Blind Beast (1969)

Synopsis

The movie Blind Beast (1969) is a Japanese film directed by Yasuzo Masumura, based on a novel by Edogawa Rampo¹. The plot revolves around a young aspiring model named Aki Shima who is kidnapped by a mysterious blind man and taken to his home in a warehouse.

The warehouse is filled with sculptures of human body parts and female figures. The blind man, Michio Sofu, is a sculptor who wishes to use Aki as an unwilling muse for his greatest work. As her time in captivity wears on, Aki soon becomes enraptured by her blind captor and the two soon become lovers, beginning a series of Sadomasochistic games.

Then Aki agrees to become something more than just the inspiration for his masterpiece, becoming the art piece itself. Michio agrees. After killing Aki, Michio “sculpts” her corpse into a macabre work of art.

Cast

• Eiji Funakoshi as Michio Sofu
• Mako Midori as Aki Shima
• Noriko Sengoku as Shino, Michio’s mother

Trivia

Noriko Sengoku, who plays the role of Michio’s mother in the movie, was in real life just one year older than Eiji Funakoshi, who plays Michio. [2]

Reviews

“The Human Centipede comparison suggests this is some kind of gritty splatter film, like Saw (2004), but if anything it’s more aligned with the disorienting experimentalism of the Japanese New Wave, and can stake a claim to being one of maybe only four or five horror films of the movement. As is par for the course for those films, Blind Beast seems to exist in a jagged, funhouse mirror world with claustrophobic camera angles and abrupt cuts that distance it, if not sever the connection altogether, from the understated social realism of earlier Japanese masters like Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. If anything, it’s stylistically and tonally in line with the anxious existential fables of fellow new wave filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara.” – [3]

“What begins as a conte cruel about a sculptor who kidnaps his “muse” gradually becomes something much more twisted and symbolic, as the two slowly fall into a relationship that is mutually self-destructive. It is this that keeps Blind Beast from becoming the generic exploitation flick that its logline makes it sound like, even while it is probably also this that led a contemporary Variety review to call Blind Beast a sick film.” – [4]

Citations

[1] Wikipedia

[2] IMDb

[3] https://www.framerated.co.uk/blind-beast-1969/

[4] https://unwinnable.com/2021/10/28/a-dark-dank-death-blind-beast-1969-on-blu-ray-at-last/

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