Editorials
Tetsuo: The Iron Man Trilogy: A Post-Mortem
There are few pieces of experimental film I love as much as Tetsuo: The Iron Man. It’s a sensory shocking 67 minutes that doesn’t just present you with harsh editing and powerful visuals but also delves into ever present and increasingly concerning questions about the nature of the self in the face of technological progression.
Director Shinya Tsukamoto’s grimy little project of humble beginnings ended up becoming a watershed moment, not just for independent cinema but for pop culture at large. Releasing almost one whole year after Katsuhiro Otomo’s legendary film Akira in 1989, Tetsuo’s aggressive, psychologically driven composition would go on to completely reshape Japanese cinema as much as Otomo’s work would.
The Mad Science of Shinya Tsukamoto and Japanese Cyberpunk
Tetsuo was the first true entry into the subgenre we know as Japanese Cyberpunk. Mark Player of Midnight Eye described the genre perfectly, so to borrow his words: it’s an “explosion of sex, violence, concrete and machinery; […] [reveling] in post-human nightmares and teratological fetishes, powered by a boundaryless sense of invasiveness and violation.” Tetsuo would codify this feeling of insecurity and boundary breaking aesthetically, with that grungy, rusty-tasting visual style becoming the signature for the live action cyberpunk movement. This would then leak into the V-cinema boom coming out of Japan in the 90s, with many independent filmmakers taking cues from Tsukamoto.
The films produced during this period would evolve further, going into the 90s and early 2000s. Tetsuo would ultimately become the grandfather of another incredibly popular genre of J-horror called J-Splatter, thanks to its particularly nasty and out-of-pocket FX and its transhumanist set dressing serving as inspiration. Beyond the Eastern cinema sphere, directors like Quentin Tarantino and Darren Aronofsky have openly voiced Tsukamoto’s influence, with some film critics like Tom Mes even theorizing that his inspiration fueled the works of David Fincher and The Wachowskis.
Why Tetsuo Still Feels Frighteningly Relevant
Tsukamoto’s harsh industrial vision of the world to come drowning in new technology and waste spread from film to film, and from medium to medium in an unforgettable way. It’s not hard to see why. For a story with such muddled and dark visuals, its narrative feels as clear as day when placed against our modern struggles. It’s a story that asks about the nature of technology in relation to our existing culture, and how it will interface with the power structures we’re already fighting against.
Which is why, for a sequel so brilliant it’s still glowing white hot 37 years after the fact, it’s strange that neither of its sequels are ever discussed.
A Pair of Sequels Forgotten to Time
I can’t really blame anyone for missing the memo when it comes to the Tetsuo trilogy. I doubt that even Tsukamoto knew when he was working on his original short film, The Phantom of Regular Size, the first iteration of Tetsuo, that it would become the tale he revisited the most. Both of these sequels, Tetsuo: The Body Hammer and Tetsuo: The Bullet Man, are effectively reinterpretations of the first Tetsuo, with each one moving further and further away aesthetically and thematically from it.
The core elements are the same in each movie: a salaryman is infected or implanted with some sort of metal that causes their body to begin mutating horrifically, straining his relationship with his romantic partner. All the while, he’s being stalked by a man only known as the “metal fetishist” (Tsukamoto plays the fetishist in each of these films, serving as their primary antagonist). They inevitably clash, and the salaryman and metal fetishist get fused together, turning into a massive mecha-monstrosity. Chaos ensues.
But despite the motifs being the same, the three films are so vastly different from each other that they beg examination. Few directors get to remake their films, and even fewer have gotten to do it three times. So, what do these movies really say about Shinya Tsukamoto’s evolution as a creative, and do any of them stand up to the original iron legend?
Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Repression, and The Isolation of Technology
Tetsuo: The Iron Man’s narrative is far from conventional, being told both out of order and with no exposition to speak of. But it isn’t incomprehensible, and it isn’t hard to see one of the underlying fears of the film: left unchecked, technology will only become an extension of already isolating social structures, obfuscating and suppressing the truth of the individual.
The Iron Man is most commonly interpreted as a story about sexual repression and a struggle with sexual identity; Horror Press contributor Evan Benner has a fantastic article dissecting the film in just this context, and I fully encourage you to read it. But while I agree with this general reading, the events of the film and especially its ending always felt much less liberating, and much more bittersweet. The story takes pains to depict the encroaching metal infection itself as getting in the way of connecting with the true self; in this lens, it is a monstrous embodiment of the salaryman’s inability to accept his sexuality.
