There’s no better way to close a retrospective of 1960s horror cinema than with Horrors of Malformed Men, a fever dream of grotesquery and surrealism that was so transgressive, it vanished from circulation for decades. Directed by cult provocateur Teruo Ishii and loosely inspired by the works of Japanese mystery and erotic horror master Edogawa Ranpo, this film stands as one of the most controversial and singularly strange entries in the genre’s long, bloodied history.

The film begins in familiar pulp-horror territory: a young medical student escapes from an asylum, assumes the identity of his apparent double, and is drawn into the dark secrets surrounding a remote island populated by deformed men and ruled by a mad, god-complex-driven scientist. But what unfolds is anything but conventional. Ishii tosses gothic horror, grotesque body imagery, kabuki theatre, Freudian nightmares, and existential dread into a blender and hits mutilate.

More art-house hallucination than straight horror, Horrors of Malformed Men taps into deep post-war anxieties and long-standing cultural taboos around deformity, insanity, and identity. The film’s exploration of physical abnormality and psychological trauma, paired with scenes of near-surrealist horror, earned it an immediate ban in Japan. For decades, it remained unseen, whispered about in underground cinephile circles as a kind of forbidden fruit of Japanese cinema.

And yet, beyond the scandal lies something undeniably compelling: Ishii’s direction is bold and ambitious, mixing low-budget exploitation with a high-concept fever dream. Every frame carries a strange beauty or disquieting detail, enhanced by Jiro Takemura’s eerie score and the film’s striking use of theatrical staging. The lead performance from Teruo Yoshida is appropriately wide-eyed and distressed, anchoring the chaos with a tragic, almost operatic sense of fate.

It’s a film that refuses to sit still — shifting from gothic melodrama to art-house allegory to grindhouse freakshow in a heartbeat. It doesn’t always hold together narratively, and its tone can veer wildly, but that dissonance only amplifies the experience. Like a hallucination you can’t quite shake, it lingers.

In a decade where censorship and moral panic loomed large, Horrors of Malformed Men wore its taboos on its sleeve — and paid the price. But with time, it has emerged as a boundary-pushing relic of Japanese cinema history, a nightmarish outlier that still startles and fascinates.

The Prognosis:

As the 1960s came to a close, this film seemed to herald what horror cinema would increasingly become in the decades ahead: challenging, transgressive, and unafraid to look into the abyss. It’s a flawed but unforgettable swan song to a daring era.

• Saul Muerte