31 Days of Horror: Day 8- Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

Despite the gruesome creatures, flying limbs and buckets of blood, horror as a genre can feel pretty stale. For every excellent film there is a dozen forgettable or terrible ones. And there are so many that it takes a lot of wading through the rubbish to get to the interesting stuff. For each day in October I’m going to recommend a different horror film or film about horror. For the most part they won’t be the accepted classics. My selections range from the genuinely excellent to the delightfully strange with a few that are more fascinating than they are great. Hopefully there will be something for everyone and you’ll find something new to give you a scare or maybe a laugh. This is my 31 days of Horror and today I’m talking about: Tetsuo: The Iron Man.

If David Lynch, David Cronenberg. Sam Raimi and a bunch of speed were thrown in a blender with chunks of metal the film that the emerging monstrosity would make would be Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The Japanese cyberpunk film is intensely energetic, wildly surreal and cringingly grotesque. It’s barely over an hour long yet moves at such a breakneck pace that it manages to squeeze in loads of metal-related madness. From crudely robotic cats to a giant drill penis it shows a world becoming mechanised in the most horrific fashion.

There’s a simple story at the heart of Tetsuo but it’s somewhat obscured by the rapid movement of the film. After an accident a Japanese businessman (credited solely as “Man”) notices a piece of metal in his cheek that seems to be growing out of him. A character simply credited as “Metal Fetishist” (played by Tsukamoto himself) then doggedly pursues him. The Metal Fetishist is able to turn people into metallic abominations that he can control and sic on the Man. As the Man himself becomes more and more combined with metal he begins to regain some control and bring the fight to the Fetishist.

The plot may sound relatively straight-forward but how it is told is not, I genuinely don’t know if I have ever seen a film so dizzyingly quick moving. There are sequences that are done via live action stop-motion allowing characters to move at rapid speeds. The stop-start nature of these scenes can be a bit disorienting simply because it’s something we rarely see. Sometimes the speed the film moves at can obscure the fairly simple story but it pretty much comes together at the end. Despite my minor gripes with the ridiculously fast pace it lends the film a crazy kineticism that is unlike anything else. We become as confused as the main character who is so baffled and terrified by what is happening to him. He is constantly fleeing metal terrors to the point that he barely has a chance to think about what could be causing this, just like us. Tsukamoto is incredibly stylish with how he frames every shot and he purposefully enhances our sense of confusion. Jumping from stop-motion chases to extreme close-ups the camera is in constant motion just like the characters. If the film is about anything it is about how technology is speeding the world up and everything in the film reflects that idea.

One of the most immediately noticeable and horrifying things about the film is the stellar effects work. A person getting bound with metal is a crude and violent process in the film. The camera zips round showing metal fly across the room and within seconds it has meshed with a characters face. The forceful coalescence of man and machine is not a pleasant process and the film visualises this amazingly. Some of the effects are a little cheap but that just adds to their grotesque authenticity. The effects in Tetsuo: The Iron Man are some of the most disquietingly nasty I’ve ever seen. With the frenetic style the chases are exciting and tense but with the added element of the insanely visceral effects it just makes it a very impactful scary experience.

There’s not a great deal to say about Tetsuo: The Iron Man because it’s such an experience film but what an experience it is. Few films move as quickly as this does and even fewer do so this successfully. Violently energetic is probably how I would describe it. There’s body horror, surrealism and visual experimentation all thrown together in this inventively monstrous thrill-ride.