RICHARD MARTIN REVISITS THE MASTERS OF HORROR: IMPRINT, DIRECTED BY: TAKASHI MIIKE

16/6/2021

We are living in a golden age of horror on TV. Shows like ‘The Walking Dead’, ‘Supernatural’ and ‘American Horror Story’ have effectively taken the genre mainstream, offering weekly doses of gore and mayhem to the masses. Go back a decade or two however, and genre fans had far fewer options to choose from. Anthology shows, like ‘Tales From the Crypt’, ‘Monsters’ or ‘Tales From the Darkside’ were king during the horror heyday of the 1980s, providing cheesy and cheerful tongue in cheek horror in half hour bites. It wasn’t until 2005 that the TV horror anthology show got serious, and delivered arguably the most consistent, memorable and scary anthology show to date.

The brainchild of horror legend Mick Garris, the show’s title is no hyperbole. ‘Masters of Horror’ brought together the best horror talent Hollywood (and beyond) had to offer. Episodes directed by undisputed genre luminaries such as John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento and Stuart Gordon were like hour long movies brought to your TV screen. High production values, A-List talent and a free reign to do whatever they pleased resulted in some truly unforgettable work from a group of horror legends let off their leash. These are stories that have stayed with me in the fifteen years since many initially aired and, in this series, I’ll be revisiting all twenty-six episodes, one at a time, to shine a light on a fondly remembered and undeniably influential moment in horror TV history.
Join me as I take a look back at;

Imprint
Directed by: Takashi Miike
Starring: Billy Drago, Youki Kudoh, Michie Ito, Toshie Negishi
Original Air Date: n/a
Synopsis: An American Journalist comes to a lawless island searching for a former lover he had vowed to save from a life of prostitution, and discovers the terrible fate that befell her in his absence.

Revisiting the ‘Masters of Horror’: Imprint

Horror fans who watched Masters of Horror only when it first aired and haven’t revisited the show since may not recognise this episode. It is the only one of the twenty-six produced that never made it to screens in the U.S. and was only available as part of the subsequent DVD boxset, as it was pulled for extreme content. Masters of Horror initially aired on Showtime and, as a cable TV channel, there were far less restrictions in terms of content, allowing the various masters of horror to go as big as they wanted, or so they thought. Despite episodes coming from some of horrors most infamous directors (Tobe Hoope and Dario Argento to name just a few) it took Takashi Miike to finally cross the line.

The prolific director of ‘Audition’ and ‘Ichi the Killer’ considers Imprint his scariest work to date and given the notoriety of some of his horror output, that is a hell of a statement. Watching it now, I can not only see why the episode was pulled, but also why Miike still speaks so highly of it to this day.

Set in the late 1800s, the episode opens with Christopher (Billy Drago), an American journalist travelling to a remote island in Japan populated by criminals and prostitutes. The river that leads to the island is littered with dead bodies and, upon his arrival, he walks past cages filled with girls clamouring for the attention of the decidedly unsavoury looking locals. We soon find that he is looking for a woman named Komono (Michie Ito), and while the locals are suspiciously vague about her whereabouts, it is confirmed that she has been here. With a longer stay now on the cards he books a room for the night and is accompanied by one of the women (played by Youki Kudoh).

At this stage we’ve been introduced to the two leads and while Billy Drago is always an engaging presence, Youki Kudoh is a scene stealer throughout the episode, her character getting to run the full gamut of emotions in the 60-minute runtime. She plays a deformed escort who, at first, comes across as meek and shy, opening up slowly as the episode progresses until she becomes completely in control of the situation and we see a whole other side to her. Couple this with flashback scenes, some of which we later find may not be the full truth, and it’s a big role that asks a lot, and Kudoh delivers.

As the episode progresses Christopher asks her what became of Komono and she weaves him a story, shown to the viewer in flashback, of her tragic upbringing after her midwife mother loses her husband and can no longer afford to look after her. She finds her way to the brothel she now works at, where she met Komono, who was kind to her and the envy of the other women for her good looks and kind heart. Her story takes a sinister turn when the brothels Madam find a piece of her jewellery missing, and Komono is wrongly accused of taking it. She suffers terrible tortures at the hand of the vindictive Madam, and takes her own life rather than continue to suffer.

Anyone who has seen ‘Audition’ before, knows all too well that Miike knows how to create a memorable torture scene, and the one inflicted on poor Komono is absolutely horrifying. After she has been burnt under her arms with incense sticks, she has needles pushed under her fingernails and through her gums, leaving her hanging by ropes from the ceiling to suffer until she confesses to a crime she didn’t commit. The whole scene is shown mostly in close up, few cuts, no music. It is unflinching, graphic and tough to watch and, one imagines, a big part of Showtimes reasons for not airing the episode.

Upon hearing of Komonos death Christopher is obviously distraught, but he suspects that he has not been told the truth. The woman confesses that she was not entirely honest and retells the story with a few minor differences. Her upbringing appears to be more traumatic than her initial story suggested, her mother actually an abortionist and not a midwife, her father a violent alcoholic who she kills before being sold into prostitution. In this version of the story, she makes it clear that it was she who stole the Madam’s jewellery, leaving Komono to take the blame.

Through these flashbacks, particularly those which focus on her childhood, we see another (and perhaps major) reason why the episode didn’t make it to air. Scenes of her mother working as an abortionist are shockingly explicit and I’m hard pressed to think of a TV show quite as graphic as Imprint is in showing such difficult subject matter quite so overtly. It is brutally honest to the point where it is difficult to watch, but ultimately important thematically to the story being told (as we will later find out).

Things start to get a little weird from here on out, as it turns out there have been a few more things left out of the story told to Christopher, namely that her actions were largely due to encouragement from her sister… who lives inside her head… literally! In a fantastic scene of body horror, completely out of left field, a hand grows out of her head and begins to talk. It transpires that this parasitic twin has been the one influencing her all along, compelling her to kill her father, steal the ring, and, as she finally confesses to Christopher, murder Komono.

The episode wraps with some revelations about Christopher himself that make his ultimate incarceration and descent into madness after shooting the woman and her ‘sister’ dead, less tragic and more deserved but it is nonetheless a bleakly downbeat ending to an episode that has been a relentless assault on the senses since the opening scene.

While I’ve talked a lot about how extreme and violent the episode is, it is also genuinely scary. The setting of 1800s Japan is depicted as a difficult and unforgiving place to live and the harsh realities of the impact of poverty is not shied away from. The whole thing is also beautifully shot and may be one of the most visually spectacular things Miike has committed to film. It is an incredibly well-made episode all round that I only hope fans are able to tolerate the subject matter and extreme violence enough to appreciate what an accomplishment this instalment really is.

Imprint is well deserving of its reputation as the infamous episode too extreme for TV. I can’t imagine this airing now, almost fifteen years later. I, for one, am grateful the episode saw the light of day thanks to subsequent DVD releases because it is also one of the series best, and the work of a true Master of Horror, working without restraint and at the top of his game.

Join me next time as I’ll be looking at episode one of the second season, Tobe Hooper’s ‘The Damned Thing’. See you then!

If you missed any of Richard's previous Revisting The Masters of Horror articles, you can find links to them all here on our handy landing page

THE MASTERS OF HORROR

Richard is an avid reader and fan of all things horror. He supports Indie horror lit via Twitter (@RickReadsHorror) and reviews horror in all its forms for several websites including Horror Oasis and Sci Fi and Scary