ‘Cannibal Killer’ Tsutomu Miyazaki Executed
in Tokyo.” The Sunday Times. June 18. Retrieved from: http://www.
timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article4156285.ece
McRoy, Jay. 2008. Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema.
Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.
Sharp, Jasper. 2009. Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of
Japanese Sex Cinema. Surrey: FAB Press.
Shin, Chi-Yun. 2009. “The Art of Branding Tartan ‘Asia Extreme’ Films.” In
Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, edited
by Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, pp. 85-100. Aberdeen:
University of Hong Kong Press.

Colette Balmain is an independent researcher, writer, and film critic. She is a

specialist in East Asian horror cinema. She published her first book Introduction
Japanese Horror Film (Edinburgh University Press) in 2008 and is currently
writing her second book, South Korean Horror Cinema: History, Memory
and Identity.

Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2011