How Ichi the Killer brought ultra-violence to the mainstream

In November 2001, one of the most violent and notorious films to emerge from Japan premiered in the UK, at the London Film Festival. 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.

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). 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. 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.

Ichi the Killer typified the output of an intense faction of the East Asian cinema boom of the late-1990s and early-'00s. 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. 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.

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Nakata's J-horror classic Ring became an international sensation, with critics hailing a new golden era of Japanese cinema

Back in the late 1990s, Hollywood genre cinema had been growing stale. While Hong Kong's "gun fu" directors like John Woo had been drafted in to help invigorate action films such as Hard Target (1993), Face/Off (1997) and Mission Impossible: II (2000), classic horror franchises were resorting to more absurd methods to retain audiences. In Jason X (2001), Friday the 13th's Jason was sent into space in the year 2455 to smash up sexy astronauts, while the initially subversive slasher satire Scream (1996) had become a worn franchise in itself, while spawning countless teen splatter copycats. That an independent film like The Blair Witch Project (1999) could gross nearly $250m worldwide on a budget of just $300,000 was a sign that the studios were losing their grip on the genre films market, allowing for independent and international works to make inroads just as films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction had done earlier in the '90s.

The same decade was significant for Japanese cinema. In 1997, a trio of Japanese films by Shohei Imamura, Naomi Kawase, and Takeshi Kitano won major awards at the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals – including the Palme d'Or and the Golden Lion – putting a significant international focus on Japan's national cinema for the first time in a generation. Only a year later, Nakata's J-horror classic Ring (also referred to as Ringu) became an international sensation, with critics hailing a new golden era of Japanese cinema. Similar films such as Dark Water, Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse flooded the UK via new, Asia-focused distribution labels thereafter. The legacy of these J-horror works was crystallised in the early 2000s when Hollywood remakes The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002) and The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2004), returned box office figures of $249.4m and $187.2m, respectively.

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

But 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. 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. "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. However he asserts that one film in particular led the field with the boundaries it dared to push.

'Garish and perverse'

Ultra-violent and provocative, Ichi the Killer lays out its super-charged film language in just a few delirious moments. Chaotic, jerking camera motions and a hyper-kinetic editing style transform Tokyo's Shinjuku district into a neon blur as the film opens, as the bustling drums and industrial guitar sounds of Karera Musication (a side project of avant-garde noise-rock band Boredoms) provide a disorientating soundtrack. Soon after, the fate of the missing yakuza boss Anjo is confirmed to the audience with a cut to a room covered in CGI blood and cow intestines – and the film's intense visual identity is made plain.

"It comes straight from V-Cinema," Chika Kinoshita, a professor of Film Studies at Kyoto University, tells BBC Culture, of the low-budget film's frenetic filmmaking style. She refers to the thriving straight-to-video market that emerged in Japan in the late 1980s, just as the economic bubble burst; a new arena that opened up avenues for young directors like Miike, Nakata and Kurosawa to prove their worth. Having established themselves in a field that emphasised cheap thrills good for eye-catching VHS box covers, these filmmakers would graduate to the big screen at almost exactly the same time that Japan had landed its historic triple-win at the world's leading film festivals.

While Miike shared the benefits of these industry changes with many of the emerging J-horror directors, Ichi the Killer drew its aesthetic influences from elsewhere. Traditionally, "J-horror is much more muted and atmospheric," Kinoshita explains, and indeed, the parallels between films like Ring and Ju-on: The Grudge with classic Japanese horror texts such as Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo, 1968) and Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1965) are evident. Ichi the Killer instead had a closer affinity with the brutal and energetic gangster thrillers of the 1970s, such as Fukasaku's Battles Without Honour or Humanity series, says Kinoshita. These films were marked by violent acts filmed on handheld cameras, set in the chaotic black markets of post-war Hiroshima in what was an economic crisis that, in many ways, anticipated that of the '90s. Indeed, Fukasaku's cult classic Battle Royale – an ultra-violent Lord of the Flies about a class of children instructed to fight to the death – cemented his own position as a central part of the "Asia Extreme" revolution. Miike would acknowledge his debt to the master explicitly a year after Ichi the Killer's release, when he remade Fukasaku's 1975 gangster classic Graveyard of Honour.

