Blind Beast

Famously dubbed a “sick film” by Variety, Masumura’s gorgeous grotesquerie follows the spiral of degradation – or, perhaps, liberation – which ensues once the titular sculptor (Eiji Funakoshi) abducts an unwilling muse (Mako Midori) and imprisons her in his macabre, strikingly set-designed and deliriously symbolic warehouse studio. Variously called “outlandish”, “freakish”, “nutty” and “bizarre”, it leavens the horror with liberal doses of tongue-in-cheek silliness. Based on the novel by Edogawa Rampo, sometimes considered the “Japanese Edgar Allen Poe”.