The 1980s in Japan were a decade of economic boom and unknown prosperity. But like a presentiment to the 90s, the so-called “lost decade” of Japan, the opening text crawl of Cyclops reveals a dark secret, the side effect of superficial social wealth. With human evolution going forward, more and more babies are, as a result of poisoning and destruction of the environment, radiation and over-medication of pregnant women, being born deformed. A common feature of these mutated babies is one missing eye, so the initiated named them Cyclops after the Greek mythological figure. Since nearly all of the affected children die at an early age, their existence is being kept a secret to the general society. But in the 1950s the scientist Doctor Keji Takazawa performed unethical experiments on the babies to keep them alive, seeing in them the next step in human evolution, as our species is adapting to the hostile environment it has created for themselves. In the present time of the movie, after Takazawa’s death, his former assistant Takamori works as a medical doctor in a hospital and is a father to be. But when the best friend of his younger sister Miuki is murdered, he and Miuki are confronted with his past leading to a body deforming and face ripping climax.
Given that the cult appeal of Tetsuo: The Iron Man is ever-growing and films like the Guinea Pig series keep being a reference for Japanese gross-out horror, Cyclops is a hidden gem, which was stolen the chance to have a cultural impact. I can’t say that in an alternative timeline, where Cyclops found wide distribution, it would have gotten an iconic legacy like the films of Shin’ya Tsukamoto have. But I’m sure it would have become a solid midnight movie favorite. Much of this is thanks to the film being quite accomplished in creating mood and filling out its running time of only 53 minutes with elements of numerous genres: Drama, Comedy, Medical Thriller, Conspiracy Thriller, Sci-Fi and Body Horror; with the latter being the hook to sell the film to the dedicated horror audience, since the gore effects unleashed in the finale are creative and extremely well executed. At the same time the film is a good introduction to newcomers to the Japanese horror underground, since the violence is never as offending as more notorious contemporaries, for example the aforementioned Guinea Pig series. The context is much less misanthropic, and quite the opposite, the film has a humane perspective on its subject and characters, giving a lot of room for melancholy. Also Cyclops doesn’t shy away from comedic scenes, delivered by unlucky villains filling the comedic relieve roles and creative editing. That the genre mix of Cyclops is fitted in a framework of just under one hour is arguably in the film’s favor. That Cyclops collected a solid number of positive reviews from people on the internet, who could only watch it with auto-generated and auto-translated subtitles from Youtube, speaks for the visceral appeal of the film. Even when you aren’t able to follow the plot, the special effects and the grimy setting of 80s urban Tokyo is enough to sell the film. Furthermore it helps that the previously mentioned creativity presented in the editing works in a tandem with the cinematography. The style of shooting and the camera movement can become very dynamic and the editing often matches the flow of the camera motion of consecutive scenes. This is how you get action in your movies, without having action scenes.
Now, some reviewers who were able to watch the film with real subtitles say that the story of Cyclops is hard to unravel and actually not that relevant. I can’t deny the first argument. But there are quite a lot of interesting aspects to the plot, as I will get into at the end of this article (please be aware of mild spoilers).