But Ichi the Killer manifested Fukasaku's intense '70s style into something much more perverse, its garish sensory stimuli maintained throughout the film's numerous torturous interrogations, instigated by the sado-masochist Kakihara. Torel points to the film's distinctly Japanese source material – a popular and widely-consumed manga series by Hideo Yamamoto, which ran for 10 volumes between February 1998 and April 2001 – as a major influence on the film.

"Manga is a big pop culture element that you don't get in Western society," says Torel. "And Japanese manga is a lot more extreme than Western manga, without a doubt." In his 1997 book The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture, the Japan Times film critic Mark Schilling declared: "sex and violence sells, so rack after rack of manga in the neighbourhood convenience stores depict rapes, beatings and killings in graphic detail." Kinoshita agrees that such media has long been widespread in Japan’s pop culture – it, too, emerging partly from the same period as Fukasaku's violent yakuza thrillers. "From the late '60s or '70s, manga gained a solid adult readership… and the content can be very sexual and/or violent," she says. "I read that Miike was a fan of Yamamoto's original manga, and that he had an envy of him doing such graphic things at ease."

Censorship debate

Japan's greater acceptance of violent content compared to other high-profile filmmaking nations meant that Ichi the Killer was banned outright in territories including Malaysia, Norway and Germany. Sixteen minutes and 59 seconds of the film were cut to ensure its release in Hong Kong. In the UK, 3 minutes and 21 seconds of scenes pertaining to mutilation, savagery and "sexual pleasure from violence" were censored by the BBFC to ensure a home media release. This is, after all, a film that features interrogation via boiling tempura oil and the graphic self-removal of a tongue. "Nobody in the West could have made things like that at the time," says Torel, who points to the "video nasty" hysteria of the '80s, which led to the banning from distribution of countless European exploitation films via the 1984 Video Recordings Act. But Japan's attitude towards screen violence has traditionally been much more liberal.

"Officially, Japan has no censorship," says Kinoshita. "Our constitution [which is designed to 'protect freedom of speech, press and all other forms of expression'] doesn't allow it." And while the country does have a film rating system, introduced in 1949 and modelled on America's Hays Code, it is an independent body rather than a government entity. Obscenity can become a criminal offence, says Kinoshita (she points to Nagisa Oshima, whose production materials for the erotic 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses landed the director a major lawsuit in Japan) – but crucially this regulation tends to target sexual rather than violent content. Indeed, in the BFI's 2020 Japanese Cinema Book, Rachael Hutchinson writes that violent physical imagery alone has not historically led to calls for censorship unless the ideology that accompanies it is deemed harmful. Kinoshita agrees: "There is almost no limit to the violence [allowed] on screen in Japan… [and] no law that punishes on-screen violence in the same way as the obscenity law."

Miike makes very interesting distinctions as to how to show the violence and how to make the audience feel that violence – Chika Kinoshita

Some of the more notorious cuts the film received overseas remain controversial to this day – and any discussion of the film cannot avoid confrontation of the debate over whether the film glorifies or denounces the acts on screen. In one infamous scene (to this day unavailable on any UK home media release due to censorship by the BBFC), a sex worker is mutilated before being beaten to death. And while Kinoshita feels that the director is astute in his intentions (neither act is explicitly seen, forcing the viewer to fill in the gaps), she acknowledges that the portrayal of such extreme, gendered violence has become more and more of a sensitive issue over the years.

"[The film] is a pure crystallisation of misogyny, in many ways… [and] I understand how some women cannot stand it," she says, conceding how it has become difficult to discuss the film as a part of her work. "But at the same time, I really liked teaching this film because everything's on the table and everything's upfront. It's designed to provoke, but Miike's totally in control of the effect. He makes very interesting distinctions as to how to show the violence and how to make the audience feel that violence. And the film is very self-conscious of being unreal, and being a fiction."

And a liberal dose of black comedy – derived from jarring tonal shifts and the absurdity of the actions taking place on screen – can sometimes be lost on first-time viewers. The cheesy and colourful CGI observed when Ichi vertically slices a man in half using a blade concealed in his shoe is often cited as an example of the film's surreal and cartoonish quality, while a dazzling colour scheme and Michiko Kitamura's emphatic wardrobe design – which combines tartan suits, studded leather boots, sequinned shirts and pink trenchcoats – rival the zany torture set-pieces in terms of their flamboyance. "It's taking those taboo subjects and viewing it with a different eye, in more of a fun way," says Torel of the film's sordid but fantastical nature.

