J Horror is all about dread that creeps up like sinister fog from apparently mundane objects, surroundings and events - a videotape, a moldy apartment, shadows on the computer screen - on perfectly sane, average, people.
Yoshihiro Fukagawa’s Peeping Tom (Makiguri No Ana) takes a different tack, if one familiar from an older tradition of horror, in which the scares come from a fragmenting mind that can no longer distinguish between reality and illusion - or from a world in which boundaries (between life and death, reality and illusion) have dissolved.
Based on a novel by Yamamoto Akiko, Peeping Tom undercuts J Horror genre expectations in another way. It begins as a lubricious black comedy about a failing writer, Makiguri Ben (Hidetoshi Nishijima), who takes a soft porno serial commission from a sleazy weekly magazine - and finds his fictional subjects in the residents of adjoining apartments, whom he spies on through holes in the wall. When an attractive young female editor, Asaka Narumi (Kinoshita Ayumi) discovers him in the act of peeping, his eye glued to an opening above the floorboard and one leg raised absurdly in the air, the film seems ready to dissolve into farce.
But Fukagawa, who made a deft transition from the slapsticky comic to the seriously dramatic in his 2005 debut feature When The Show Tent Came To My Town (Okami Shojo), does something similar in Peeping Tom, segueing from an everyday world in which the hero’s biggest concern is grabbing a check from a powerful (to him) editor to a border land where the extraordinary -or bizarre - becomes ordinary and his very sanity is under threat.
As in so many old-school scary stories, there is a twist at the end, but it’s not forced or arbitrary.
Instead, the story follows a logic that makes nightmarish sense.
It all starts simply enough. Soon after getting the commission, Makiguri, a nervous type who spends far too much time inside his own head. discovers the aforementioned peepholes in the paper-thin walls of his tiny room. Through one he spies a goofy-looking amateur boxer punching a bag and making noisy love to his tarty girlfriend. The other room is vacant, until a woman named Mizuno Saori (Awata Urara), whom Makiguri memorably encountered on the road, moves in. Though her dress and demeanor are modest, she exudes an allure that, with its suggestion of lonely purity ready to be defiled, drives Makiguri wild with desire.
Excited, he starts scribbling, as the editor anxiously monitors him. When she is away, he returns to peephole next to Saori’s room for fresh inspiration, which she and her male visitors obligingly provide.
His other, usually brief and testy, human encounters include a middle-aged woman who boldly beds Makiguri one fateful night, a nerdy salesman who supplies him with badly needed headache medicine and a delivery man who drops his name tag in Makiguri’s room.
These seemingly random strangers, we see, have their own, important roles to play in the psychodrama of Makiguri’s life, which as his peeping becomes an all-consuming obsession, steadily devolves toward madness and death.
This story echoes the work of Edogawa Rampo - Japan’s premiere writer of the erotic and bizarre, who wrote his most famous stories and novels in the 1920s and 1930s, long before any one thought of J Horror. Peeping Tom is less a throwback, however, than a film that exists in a strange, timeless space where wishes become realities - maybe.
Mark Schilling