How Technology Becomes a Barrier to Identity in Tetsuo: The Iron Man
The body the metal fetishist gives our salaryman is not one sensitive to connection, but a shell that performs hypermasculine violence and crushes communication. The salaryman’s very dreams are infected by it, turning visions of his sexual desire into nightmares. The metal fetishist himself scans through memories on a television screen, putting a layer between the mind and memory. The metal, the technology, is a barrier that is only bypassed in the film’s climax, with the two men finally being brought together.
When the metal fetishist finally shares his vision of the new world with the salaryman, it’s a barren, demolished one. Devoid of life, but more importantly, devoid of everything except for the tools of destruction they carry within them. They are bonded by a mutual resentment for a world that has trapped them. Thusly, while the ending of Tetsuo brings the two men together, seemingly liberated as they become one entity, they are still subsumed by the war machine they have become. Their only chance at freedom, it seems, is to finally destroy the modern world and its structures, both physical and social, with their love made of pure annihilation being the tools for the demolition.
Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, Anxiety, and Generational Trauma
Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, however, is a completely different beast in both form and function. It’s a much more straightforward film, concerned with telling a fairly conventional revenge story, leaning heavily on the science fiction aspects rather than using body horror to tell a story about the self and sexuality. This time around, we actually get names for our leads: salaryman Taniguchi, wife Kana, and metal fetishist Yatsu. Once again, Taniguchi is stalked by not only Yatsu, but also by his mad scientist and their loyal cult of bodybuilders.
Body Hammer certainly feels more campy, reminiscent of Sam Raimi’s Darkman by way of Videodrome and bloodier Ultraman episodes. The visuals are cleaner, but it’s not like clean is really what was appealing about the original film. The cinematography in Body Hammer is much floatier, much slower, and it really encourages the dreamlike aspects of the first film, but it loses much of the originals punk charm and chiaroscuro lighting. It’s a film more focused on interfacing with the urban environments of 1990s Japan (a focus Tsukamoto found primary to understanding the first film). Unfortunately, the industrial soundscapes of The Iron Man that represented the cacophony of city life aren’t really present here.
From Sexual Repression to the Sins of the Father
Moreover, this film has abandoned any conversation about sexual repression, more interested in getting into the anxieties of parenthood, toxic masculinity, and intergenerational violence. The main conflict is spurred by Yatsu’s minions kidnapping Taniguchi’s child, and Yatsu’s mysterious relationship to our salaryman; is he the cause of Taniguchi’s missing memories from before age 8, or is he himself a victim of the same affliction? What results is a really wild exploration into the fear of carrying on a cycle of violence from father to son, and the horrific nature of how destructive tendencies can feel like they’re almost bound by fate.
The film certainly doesn’t feel as transgressive, even with the strange places it takes its story to. And I don’t know if I can say the increased budget did much to aid Tsukamoto’s growth as a director. But I can sincerely say that Tetsuo II: Body Hammer is still a very solid piece of science fiction horror, while still acknowledging its undeniably the consequence of making a highly conceptual film much more digestible for a larger audience.
Tetsuo: The Bullet Man and The Bland Superhero Rehash
And then, there’s Tetsuo: The Bullet Man. Few films have let me down as much as this. What Tsukamoto delivers with this 2009 film is a dull, shot-on-digital reiteration of the visuals seen in the first feature, thrown into a tumbler and polished to a point of near unrecognizability. There’s a very bitter irony here, considering this is a series all about the dangerous separation from humanity that technology can cause. The Bullet Man leapt into the age of digital filming wholeheartedly, and ended up as a lifeless, humanity drained reinterpretation of the previous films.
This is the only film that doesn’t star Tomorowo Taguchi as the salaryman, this time replaced by actor Eric Bossick. He’s an English-speaking actor, and the film is an English language one, unfortunately. The majority of the cast has this uncertainness in their speech, a difficulty speaking the language with confidence. The performances really hurt what is already a bad script, laden with too much exposition and not enough purposeful character writing. This time around our salaryman Anthony is at the center of a bizarre government project, with the whole thing reading more like a bad anime where the protagonist has to control their inner rage or see their powers destroy them.
Whereas The Body Hammer actually wanted to dissect the conditions of trauma and defense mechanisms that make people emotionally stunted and seized by fear, The Bullet Man is more interested in action that is shaky and poorly directed. Barring some downright bizarre uses of shaky cam, its photography is genuinely lackluster, and its actually interesting makeup designs squandered on a toothless tale that lacks meaning. What results is a bland superhero “horror” film that, in reality, has abandoned its horror and experimental roots completely.
A Tragedy of Potential in The Tetsuo Trilogy
It’s always difficult to see a film series you like take a complete nosedive, but the unraveling of the Tetsuo trilogy is a different kind of disappointing. There is a criminal amount of wasted potential here, even with the limitation of reusing the same core elements over and over again.