Nevertheless, the notoriety and censorship of Ichi the Killer were key to the film's cult success overseas. Sick bags were handed out at film festival premieres around the world (including Toronto, Rotterdam and Sitges) as a gimmick to capitalise on the film's violent reputation. Critical reviews only fanned the flames of its infamy further, with The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw publishing a two-star review in 2003 describing "truly nauseating scenes of murder and torture", while the Evening Standard called it "blindingly violent".

"Any title that gets censored gets a notoriety because it makes people want to find out more," says Torel. The film's popularity, incidentally, was such that it demanded single, double and triple disc releases in the UK – but fascination with the forbidden footage created a demand for overseas imports, as well. "Fans would buy multiple copies of the film," Torel says, with the hope that various foreign editions would include those scenes deemed unacceptable by UK censors.

Changing tides

The Asia Extreme boom continued until the mid-to-late-'00s, and its reinforcement of the Western appetite for violent movies led to Hollywood's rash of so-called "torture porn" cinema: films like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), emulated the same ultra-violent tendencies as Ichi the Killer and others. The latter film even cast Miike in a cameo as "The Japanese Sadist". Quentin Tarantino's 2003 Asian cinema love affair Kill Bill similarly recognised Ichi the Killer through the inclusion of at least four of its crew members in the cast. Most notably, actor Jun Kunimura (also of Audition) played Boss Tanaka, the obstinate yakuza leader who loses his head to Lucy Liu's O-Ren Ishii, while Ichi the Killer screenwriter Sakichi Sato played Charlie Brown, the panicked servant caught up in the subsequent battle at the House of Blue Leaves. Even Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008) shares an affinity with Miike's manga adaptation, with Heath Ledger's mouth make-up, flamboyant attire and dyed hair as the Joker visually resembling that of Kakihara.

Miike's sole US production, meanwhile, was completed in 2006. He directed the final episode of the first season of Showtime's Masters of Horror anthology series, which featured works by such noted masters as Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), John Carpenter (Halloween) and Dario Argento (Suspiria). Miike's episode Imprint – which recycles the themes of torture and sadism in a period setting – holds the dubious honour of being the only episode of the series banned from exhibition by the network, due to its graphic and disturbing content.

Even after 20 years, Ichi the Killer's legacy remains tangible, says Torel. "Studios like A24 [Hereditary; Uncut Gems] are making these very popular entertainment and genre films that are more extreme than they used to be, and they're getting a lot more popular." He also points to XYZ Films – the production company behind contemporary cult films such as Gareth Evans' The Raid, S Craig Zahler's Brawl in Cell Block 66, and Nicolas Cage vehicle Mandy – citing the brand's origins with the film criticism site Twitch (now Screen Anarchy), where Asia Extreme had been a dominant focus. Indeed, the same production company has just brought Miike's close friend and fellow Asia Extreme director Sion Sono to Hollywood for the first time – he directed Nicolas Cage in this year's samurai-western Prisoners of the Ghostland.

But few films draw a clearer line between Ichi the Killer and today's cinema than Titane – the French body horror from Julia Ducournau, which took home the top prize at Cannes in July. Like Ichi the Killer, Titane is a brutal tale about a visibly scarred psychopath with a penchant for BDSM, who inflicts sexualised violence upon women, and dispatches men using a hairpin (a visual doppelgänger for Kakihara's weapon of choice: a metal skewer). A crucial difference is that the dispenser of violence in Titane is a woman.

Of course, there are other factors that have contributed to the changing tide in Western cinema. While the increasing prominence of Asia Extreme cinema fans in Hollywood and other key film industries is evident, the past two decades have also seen uncensored materials such as hardcore pornography and real-world violence become widely accessible via the internet – a realm much less easy for institutions such as the BBFC to maintain control over. It seems fitting, then, that Ichi the Killer arrived on DVD in the UK at almost the exact halfway point between the passing of the Video Recordings Act in 1984 and the present day – in retrospect, it warned of even more extreme filmmaking futures still to come.