Screambox for as long as I can remember, and I say this with love, the scrappy underdog in the streaming world. With many larger services taking up the mental real estate of horror fans everywhere, it begs the question, what’s their strongest selling point? The answer to that question came up recently with the streaming premiere of the 1988 Japanese psychological thriller film Door.
ONCE FORGOTTEN, NOW VOD (COURTESY OF SCREAMBOX)
An overworked and underappreciated housewife, Yasuko Honda spends most of her days in a cluttered apartment, tending to the needs of her rambunctious son and typical working husband. With both of them leaving her alone throughout the daytime, her hours are occupied by housework and small talk over the phone. But soon, phone calls from a pervert herald a much worse threat: a maddened door-to-door salesman turned stalker named Yamakawa, who threatens Yasuko’s life and her family’s safety. The only thing between her and him? A front door that grows weaker to hold him back every day.
Directed by Banmei Takahashi, Door had a repertory screening this year at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, which our lovely editor, James-Michael was able to catch, but I missed. I was delighted to find out, however, that Screambox has made the film available for a home release. This answers the question: if Screambox keeps putting up quality obscure titles like this, it has serious potential to become a repository for tons of great lost media that are currently being restored.
THE LONG SLOW DEATH OF ISOLATION
Door is best compared to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, in that it’s a psychological horror trying to say something about the cinematic culture around it; being a weird psycho-sexual nightmare is sort of just the byproduct. As Haneke’s work commented on the violence of American media and the arms race of captivating audiences with atrocities, Door is about an ever-increasing push towards individualism, and the fear of that isolation’s effects on future generations.
Yasuko lives in a densely packed building, and a lot of the horror that comes from Door’s premise is that despite Yamakawa’s very loud and very visible attacks, her neighbors are little help. The building is more preoccupied with garbage codes than it is protecting its residents, and the police of the city do little to help. Door verbalizes a longstanding urbanist anxiety of being so close to the people around you while having no sense of community and in turn, no sense of protection. Yasuko is forced to keep her head down and shrug off the worst of her assailant’s offenses, because who does she really have in the end?
Moreover, Takahashi’s work was also especially prescient for a Japanese audience: it’s a foretelling of the much more dire conditions that would strike Japan’s Lost Generation, and the subsequent loneliness epidemic that plagues the nation today. With that loneliness epidemic spreading abroad, it’s frightening to think of how more relatable the film might become for Western audiences.
CAT AND MOUSE WITH A PURPOSE
As I mentioned earlier, the film also has a very overtly psycho-sexual angle, especially in the way the film represents the relationship between Yasuko and Yamakawa with objects rather than outright nudity, i.e., there’s a lot of blatant, smack-you-over-the-head phallic symbolism. Knives are penises. Newspapers are penises. Hands are penises. Everything is a penis.
This undoubtedly has something to do with Banmei Takahashi’s origins in the “pink film” boom of 1970s Japan. That trend involved a lot of sleazier fare, erotic thrillers made for dirt cheap, and playing up the scandalous nature of the stories as something to gawk at rather than analyze. But Door feels like an attempt to finally explore many of those films’ more salacious and violent aspects as the byproducts of a broken society rather than a source of cheap thrills.
Takahashi zooms in on how violent men like Yamakawa try to take advantage by exerting violence on the isolated. Sexual symbols here are more symbols of sexual violence. They’re on the nose, yes, but unmistakable in their intent; they show how Yamakawa is looking for control rather than any sort of sexual and romantic connection, and doesn’t mince its message on that.
Door’s climax (which I won’t spoil too much but will say involves a tiny chainsaw) is the most destructive and blatant example of this, and it’s captivating in how bizarre and long it is. It’s uncomfortable, rife for dissection, and a fascinating choice for a director whose style evolved quite a bit from humble origins.
FRAMING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL TRAPPED
Speaking of Takahashi’s directing, his camerawork here is incredibly efficient at backing up the thematic fears of the story. There’s a really effective contrast made between how Takahashi shoots Door’s interior and exterior shots. The exteriors emphasize openness with some expertly composed wides; outside, the camera often looks down from high up at Yasuko and her son Takuto, sometimes feeling like a voyeur viewing from a rooftop above and framing them perfectly. But inside the apartment, all that visual freedom is taken away to crank up the tension.
There is an unease in the Honda family’s home; it is cluttered, oddly shaped with a hard-to-pin-down layout, and cramped; those details add to the anxiety of it all. Door is, in many ways, a great crash course for anyone looking to see how influential shot composition can be, even when it’s something as simple as the furniture arrangement in a corridor.
Takahashi is able to build the maximum amount of fear with simple shots of unlocked doors and narrow hallways because everything feels claustrophobic without being outright close-ups. This factors most importantly into the aforementioned climax, where that tension pays off, and all hell breaks loose.
A SOUNDTRACK THAT DENIES YOU COMFORT
And what may be my favorite part of Door is its soundtrack. The music here can best be described as comforting and dulcet. It’s a byproduct of the booming music scene of late-1980s Japan and its focus on smooth jazz. It’s a gorgeous soundtrack composed by Gôji Tsuno, that has a sort of romantic lilt to it…
Until it simply isn’t.
Until it’s abruptly torn away, and a switch flips in your brain telling you something is wrong. The music cuts out at seemingly random intervals but is timed to disorient you. It leaves the viewer to listen to the sounds of struggle, the sounds of breathing, the aftermath of an attack, only to return and start the cycle over again. It’s a genius choice, and a highly underutilized one. It’s the first time in a while that a soundtrack wasn’t telling me how I should feel, but how I felt outright.
Door earned my fondness because Banmei Takahashi took a very common premise for a psychological thriller and imprinted his one-of-a-kind vision on it. To my knowledge, he was a bit of a hired gun in the pink film era who almost quit due to disagreements with producers, but persevered and went on to make a variety of films in many different genres.
Door marks one of those beautiful moments where a director reflects on their past works, and creates something wholly unique in the process. It’s a diamond in the rough (one that will likely land on my Hidden Gems of 2023 list early next year), so I hope you seek it out and enjoy it as much as I did.
You can stream Door (1988) on Screambox.
