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Blind Beast is a grotesque portrait of the bizarre relationship between a blind sculptor and his captive muse, adapted from a short story from Japan’s foremost master of the macabre, Edogawa Rampo (Horrors of Malformed Men, The Black Lizard, Caterpillar).

An artist’s model, Aki (Mako Midori), is abducted, and awakens in a dark warehouse studio whose walls are decorated with outsized women’s body parts – eyes, lips, legs and breasts – and dominated by two recumbent giant statues of male and female nudes. Her kidnapper introduces himself as Michio (Eiji Funakoshi), a blind sculptor whom she had witnessed previously at an exhibition in which she featured intently caressing a statue of her naked torso. Michio announces his intention of using her to sculpt the perfect female form. At first defiant, she eventually succumbs to his intense fixation on her body and finds herself drawn into his sightless world, in which touch is everything.

Blind Beast is a masterpiece of erotic horror that explores the all-encompassing and overwhelming relationship between the artist and his art and the obsessive closed world that the artist inhabits, with maestro director Yasuzo Masumura (Giants and Toys, Irezumi) conjuring up a hallucinogenic dreamworld in which sensual and creative urges combine with a feverish intensity.

SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
• Original uncompressed Japanese mono audio
• Optional English subtitles
• Brand new audio commentary by Asian cinema scholar Earl Jackson
• Newly filmed introduction by Japanese cinema expert Tony Rayns
• Blind Beast: Masumura the Supersensualist, a brand new visual essay by Japanese literature and visual studies scholar Seth Jacobowitz
• Original Trailer
• Image Gallery
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tony Stella

FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated booklet featuring new writing by Virginie Sélavy.

Rather than grotesque I’d say this is a sort of gothic melancholy somewhere between the Corman Poe’s and Wyler’s The Collector.

knives -- ero-guru (short for erotic grotesque) was a Japanese category for literary, dramatic and artistic works (a bit older than 100 years ago in origin). You also had comic versions -- ero-guru-nansensu (Ozu did some movies of this sort in the silent era, but these are lost). This film is definitely in the ero-guru tradition (but more extreme).

That’s cool to know. I was thinking of the Malformed Man. Is that also considered guru? I was thinking grotesque in the way it is usually implemented although the film does fit with an Italian theater of the grotesque vibe (thinking Santa Sangre) which I guess is another foot in my mouth.

I don't know Malformed Man. But I suspect a story about something deviant and malformed would fit into this category.

Hopefully the supplemental materials for this release will explain things more fully (and better) than I can.

It’s worth noting that both this and Malformed Men are adaptations of work by Edogawa Rampo, whose Taisho-era work is the most commonly used example of this style. You’re right that this film certainly feels more gothic than grotesque, which speaks to Yasuzo Masamura’s style versus the types of films coming from Toei, it’s certainly grotesque when considering the film’s major set. There’s a great book about the whole style I picked up at a Berkeley bookstore over a decade ago called Erotic Grotesque Nonsense.

I did not know (or maybe forgot?) this is based on a story from Rampo. I've read The Human Chair and (I believe) The Psychological Test; I've watched Horrors of Malformed Men and Rampo Kitan: Game of Laplace, the latter a television anime loosely based on his stories. The visuals are inventive, but everything else is quite bad.

This edition doesn't look stacked, per se, but I'm happy this is getting an English-friendly Blu-ray.

Elegant Dandy Fop -- Does Silverberg deal with both ero-guru and ero-guru-nansenseu?

Michael Kerpan wrote: Sat May 29, 2021 3:16 am Elegant Dandy Fop -- Does Silverberg deal with both ero-guru and ero-guru-nansenseu?

Mostly the feminized latter, but she touches upon ero-guru and the sorts of connections between the both. I remember it being a good book, but it’s been a long time since I read it.

The main take away from this film for me is that the mother is enormously indulgent of her son's whims!

I imagine 'Red Angel' will be announced next but I hope Arrow doesn't stop there: 'A Wife Confesses' is the one I would really like to get a release.

AidanKing wrote: Sun May 30, 2021 10:14 am I imagine 'Red Angel' will be announced next but I hope Arrow doesn't stop there: 'A Wife Confesses' is the one I would really like to get a release.

Manji is also likely as it was a Fantoma release and has restored blu in Japan (I think Afraid to Die was a Fantoma title so perhaps that one too). I'd also absolutely love to see A Wife Confesses released, and if possible a set of his first 3 features - Kiss(es), The Blue Sky Maiden, and Warm Current.