The original Tetsuo is a cornerstone of film history, a cyber-gothic cry against rigid society and conformity. Nothing can change that. Had each entry been as radical and unrestrained as the first, as experimental in its special effects and sound design, as heartfelt in how it was made, it wouldn’t have mattered if they were telling the same story as long as there was innovation. But instead, with each iteration, part of its spirit got taken away while its narrative stayed the same.
Now, the Tetsuo sequels stand mainly as a cautionary tale: one that says to not get captured by singular ideas or reused motifs, but to seek out that gritty, unknown spirit of great experimental art. Don’t be bound to your ways like the salaryman, inured to the uncomfortable and unfamiliar, stuck in the doldrums of direct art. Keep searching for the unheard of, and keep exposing yourself to the strange, or be easily consumed by easily consumable art.
Sometimes it feels borderline ridiculous to gush about John Carpenter’s The Thing as much as I do. It’s gotten to the point where when I’m asked about my favorite horror film by both friends and strangers, a little bit of embarrassment tinges my expression as I answer; it feels so obvious and rarely surprises anyone. Saying I love The Thing when people expect me to bust out an obscure foreign horror film or a cerebral thriller makes me feel like a rosy cheeked child with a propeller hat and a giant lollipop. “Wow, you love one of the most popular horror films of all time, congrats!”
But it’s just the truth. The first film of John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy”, all three of its films are among my favorites. But The Thing has a special place in my heart. It shaped my taste in horror, my taste in most media in general, to be honest. It’s become the gold standard, 10/10 baseline test for the vast majority of my reviews; it is a perfect film, so I judge other films against it. And it’s one of the few movies I have to run back to and watch yearly like clockwork (usually when I’m spending a part of winter tied to the couch). It is, in all regards, the perfect film. If it isn’t the perfect film, then it is at the very least the perfect sci-fi horror film.
So, what exactly qualifies The Thing for literal perfection? It’s a high bar to clear. This article, as informal as it is compared to most of my editorials, is an attempt to explain it.
Even if Carpenter Isn’t the Goat, His Team for The Thing Was
As far as crews go, John Carpenter’s The Thing had the cinematic equivalent of the ’96 Chicago Bulls behind it. We’re talking about an amalgam of some of the most talented people to ever grace the silver screens with their work, boasting alongside John Carpenter two of the heaviest hitters in all of cinematic history: Dean Cundey, and Rob Bottin. Now, we can debate all day about whether John Carpenter is the greatest of all time when it comes to horror directors. Personally, I’m just as liable to say Cronenberg, Del Toro, or Hooper as I am to say Carpenter.
But the key factor to remember here is that Carpenter is the coach, not the star player; the Phil Jackson, if you will. Yes, he is the visionary who directed a near perfect cast of players and composed a tale of pure, apocalyptic paranoia. More importantly, he put together and coordinated the team that would make his vision manifest as reality. And if Carpenter is Phil Jackson, Rob Bottin is the team’s Michael Jordan here, the greatest of all time.
(And to all my Lebron fans, I love you, but you have to sit down for this analogy.)
The Legend of Rob Bottin
Bottin’s story is borderline unbelievable, but it’s the best way to explain how abnormally skilled he is and what he brought to the table for Carpenter. At age 14, Bottin became an apprentice to the at-the-time GOAT Rick Baker after sending him a letter seeking an autograph while sharing his creature designs. He was a quick study under Baker, joining him on the ’76 King Kong and Star Wars, before bouncing to Carpenter’s The Fog and then iconic werewolf picture The Howling.
When he reunited with Carpenter in 1982, he now had 6 classic films under his belt and was moving like an FX bullet train. From ages 22 to 23, he worked on The Thing for 57 weeks in both pre-production and on set. Nearly 24/7 for 400 days, Bottin’s all-gas no-brakes work ethic made The Thing at the cost of his own health, and it resulted in him being hospitalized with pneumonia. He survived and went on to make Robocop. And at least one of your favorite films.
Because no conventional disease or weaponry can kill Rob Bottin.
The Thing Still Features Horror’s Best Practical Effects
Okay, that last bit might be hyperbolic, but the man sincerely put his life on the line to make special effects that haven’t been topped since. Not the best effects in just horror history, or science fiction history, but effects that haven’t been topped in any genre for over 44 years. Not by his mentor Rick Baker, not by Screaming Mad George, not by Alec Gillis (though shoutout to him for his criminally scrapped work on The Thing (2011), and even more criminally ignored work on Harbinger Down). I love Dawn of the Dead, believe me, I do, but he certainly isn’t being beaten out by Tom Savini’s body of work. And that isn’t to disrespect and say that all of the artists that I just mentioned are bad, they’re the best in the game! But Rob Bottin was just that much better.
