Ultra-violent and provocative, Ichi the Killer lays out its super-charged film language in just a few delirious moments.

However he asserts that one film in particular led the field with the boundaries it dared to push. 'They were something we'd never seen before,' Adam Torel, managing director of the UK's leading Japanese film distribution label, Third Window Films, tells BBC Culture. Whereas these titles favoured subtle psychological tension, drawing upon Noh and Kabuki theatre and Japanese folk mythologies for their visuals and themes, films like the aforementioned Audition, Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale (2000) and Sion Sono's Suicide Circle (2001) did away with long-haired ghosts and subtle psychological tension, instead emphasising ultra-violent set-pieces and taboo subject matter such as torture, child murder and mass suicide. Twenty years after debuting in the UK, it returns to the big screen this month as the final feature in the BFI's six-film 'J-horror Weekender' – part of its wider Japan 2021 film season.īut there was a faction beneath the umbrella of J-horror – a term that perhaps better describes the influx of evocative Japanese films in the West during that period rather than a uniform style or genre – that arguably left an even greater impact than these more traditional horror films, like Ring and Dark Water. The film's distinct Japanese identity stoked its cult popularity in the West, and along with the whole 'Asia Extreme' genre of the time, created a new era of shocking cinema that foreshadowed the emergence of ultra-violent films in the mainstream today. Ichi the Killer typified the output of an intense faction of the East Asian cinema boom of the late-1990s and early-'00s. Kakihara was the deranged yakuza enforcer hot on his trail, determined to use whatever torture methods necessary to track down the man responsible for killing his gang's boss. It told the story of two deranged killers caught in a twisted cat-and-mouse chase across Tokyo's red-light district of Kabukicho the 'Ichi' of the title was a mentally disturbed man, manipulated to kill by a master hypnotist. Ichi the Killer was directed by the now-infamous Takashi Miike – whose 1999 film Audition had already built him a reputation in the UK (after arriving on VHS via distribution label Tartan Video).

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The sci-fi director of the 21st Century Later described by Empire magazine as 'a masterpiece of extreme cinema, crammed full of images that push back the boundaries of what's possible – and allowable – on screen', it would be duly chopped into shreds by censors in the UK and further afield, and banned outright in several countries around the world. In November 2001, one of the most violent and notorious films to emerge from Japan premiered in the UK, at the London Film Festival.

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