October 20
#17 Masters of Horror: Imprint (2005)

Showtime’s Masters of Horror was, on paper, my favorite idea for a television series ever.  It would be a one-hour anthology series, with each installment directed by a recognized name in the genre of the horror film.  Since this was not Tales from the Crypt, they would not be constrained by script or tone; since this was Showtime, they’d have free reign to present R-rated horror.  Plus it would be an ideal comeback medium for many talented directors of the 70’s and 80’s who had since seen fallen off the radar, as well displaying the skills of a new generation of “masters.”  The execution, however, was a mixed bag.  The misfires could be genuinely embarrassing, and there were too many of them, especially in the second and last season of the series.  You could guess how bad Dario Argento’s eagerly-awaited Mother of Tears was going to be based upon his risible and tone-deaf work here.  Tobe Hooper still could not live up to the promise of his earliest films, and creator Mick Garris (Stephen King’s The Stand), overseeing the whole project, should have applied a stronger hand in quality control.  But most often it was the script that let the director down: for instance, I blame Drew McWeeny, not John Carpenter, for how astonishingly awful their episode “Pro-Life” is.  There were standouts, so good that one could only see what a missed opportunity the whole series was: Joe Dante, Stuart Gordon, and John Landis all delivered six fine episodes, Dante in particular proving that he deserved more chances like this (his “The Screwfly Solution” is one of the very best hours of television fantastique ever produced).  After a mostly limp second season, Showtime cancelled the series, and Mick Garris took the same concept to network television, which gave us one season of a series called Fear Itself, which was on the whole much worse, actually.

Masters of Horror nonetheless provided just enough interesting hours of television to justify its existence.  One of the most memorable didn’t even air: Showtime pulled Takashi Miike’s Imprint from the schedule when he delivered the most startling and disturbing episode of the series–which is a shame, since it would have made for one stunning season finale.  It’s also the most cinematically striking of all the episodes, with Miike, gaspingly prolific but still best known for the film Audition, channeling Francis Ford Coppola by way of Asian horror grotesquerie.  A true merging of East and West, the hour-long film follows an American (Billy Drago) journeying down a fog-enshrouded river to a brothel that seems to exist in the limbo between this world and Hell.  He’s searching for Komomo, a prostitute whom he knew years prior, and with whom he fell in love; instead, he finds a geisha with a malformed face (with one elongated eye and the end of her mouth reaching up the left side of her cheek, it looks as though she’s perpetually pulled by the wind, which makes the always-windswept Drago a fitting physical match).  She tells him his lover is dead, and, with a “bedtime story,” relates her story as well as Komomo’s, a grand guignol history replete with graphic torture, rape, and lots and lots of abortions (the trade of the deformed woman’s mother). 

This is a film which seeks to prove the thesis that the grotesque can be made very beautiful, and for years to come, I suspect, anyone wishing to write a paper on the topic will draw from “Imprint”’s catalogue: Komomo suspended, nude and bound, upside-down with hairpins jutting from her fingernails and gums; the fetuses, dropped from a bucket into a river, floating downstream like fish; the pinwheels that are set upon the shore, one for every dead child, which come alive suddenly when the wind picks up.  As Drago pushes the mysterious woman to tell him the whole truth, she retells her story twice, each version somehow more horrible than the last, until at last he arrives at the truth he did not truly wish to confront.  Yet what is that truth, and what does it mean?  By this point the film has become so bizarre that it seems to have lost all coherency.  It must also be pointed out that Drago’s performance is dreadful in almost epic ways; he appears to have been chosen for his withered face and skeletal body rather than for his acting, which has always been, in a long journeyman’s career, rather eccentric, to put it politely.  He almost singlehandedly sinks this entry, but Miike, who is always determined to push his craft well past the taboo and into a heightened and pain-desensitized realm, nevertheless delivers an hour which leaves its mark.  I previously outlined two strains of horror, the Frankenstein (focusing on the morbid and taboo) and the Dracula (seeking shocks); others have divided them more simply into “horror” and “terror.”  Either argument is problematic because any given horror film, novel, or story will have elements of both.  “Imprint”, however, aligns itself pretty firmly in the “horror”/Frankenstein category.  As in that strain of the genre, it dares to gaze at the forbidden, and to dwell at great lengths upon it.  I don’t want to say that it gazes unflinchingly, because close analysis will show that Miike does flinch…sometimes.  The abortion imagery is horrible, but the operations themselves are not depicted as graphically as they might have been.  We only see one hairpin penetrating under a fingernail; although, frankly, that’s enough, and it’s somehow worse when we’re focusing instead upon a foot twisting helplessly in the air, or the rooster-hat of an ugly dwarfen crone bobbing while she makes a clucking noise.  Miike, like all great horror directors, is focused on the cumulative effect of a montage of images and sounds, with the purpose of driving deep into your psyche and the source of your nightmares.  He wants you to stand beside him and look upon what you most fear.  Some directors use this technique for cathartic effect: you emerge somehow unscathed, and stronger for it.  Not Takashi Miike.  ”Imprint”’s final moments have more in common with the work of David Lynch.  This far into your unconscious mind, the place where your nightmares are made, all reason and logic depart.  He leaves you with an image that only makes the vaguest sort of sense, given all you’ve seen; it’s fittingly macabre, but it’s also quite mad.