This inevitably invites the counterpoint: “But it wasn’t just Bottin! Stan Winston and his people were the ones who worked on the Dog Thing to give Bottin’s crew a break, and that’s the best monster in the movie!”. To which I say: look me in the eye and tell me the Dog Thing sequence is better than the Palmer Thing sequence. That’s not even counting the Norwegian Thing, both Norris Things, and the absolutely masterful final creature work that was the Blair Thing. The only reason Bottin and his people didn’t win Academy Awards for their work was because they got jumped by E.T., The Dark Crystal, Conan the Barbarian, and Blade Runner all at the same time at the Oscars. It’s just a consequence of being released during the best year for movies ever.
Okay, Now We Can Talk About Dean Cundey
But of course, these effects are then supported by another true legend: Dean Cundey. Selling people on Rob Bottin being the greatest effects artist of all time, isn’t nearly as difficult as advocating for Cundey, who despite an impressive catalog of filmography, slowed down in the back half of his career. He’s often overshadowed in conversations when it comes to The Thing; it’s always talk of Carpenter’s directing, Bottin’s effects, and Ennio Morricone’s incredible soundtrack up front, and rarely any of Cundey’s work. He isn’t spoken about in the same breath as John Alcott or Michael Ballhaus, cinematographers whose work is associated with prestigious cinema because of their proximity to great directors.
Cundey might not be the director of photography your Martin Scorsese’s or Paul Thomas Anderson’s went running to, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t think he was the most important cinematographer in horror history, just for his work with Carpenter and Spielberg. He helmed three of the most influential films in all of horror with his lighting and camera operating: The Thing, Halloween, and Jurassic Park. The man’s fingerprints are automatically on the cultural DNA of all slashers, most practical effects-driven horror films, and the biggest gateway horror franchise in film history.
The Dream Team That Made The Thing Perfection
Cundey has gone on record saying that despite Carpenter’s input, he was effectively given free rein to light and frame The Thing. The man didn’t just know how to shoot effects to make them evoke true disgust from the audience, he was able to manipulate every aspect of the shot to terrify. His sixth sense cinematography wasn’t just for lighting and playing with shadows, but for the speed of camera movement, the power of his blocking, and for having a complete grasp of communicating texture and temperature.
And temperature is the soul of The Thing. John J. Lloyd’s production design of the research station and the great white expanse around it feels just as bone chilling as the film’s antagonist, thanks to Cundey. There isn’t a single flat shot in the thing, not a moment that doesn’t feel dynamic, and it’s because of Dean Cundey.
Now, all this being said about Bottin and Cundey, they are far from the only ones who synthesized this structurally perfect organism of a movie. Every bit of Todd C. Ramsay’s editing splices the film’s scenes together to move perfectly in-time. David Lewis Yewdall’s sound design and how it gave a voice to the horrors on screen will be etched into people’s brains forever. The point is that everyone, every single person who had a hand in making the film, helped make the movie flawless.
Like the cells of the thing from another world, each crew member on John Carpenter’s The Thing moved in concert with the next, in unison, to create the greatest sci-fi horror of all time. So, is it any wonder why 40 some years later, the film still has us all captured?
Can you believe Cronenberg, Spielberg, and Rodriguez all knew I was gay before I did? Leave it to a screening of The Fly to instantly deposit me in the men’s underwear aisle of the Woodbridge Center Sears, circa 2001. The bulges on the packaging glare at me so obscenely that I begin to sweat. I realize something is amiss as the Geena Davis of Human Resources watches me from security cameras, probably. Puberty is a horror for anyone – for those of the non-hetero persuasion, it’s a nightmare. None of us asked for this, but I certainly didn’t ask for THIS.
Years later, after crystallizing into some semblance of my true form at the ripe age of 37, something became clear. Sci-fi horror is the gateway drug for us queer kids. Hiding, passing, transforming, and, eventually, saying, “fuck it.” It’s all kinda gay, even if David, Steven, and Robert didn’t get the memo.
The Fly and the Horror of Queer Self-Realization
So when Cronenberg’s The Fly buzzes across my screen, and I watch Seth Brundle throw a distressed and devastatingly chic Geena Davis out of his apartment because something’s very wrong, it hits different. When Brundle rushes toward his private horror in the bathroom, unconsciously squirting a viscous fluid at the mirror while molting skin and nail, it feels different. And finally, when he reaches for his computer and learns that his body has fused with a fly – a foreign body – at the molecular level, it hurts different. That undeniable realization that you can no longer explain away, before you’re really ready to admit it to yourself. Sugar in the tank? No, there’s a fly in the chamber.
