October 18, 2015

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Get yourself to Tokyo this Halloween.

There is, undoubtedly, no better place than Tokyo to be this Halloween. The long-standing Japanese love of dressing up is combined with an unbridled national imagination to create an explosion of weirdness that would be impossible to find in any other country in the world, least of all blinkered England. There is, you find, as you traverse the realms of strangeness in the streets of Tokyo, no limit to the bizarrities there. Where English (well, American) Halloweens follow something of a trick-or-treating, face-painting, friendly-neighbourhood formula, the Japanese let their imaginations dictate them, often to unsettling effect. It is this disregard for the limits of spookiness that make Japanese horror films the most disturbing in the world. And the Japanese delight in their overreaching imaginations, nurturing a near-schizophrenic tendency to swing from happy, school-girl fun, to mind-boggling darkness. Take, for example, this horror film from the seventies, 'House' is so absurdly whimsical, and somehow summing up all that is fun and strange about contemporary Japanese culture. There are laughing heads, floating, piano-playing fingers, and vomiting cat paintings, together with cheerful campers, and beautiful, bathing young ladies. Forget the Hollywood happy ending; these are the types of films we should be watching.