The Production and Release History of Cyclops
Cyclops was released on a booming Japanese VHS market on October 26th of 1987. Even though it was always planned as a direct to video film and had a low budget, it was still shot on 16mm film. Since the movie was not subject to much film journalism, there is not a lot about the production background documented. In an audio commentary by film journalist Christoph N. Kellerbach, that can be found on the German Blu Ray, it is said that director Jōji Iida told him in a private interview, that shooting took around two weeks and that the production company went out of money mid-production, so additional financiers had to be found. This production company is, at least for me who loves do go down a rabbit hole, quite interesting, as an example of the mysterious and undocumented world of Japanese video. Sadly you have to accept some spit-balling from me so take the following with a grain of salt. The company went by the name of Grafis1, and seemed to have been productive in the VHS market from around 86 to 88. But all the information you can find on them nowadays are just their film credits. As far as I can tell, their films were mostly, if not exclusively, distributed by Nikkatsu2, who might have been the financiers that helped wrap production of Cyclops. Nikkatsu at that time concentrated on their Roman Porno line of softporn cinema, but in the 80s, following the lead of the growing porn market that found its perfect medium with the VHS, they also had a very limited direct to video sub line called Roman X. A couple of narrative feature films where produced for the Roman X line, but it was used as an experiment to produce some harder erotic videos with less obligation to plot. The video titles suggest that fake casting sessions were a common trope and they didn’t shy away from featuring unsimulated sex and gross out mondo movie3 elements4. A number of these Nikkatsu Roman X videos, listings indicate a number of at least eight, were outsourced to Grafis and were made by the same director Hitoshi Nimura, who still seems to be active today as a porn director, specializing in transgender and crossdressing themes. If this really is the same Hitoshi Nimura, one can assume that potential other unlisted Grafis productions of the time already were porn and are now lost to time. There are no pornographic scenes and only very limited amount of nudity in Cyclops, so it is clearly the odd one in regards of the companies filmography.
Director Jōji Iida’s official webpage notes explicitly that at the time Nikkatsu wanted to try out non-erotic films again, so their distribution seems to have been motivated by increasing the variety of their catalogue on the VHS market. Their softporn films felt the pressure from the crowing porn industry, but if Cyclops was really used by Nikkatsu to test the potential of direct to video horror, it is no surprise that they would not follow up with a lot more (the year before Nikkatsu released the splatter short Biotherapy on VHS and in 1986/87 a trilogy of horror softcore films in cinema directed by Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu - that's pretty much it for Nikatsu pure horror output at the time). According to the director, Cyclops “didn’t get big”. As he tells in an interview on the German Blu Ray release, Horror had no dedicated audience in Japan at the time. You may have heard of the supposed success the Guinea Pig series, which were already in their third installment by 1987, had on the Japanese rental market. But since any kind of metric is missing to assess the real impact of these films on the general VHS audience, there is no reason to question Iida's statement. Still it is true that the Japanese video market at the time can be described as anarchy, if not even anomie, and a lot of wild stuff was produced. But such releases did not penetrate the Japanese mainstream. It is a staple in film history that films that find a fringe, but dedicated audience abroad are even more obscure in their country of origin. Having this in mind, it speaks for Cyclops that it was not ignored in Japan forever. Over time it found domestic fans and theatrical screenings were organized by them.
While the international market would become essential for Japanese horror films after the success of The Ring, in the 80s this was pretty much out of the picture. So it was not until 1991 that the first official non-Japanese release happened in the form of a Laserdisc in Hong Kong, with a VCD following as late as 1999. For these releases Cyclops was called The Unborn, shifting the point of interest to Takamori’s baby. Both releases sadly didn’t feature English subs, which would not have been unusual for a Hong Kong release of a Japanese film. The laserdisc still became a collectors item5. Curiously a copy found its way into the hands of the German media rating boards and offended a judge so much that it was banned in 1996, which it still is to this day. Banned movies sell, because they are banned, that was true in the 90s and will forever be true. So more than 20 years later the misguided decision of conservative judge gave the movie a second life, as the German label Cinestrange Extreme released Cyclops on Blu Ray in 2021 in Austria (to circumvent the ban in Germany) with an excellent picture quality. And this release finally does not only feature German, but also English subs, (and curiously a newly recorded very bad German dub) opening the film up to be discovered by a wider audience. Given you can still find a Blu Ray copy, the print run was limited.
Jōji Iida - The Writer and Director of Cyclops
In the following I will shift the focus from Cyclops to its director Jōji Iida and his other horror related works, because I think he is interesting as a typical example of a Japanese filmmaker career that did not really “go off”.
