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Horrors of Malformed Men (1969) – Beautiful, Bizarre, and Banned

20 Sunday Jul 2025

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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

Ink, Flesh, and Fire: Teruo Ishii’s Inferno of Torture (1969)

03 Saturday May 2025

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A feverish plunge into Edo-era exploitation, where the beauty of art is carved from the cruelty of flesh.

By the late 1960s, Japanese director Teruo Ishii had cemented his reputation as a provocateur—an auteur of the abnormal whose films constantly tested the limits of good taste. Following the surreal sadism of his Joys of Torture series and the florid transgressions of Orgies of Edo, Ishii would return once more to the nexus of eroticism and agony with Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄). Released in 1969, this film marked yet another swirling descent into the baroque horrors of Japan’s past, tinged with the obsessions of modern exploitation cinema.

Set during the Tokugawa era, Inferno of Torture builds its narrative around the booming trade of tattooed geisha—women whose bodies are transformed into canvases to satisfy the exotic desires of wealthy Europeans. What begins as a lushly costumed tale of artisanship soon mutates into something darker and more sinister. The competition between two rival tattoo masters (each with their own brand of brutality and artistry) spirals into a portrait of obsession, commodification, and systemic cruelty, where the female form becomes both sacred and sacrificial.

Ishii’s camera lingers with equal reverence on the intricacies of traditional Japanese tattooing (irezumi) and the often shocking violence enacted to “preserve” or “perfect” these living artworks. His aesthetic is unmistakable: elaborate production design, garish colour palettes, and sudden, shocking cuts that blur the boundary between the ceremonial and the obscene. Here, torture is not only spectacle—it’s also currency. Beauty is literally etched into pain.

While some of Ishii’s contemporaries were leaning into more psychological or supernatural horror, Inferno of Torture embraced the physical and the performative. The film sits on a precarious edge, asking the audience to reckon with the allure of suffering while never quite condemning its purveyors. It is this ambiguity—this refusal to clearly moralise—that makes the film both fascinating and uncomfortable. Is it an indictment of patriarchal cruelty, or an indulgence in it? Ishii leaves that question open, daring the viewer to look closer.

It’s important to view Inferno of Torture not as an isolated work, but as part of Ishii’s greater obsession with the grotesque pageantry of pain. Like his earlier Shogun’s Joy of Torture (1968), this film pulls from real historical punishments and court practices but filters them through a lens of stylised surrealism. Yet, where Shogun’s Joy was fragmented and episodic, Inferno is more narratively cohesive—anchored by the rivalry of the tattoo artists and the women who bear the consequences of their egos.

As noted in our prior discussion of Ishii’s legacy, the director had a unique ability to cloak exploitation in aesthetics. Inferno of Torture exemplifies this duality. It is a film of contradictions: gorgeous yet grotesque, meditative yet exploitative, artistic yet undeniably sleazy. Ishii revels in this tension, crafting a work that is less about resolution and more about confronting the audience with their own thresholds of taste.

Inferno of Torture remains a vivid example of the extremities that defined the tail-end of the 1960s in Japanese genre cinema. It’s a challenging watch—not merely because of its brutality, but because of its beauty. That beauty, as Ishii reminds us again and again, comes at a price.

  • 1960s retrospective review by Saul Muerte

Shogun’s Joy of Torture (1968) – The Rise of Ero Guro and Pink Cinema

22 Saturday Feb 2025

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A young magistrate recalls three tales of heinous crimes committed by women, and the brutal punishments that ensued.

A Cinematic Descent into Ero Guro:
Few filmmakers pushed the boundaries of Japanese cinema in the 1960s quite like Teruo Ishii. Known as the godfather of Japanese exploitation cinema, Ishii was instrumental in popularizing ero guro—a genre blending eroticism and grotesquerie, often rooted in historical or supernatural themes. Shogun’s Joy of Torture is one of his most infamous films, an anthology of sadistic punishments, brutal executions, and twisted morality tales that shocked audiences upon release.

The film is structured as three separate stories, each delving into themes of power, oppression, and the consequences of transgression in feudal Japan. These vignettes are marked by graphic depictions of torture, sexual violence, and extreme suffering, making it one of the most unsettling films of its time. Yet, beneath the extreme content, there is an undeniable artistry at play. Ishii’s masterful use of color, lighting, and atmosphere elevates Shogun’s Joy of Torture beyond mere shock value, crafting an experience that is as visually arresting as it is disturbing.

This film emerged at the dawn of Japan’s pink film movement, a wave of softcore erotic films that would dominate the nation’s underground cinema for decades. Unlike standard pink films, which leaned more toward romantic or comedic erotica, Ishii’s work was unrelentingly dark and often tied to historical narratives, reflecting the oppressive nature of the past and the inescapable suffering of its victims. Shogun’s Joy of Torture is particularly notable for its depiction of institutional cruelty—whether from the state, religious authorities, or social customs, Ishii presents a world where brutality is the status quo.

Though controversial, Shogun’s Joy of Torture was a precursor to the rise of more extreme Japanese cinema in the decades to follow, influencing filmmakers such as Takashi Miike. It remains a difficult watch, even by today’s standards, but for those interested in the intersection of horror, history, and ero guro aesthetics, it stands as a landmark of the genre.

Both The Ghastly Ones and Shogun’s Joy of Torture exemplify the outer limits of 1960s horror and exploitation cinema, albeit from very different cultural angles. Where Milligan’s work found itself caught in the wave of moral panic that swept through the UK in the 1980s, Ishii’s film helped shape the future of Japanese underground cinema. Both films challenge viewers with their content, making them fascinating case studies in censorship, controversy, and the evolution of genre filmmaking.