I don't know the condition of it's surviving materials, but I really want a restoration of A False Student, as the copy floating around on back channels is really awful. I haven't tried sitting through it yet (seriously it's rough!) so I'm just really going off of Rosenbaum's appreciation of it in my desire to see a restored print.

This is a great film. The set design is terrific, the sexual/familial dynamics nicely weird. Masumura had a varied career - you had the almost Tashlin-esque satire of Giants and Toys on one hand, then tense sexualised dramas like Manji, Red Angel and Blind Beast on the other.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his round-up of the Fantoma DVDs, does not rate this one particularly highly among Masumura's work, describing it as 'closer to inventive exploitation than to inquiry'. However, Jasper Sharp, who is probably producing the BluRay for Arrow, is extremely positive in his review for Midnight Eye. Midnight Eye also has an interesting overview of Masumura's work, this time by Tom Mes.

This is an incredible film, and probably the best Masumura I've seen so far. The narrative initially poses like The Collector but dissolved away from insulating class and intellectual issues, and towards a melding of psychosexual desires that posture at the universal denominators under their idiosyncratic exteriors. I think Masumura is first and foremost a master at merging people and their characteristics as ingredients into an anthropological soup, a process that often exposes deep-seated issues with identity, occasionally posing as vehicles for empowerment without actually endorsing such a fabricated and simplified position. Here there is a genuineness to the pair's impetuses and malleable fusions that seems less cynical, magnetizing us to the perverse while seeing it as both uncomfortable, detrimental, and a broad composite of the absurdity of our romantic unions in general.

The film also addresses our obsession with art, and objectifying people in a similar way as authentic, since we can't earnestly access the soul with objectivity. The default to the physical as celebrated truth reminds me of Kechiche's focus on carnal palpability, associating exploitation with naturalistic, even spiritual, appreciation. The violence intervenes just as organically when power structures and relationship dynamics are threatened or shift, and Masumura appears to comprehend deeply that this isn't tragic per se (even when the result is death) but a necessary avenue for reform and rebirth when these systemic alterations are set in motion, destruction going hand in hand with creation.

The eventual depiction of adapting sexually as they evolve a tolerance for satiability reads as a transparently urgent portrait of accelerated conflict that one may falsely assume to be neutrality. Masumura is so talented at moderating extremes that we comfortably exist in the thickness of his murky, delicious broth; for as tragic as the film leans in its parallels to addiction, exemplified determinist agony, and concession of hope, there is no apathy to be found. Masumura is equitably feeding us a passionate celebration, accepting our desire for 'more' as natural, and surrendering to its paradoxical cravings on us by lowering the shields that bar us from perversions. This amusingly runs counter to the goal of nirvana- in exposition and thematic experience of our characters, we can only hope to modify ourselves to get the most from life, and hope that we have a willing partner to help us feel intimate in this journey of contradictory impulses without judgment.

The high highs and low lows ultimately devolve into fatalist demise, but is the film a tragedy? I'm not convinced. It's certainly not a cautionary tale, because this is the world as Masumura sees it and there's never any choice these characters can make that might offer them reprieve from the intrinsic developments that commence. This is partly the best Masumura film because it synthesizes his themes of humanity's powerlessness contending with their own unidentifiable drives -translating conceptions of mortality, emotional sensations, and physiological urges into tangible forms in pleasure and pain, touch and ideas- in a fashion that communicates the magnitude of this ineffable, acute, and intense crisis in the mise en scene and tone. The film is as alive as its characters, accumulating energy and surreal desperation until it too collapses and dies; musing on low-functioning creatures, exhausted from thinking and feeling so much that it's a heavenly relief to arrive at a concrete thesis- even if it's no more true than all the equally-fervent experiences that preceded the deceleration. After all, most of life is resigned to the acceleration, and Masumura is far too spirited towards life to place much stock in any streamlined epiphany.

I'm afraid I have to say I really, really disliked this film. Except for the art design of the "studio". I will probably listen to the commentary of my friend Earl Jackson (who I know loves this) -- but I can not imagine changing my opinion. To tell the truth while I have found some of Masumura's work interesting (and even worth re-watching -- like Giants and Toys), I have not "loved" anything I've seen by him. I suspect Masumura's sensibilities are just so wildly divergent from mine that I will never be able to appreciate his work.