Jōji Iida, sometimes called George Iida, was born in 1959. He was inspired to work in film because of his love for the works of Tatsumi Kumashiro, a well regarded director of Roman Porno6.
At the time of Cyclop’s release, Iida already had solid experience behind the camera, and was first critically recognized when he took part at the 1980 installment of the regarded short film contest PIA7 with a 10 minute experimental short called Intermission, which was also shown at the Edinburgh international film festival. According to the English language Wikipedia and their source, he worked as a script writer and assistant director for Pinku Eigas8 afterwards. I could not verify this, because neither is this established at his official curriculum vitae, nor are his supposed contributions listed in the Japanese Movie Database. In the aforementioned audio commentary by Christoph N. Kellerbach it is mentioned that Iida worked in various behind the camera roles of Pink Eigas, without specifying the jobs more. But lower roles on the set, which includes assistant director, sound realistic. And according to the commentary it was because of these jobs that Iida was approached to create Cyclops. But sadly Kellerbach doesn’t seem to be well versed in the, admittedly rather convoluted, world of Japanese erotic cinema, so it isn’t clear if Iida was working inside the independent Pink Eiga circles or maybe even for Nikkatsu9, which one can assume due to their connection with Cyclops’ production company. The only other production Iida’s website lists before Cyclops is another early experimental student film, made in 1982, called Dead Flowers, without a hint that it was distributed. It was shot on 8mm, but already had an ambitious running time of 60 minutes. So it is not that big of a surprise that Cyclops, his official debut, was very competently made for being low-budget and that its wild genre mix already features many elements the director would come back to later in his career.
1989 saw Jōji Iida’s first theatrical feature film called Battle Heater in 1989, a horror film about a killer Kotatsu table. A kotatsu is a table that has a small heater on its downside. Get some hot tea, put a blanket over the kotatsu, put your feet under the table and enjoy the cozy evening. And if it starts eating you, tough luck, seems you are cannon fodder in a horror comedy. Battle Heater is an hilarious film that is unlike the rest of the director’s work, but you can already find traces of the, here prevalent, humor in Cyclops. Still, the movie has a strange rhythm to it and one can see hints of the slowburn style of the director emerging that will sink a later movie of his. One English source10 says that Battle Heater was a great success and became a cult classic, but on IIda’s page the box office is called a disaster. I would rather go with Iida’s side on this one, because I can find no backup for the cult film statement when browsing through Japanese language reviews.
It was TV where Iida found his home, as he began to work on multiple shows as writer and director, one of them being the Japanese version of Twilight Zone. He created a dedicated mystery franchise with Night Head beginning in 1992, consisting of a live action series, TV specials, a film, novelizations and animes, with the second one being as recent as 2021 (you can find that one on Crunchyroll and it is pretty decent). Much of the writing for all of these was done by Iida himself. Quite the journeyman in the art of pop culture, he even had his hands in a video game, called Nightmare Interactive ~ Moon Cradle, a top down adventure that also incorporated live action video clips and was released for the 3DO11.
In 1995 he got introduced to the most popular Japanese horror franchise, when he co-wrote Kazenban, which is the first adaptation of Ring made for TV. From a 2022 perspective it is mostly a collection of weaker versions of iconic scenes of the theatrical adaptation with a less intriguing protagonist, but curiously with a lot more sex and nudity. One can like Kazenban for what it is, given some interest in the franchise. Iida’s other contribution is more widely seen, but is at least as controversial from an entertainment factor standpoint. In 1998, the now legendary theatrical adaptation of Ring was released in Japan as a double bill, with the second picture already being the sequel. And this sequel called Rasen, or Spiral in the West, was directed by Iida. While Ring was one of the most important mainstream successes, if not the most, in Japan during its time, Spiral bombed. Which hurts even more when you think about that audiences just had to stay in their seats after watching Ring to see it. I would say the slow burn style of Iida and the emotional separation to the precursor played a part and I have to honestly say that Spiral is a movie I want to love, but I can’t.
