Adam and I agree that the true measure of a horror movie is not whether it makes you jump or freaks you out, but whether it changes your brain in a long-lasting way. I stand by the fact that the person I was before the first time I watched the original Night of the Living Dead is not the person I was after. For the rest of my life, some part of my brain will be…concerned…about zombies.
One of my cast-mates in Dracula was a bonafide learned smart person, with books published and everything. It prepared him well for the role of Van Helsing. Naturally we and some of the other actors spent a good bit of time discussing horror films, and it was through those conversations that he lent me Imprint. In the over six months since it has sat on my TV stand, and several times I set out to watch it but hesitated, because I had heard of its reputation. But I’m seeing him tonight and he wants it back as research for his new book, so the time had to be now.
Imprint isn’t even a full horror movie, it’s a one-hour story that was made for cable. Showtime did an anthology series called Masters of Horror in which some of the leading lights in the horror genre were given – in theory – carte blanche to scare people for an hour provided they kept the budget under $2 million and the shooting schedule at ten days or less. I thought this was a gem of an idea from the start, but for various reasons the series ended up very scattershot. Whether it was the subpar crews they were forced to use, or uninspired scripts, or the fact that some of them were a couple of decades removed from whatever mad inspiration led to their famous horror achievements, many episodes just flat didn’t work. Among the best are Incident on and off a Mountain Road, directed by Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep), an ingeniously-ruthless serial killer story about a damsel less-in-distress than you think; and Jenifer, directed by Dario Argento (Suspiria), in which a strange and feral woman plays on the lust and protective instincts of men.
But Imprint, directed by the Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike, was the one episode of the series that even Showtime refused to air. The series producer Mick Garris, who directed the TV miniseries versions of Steven King’s The Shining and The Stand, said it may be the most disturbing movie he had ever seen. You can see why I would have a mixture of curiosity and concern about it.
I don’t know that I can even describe what makes Imprint so audaciously fucked-up. This is not some punky “look what we can do” gross-out, or nihilism chic like American torture porn. This is a dread fairy tale about the mad cruelty and perversion in the world we’ve made, and how Hell is all around us because of our own deeds. It is a journey that starts on a river, and goes places beyond what you thought you could imagine, but you are so mesmerized you simply believe that you cannot quit the journey.
The story starts with a 19th century American journalist, played by the already deeply-strange actor Billy Drago, on his way to a small island in Japan that serves as a brothel – a Pleasure Island for depraved men. He is in search of a whore named Kimomo; he fell in love with her long ago, swore to find her and rescue her from her life, and then lost track of her. He asks if she is here and is told no. But when he asks for the girl sitting in the shadows to be sent to his room, she confesses to him that Kimomo was here, and was her friend, and that she is now dead.
The journalist rages. He drinks sake. He sees things in the shadows. But he asks this girl – this strange woman with blue hair and a scarred face, to tell him what happened to Kimomo.
This is the first 20 minutes of the hour. Until now, there have been a few gruesome images, a shock or two, but Miike is holding back. You are just carried along by the unrelentingly-weird atmosphere he creates on this island, and the sense that this man should never have come here, but was always going to.
The girl tells her story, both about her own sad and bloody life and the awful fate that befell the innocent Kimomo. It is hideous, almost excruciating to watch. The man refuses to believe it. He demands the truth. And so the girl tells the story again, and this time confesses more, and the story you thought was unbearable becomes even worse.
And now the man believes, but doesn’t understand. There is still something missing that will explain it all. Again, he demands the truth – all of it. And now something is revealed that nothing has prepared you for, and sends your imagination to places you never wanted it to go. The thing about Imprint is, up until its final images it is still torturing your mind. There isn’t any peak gross-out moment followed by release and some nice resolution. It is…and this is its point…perpetual.
It mentions Hell, and demons. It talks about torment. But it doesn’t allow us to expel its greatest evils onto demons. Its supernatural touches are mere feints beyond our reality. We are the offenders, for our ability to imagine doing such things to other people.
Understand, I am not recommending this to just anyone. Miike is an exceptional filmmaker (his 13 Assassins may be the greatest action epic of this generation), and this is an exceptionally well-made film despite the eccentricity of Drago’s performance. But not everybody needs to see this, and certainly not everybody wants to see this. And for good reason. What makes Imprint rank as an all-time great piece of horror filmmaking is that, no matter what you go through while you are watching it (be ready for a lot of cringing and jaw-dropping), what is much worse is that the movie will not leave you after.