Blind Beast (Môjû) [1969]

Blind Beast (Môjû) is a cult Japanese film, based on a short novel by Edogawa Ranpo, a master of macabre, known as “Edgar Allan Poe of Japan”. Another cult Japanese movie based on his work, Horrors of Malformed Men, was released the same year, and both films are full of grotesque scenes and deranged characters. What sets Blind Beast apart is its extremely fetishistic nature. Whereas Malformed Men is almost tongue-in-cheek in its grotesquerie with a parade of freaks, nothing in this film is played for laughs – the sick depravity is actually meant to be disturbing. But there is also an abstract, nightmarish quality to it. This is a highly stylized, conceptual work of provocation.

The premise is simple: the bizarre, sadomasochistic relationship between a blind sculptor and his captive muse. Mako Midori plays Aki, an artist’s model, who awakens in a dark studio with its walls decorated with women’s body parts in huge sizes – lips, legs, eyes and breasts. Her kidnapper introduces himself as Michio (Eiji Funakoshi), the blind sculptor we first see at an exhibition caressing a statue of the model’s naked torso. Michio wants to use her body to create the perfect female form in sculpture. The model is at first defiant, but eventually gives in to his intense fixation and even finds herself drawn into his world in dark, where sights mean nothing and touching is everything.

The only other character is the blind man’s mother, who is equally fucked-up and deranged as the sculptor himself and she is a complicit in the crimes. The dominant mother figure is an obvious source of mental degradation for the ‘Beast’, who is a virginal Mummy’s Boy. Strange power dynamics in the studio between the three characters comprise about the first half of the film, which is actually much tame and ‘normal’ compared to the more insane final part. The mother is very protective and adores her son, and the blind man is equally protective of his muse, which gives the model a chance to manipulate him against his mother to set herself free from this madhouse. Like in many stories of captured beauties in cinema and literature, the captive is less a demeaned prisoner than an object of intense adoration.

The second half of the story is decidedly different, where the model first succumbs to the captivity, then begins to appreciate the Beast’s passion for his art and his adoration for her body. She surrenders and becomes a partner in his escalating obsession and sado-masochistic frenzy, and losing their grip on reality, isolated completely from the outside world, the studio turns into a setting of decadence and decay. The final act of the film pushes the limits of lust in an attempt to realize the darkest passions. The grotesque climax precedes Nagisa Oshima’s depraved classic, In the Realm of the Senses. In fact, that title could be a perfect fit for this film.

This cult classic was made in a period in Japanese cinema when film studios were in need of more extreme material to attract an audience that cinema had lost to Television in the Sixties. Nikkatsu studio was going to start its sleazy softcore Roman Porno series of films only a couple of years later, in 1971. Blind Beast was not only a precursor to the 70s sexploitation wave of films, as sleazy and pulpy as any of them, but also a unique production, a visual, sensual experience and a fetishistic exploration of art, lust, obsession, adoration and masochism.