It is fair to assume that the failure of Spiral hindered Iida’s career, or at least it didn’t help him to get finance for bigger projects. While he only had a few feature film credits afterwards as a director, in no way he is done as a creator. As I wrote earlier, 2021 saw the release of his newest anime as part of his Night Head IP and in the interview included on the German Blu Ray he tells that he is developing a TV show he wants to sell to a streaming service for worldwide distribution. I wish him the best of luck.
The Cast and Crew of Cyclops
The lead actress of Miuki, Mayumi Hasegawa, was only 16 at the time and handled the emotional aspects of the role with bravura. Cyclops seems to have been her second project and she acted in a handful of theatrical films afterwards, but mostly works for TV and is still active. The most interesting actor of the cast is the one playing her brother, Kazuhiro Sano, who is well regarded as a Pinku Eiga creator, but was at that time mainly active as an actor. It wasn’t until 1989 that he became a prolific director.
Since the effects of Cyclops are very well made, it is no surprise that the further careers of the effects team are prosperous and for all of them Cyclops was a contribution very early in their career. Yûichi Matsui, credited for the special effects, concentrated on makeup effects later on and worked on multiple Ring and Ju-On movies and countless films by Takashi Miike, as well as Drive My Car. For Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 he worked on the special effects again. Cyclop’s art director Yûji Hayashida contributed to a lot of Miike films as well.
Uncredited in most databases is the designer of the body horror scenes Kōji Yamamura. He is an established independent artist in the field of mixed media animation and was nominated for the Oscar in the category Animated Short12. At the time of the production of Cyclops he studied painting at University. According to his website he worked as an art assistant and special effects modeler on “major movies”, that are not further specified. It would be interesting to know if he did more horror work, since his designs are excellently grotesque and his personal art is much more wholesome and recommended to be checked out for completely different reasons than Cyclops. He had quite a chance with this film. You have to be aware that in Japanese film production, maturity plays an important role and a young student would probably be so low in the ranking of the production crew, that their contribution was not only uncredited but also exploited.
The rest of the production team didn’t go on to participate with more mainstream films. The most interesting credits of editor Kenichi Takashima are Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole and… the original Super Mario Anime from 1986? Cinematographer Toshihiko Uryû often worked with notorious Pinku Eiga director Hisayasu Satô, so he will be a returning guest in future articles of this blog. The music of Cyclops was done by a practically anonymous performer/band under the name Unio Mystica. They scored a few more of Grafis' productions and just a handful of titles for other companies. For all I know, it just might be the name of a music library that could be licensed and not an actual person.
And as a final curious sidenote, the film was co-written by Hisashi Saito, who also worked on the original draft of Shin’ya Tsukamoto's Tokyo Fist.