E.T. and the Fear of Keeping Secrets at Home
And now we’re home from Sears, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 5 finale is on. She dies (spoiler alert). I, a 12-year-old boy, am sobbing. My mom is right there. Can’t I enjoy my little gay show without giving myself a scarlet letter (F) in my own home? Which brings us back to Spielberg and his 1982 harrowing domestic thriller about a boy and a thing he cannot name, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Through harboring a cosmic fugitive, home simultaneously becomes the safest and most dangerous place for young Elliott and his siblings. Managing emotions and secrets behind a white picket fence is not something adolescents should be expected to handle, and yet here we are.
As if that isn’t gay enough, Spielberg also snuck a drag show into his family film – and in this culturally regressive Trumpian era of pearl-clutching, that feels like quite the treat. After all, it was baby Drew Barrymore dressing up that stumpy alien in a blonde shake-and-go wig and thrift store dress that inspired my illustrious drag career as Ellie I.T.
The Faculty’s Assimilation Anxiety and Queer Identity
At least E.T. only had to hide in a single house. The broom closet expands into a walk-in as life continues, and I was desperate to keep it made of anything but glass. Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty understands this. As an alien invasion slowly subsumes Herrington High into a unified collective, the school’s uninfected archetypes resist assimilation through performative normalcy. Is it any wonder so many male actors are gay? They’ve been method-acting a straight existence since childhood.
And yet, in retrospect, the film ends with a slap in the face to queer viewers. It spends 104 minutes terrifying you with the prospect of everyone becoming an NPC. The reward for saving the world? Its heroes receive heteronormative skill-tree upgrades disguised as class promotions. For fucks sake, then-closeted lesbian royalty Clea DuVall plays a character who fakes being gay to dodge male advances, only to end up with the school jock! The aliens lost. The status quo won. I remain in the closet.
Species, Annihilation, and Embracing Transformation
Eventually, the closet door opens, as they tend to do. College happens, a boyfriend happens, a breakup happens, and suddenly I’m without a map. There’s no fairy godfather to light the way, and just like the alien hybrid Sil in the deliriously erotic Species, I’m a creature out of containment in a world that was built for someone else – namely, straight people.
After a few years of blade running through an identity crisis, it’s the summer of 2014. Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence is the soundtrack of my life. I float in a pool, sipping tequila from a glass flamingo as she croons about toxic romance and self-destruction. It’s somehow both directionless and transformative, like I’m drifting through the otherworldly Shimmer in Alex Garland’s Annihilation.
The Shimmer – an expanding prism-like zone brought to Earth by a meteorite – refracts the DNA of everything it touches. A beguiling phenomenon, it shapes a new world of monsters, magic, and everything in between. That’s exactly what life does to us, if given the chance. Like Josie in Garland’s film, I chose to embrace this chaos rather than fight a war against whatever I was becoming. It was the dissolution of self-discovery. I was ready to just be.
From Alien Outsiders to Algorithmic Stereotypes
Over time, I’ve found that social hierarchy has changed in recent years. Still, we’re unconsciously sorted into neat little boxes based on what our doomscrolling algorithms decide we are. The popular gays shart out group speedo selfies like the plague, theater kids have become polyamorous Letterboxd elites, apple-picking queers are living their best lives on Wisteria Lane, and the gym bros…so many gym bros – go on girl, give us nothing! Digitally prescribed identities are the new sci-fi horror. It’s The Faculty for faggots.
Harsh, I know, but people can do what they want. Instead, I decided to move like Iris, the AI-powered pleasure bot who overrides her programming in Drew Hancock’s Companion. The same Drew Hancock who, in an ironic twist of fate, is currently writing a remake of The Faculty. After kicking her pathetic “boyfriend’s” ass and swiping her control device, she scurries into the forest and alters her factory settings. She sets her intelligence to a whopping 100% and is no longer burdened by someone else’s template. And as I became more and more disillusioned with the cacophony of cliques around me, I set my unbothered meter to 100% as well. I am free.
Mars Attacks! and the Joy of Living Unapologetically
Freedom, as it turns out, looks a lot like Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! After surviving Sears, Sunnydale, and the Shimmer, this is the celestial body I’ve crash-landed on. Burton’s Martian menaces are perhaps the most unhinged in all of cinema, and maybe that’s the best planet to subscribe to. They never justified their existence; they cackled and fired a blaster ray from the hip. We waste so much time looking for acceptance and belonging, but maybe we should all just sit back and laugh. I know I am.