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| Concept art of Cyclops by Koji Yamamura |
Most reviews of Cyclops concentrate on the glorious gore effects of the finale, but I want to highlight another noteworthy aspect of Cyclops, that is elemental for the finale hitting as hard as it does; the melancholic atmosphere, which is conveyed by the grief of Miuki, who is in mourning after her friend was found dead. On of the earliest scenes is her talking to her soon to be murdered friend, about falling for someone and having a child in the most innocent fashion. This innocence of growing up soon finds an end, with Miuki experiencing unwanted emotional and bodily changes, that can easily be interpreted as a metaphor for puberty. Due to the short running time of the film you can’t say that we spent a lot of time with her coping, but it is used for the most powerful of the gore-less scenes. The sorrowful Miuki is hiding under a blanket and a close up of her hands fills the screen. A second hand appears, crawling up her arm to meet her hand. While this sounds creepy on paper, the actual scene plays much more beautifully and the question arises if it is a third hand of hers, hinting at the overall theme of mutated human bodies, or a metaphor for her grief, during which no one is holding her hand. This has to stay mysterious for the benefit of the movie. But the melancholic mood is also enhanced by the role of the brother, in this case because of his lack of emotion. We often see him in the sterile environment of the hospital, which is not only his workplace, but also where his wife is hospitalized. A wife he seemingly doesn’t care about. And then there’s also the main villain of the plot, the “cyclops” Michio Sonezaki who is the nemesis of Miuki’s brother. At this point further analyses would go into spoiler territories and I don’t want to do this as part of this article, because Cyclops is underseen
Like with any good horror film, the core element of Cyclops - babies being born deformed - is grounded in reality. The aftermath of the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that disfigured survivors and traumatizes Japan to this day, come to mind. While these tragedies, which were arguably a large-scale scientific experiment, did not result in babies being born disfigured, they were affected by the more subtle, but as cruel of a fate of having higher risks developing cancer and other illnesses. Also worth mentioning are the so-called four pollutions of Japan, a series of environment scandals, that brought the danger of chemical wastes into the Japanese subconsciousness. Japanese cinema is full of cinematic processing of the faults in our treatment of the environment, one only has to look at the Kaiju genre13. Especially from a Western perspective, there is another scandal I think is worth mentioning, because it comes the closest to the horrors of Cyclops; the Thalidomide/Contergan scandal, which is often called the “biggest man-made medical disaster” of all time. It led to 10,000 babies being born handicaped in the 50s and early 60s as the side effects of a drug their mothers were prescribed as a sedative. Things become more uncanny when you realize, that actual Nazi doctors were involved with the creation of the drug. At least one of them was involved with human experiments that took place at concentration camps. Furthermore it became known in 2020, that Contergan was tested on babies. Like so often, reality is more scary than the movies.
Notes about image sources
All movie screenshots and the concept art by Koji Yamamura are taken from the Blu Ray release Cinestrange Extreme. Image source for the cover of the VCD is https://www.ofdb.de/view.php?page=fassung&fid=2332&vid=5992. Sources for the film posters is the IMDB otherwise.
1 Must English sources write the name as Graphis, but Grafis is used for the company logo in the opening credits of Cyclops. The Japanese Katakana グラフィス reads 'Gurafisu'.↩
2 Nikkatsu is the oldest Japanese film studio. In the early 70s when cinemas lost a great amount of viewers to TV, they radically changed their movie production to mostly consist of well-produced softporn films under the brand name “Roman Porno”.↩
3 A Mondo movie, named after the Italian film Mondo Cane from 1962, is a exploitative form of documentary dealing with scandalous themes to display as much sex and violence as possible. The "documentary" footage is often staged and presented in racist contexts.↩
4 Behind The Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema by Jasper Sharp, ISBN-13: 978-1903254547.↩
5 One laserdisc was sold for as a little as 1200€: https://www.filmundo.de/asien-horror-ab-18/laserdisc/the-unborn-aka-cyclops-hk-laserdisc-ultra-rar-oop-horror-131_art_9626755.html.↩
6 Source is the aforementioned audio commentary by Christoph N. Kellerbach.↩
7 An important Japanese film contest for amateur and student filmmakers.↩
8 Pinku Eigas are independent erotic films. The term is explicitly used because these movies were part of unique distribution model with established rules, like a running time of around 70 minutes and at least one sex scene per film roll. But the filmmakers had complete creative freedom aside from this. This industry was the starting point for many Japanese directors.↩
9 In short, Pinku Eigas are independent films, while Roman Pornos are major productions by Nikkatsu. The differences are more relevant from a distribution and production standpoint, regarding the nature of the films they are more or less nonexistent. A lot of Pinku Eigas were distributed by Nikkatsu, but hadn't the same production values as in house productions. ↩
10 Hiding the link in the footnotes, because the site can only be accessed with the Wayback Machine and just doesn't seem like a good source to me: https://web.archive.org/web/20120725044118/http://www.subtitledonline.com/special-features/joji-iida#extended.↩
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