‘Tetsuo: The Iron Man’: The body horror movie that made the entire crew quit
Body horror is an acquired taste.
I mean, all horror is an acquired taste, but the kind of horror where the main thrill comes from seeing the human body do disgusting things is a whole different ball game. A good slasher movie can essentially be an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, built on nail-biting tension and suspense. A good ghost story can draw on the centuries’ worth of stories that have been told in the medium and become almost any kind of story. Both of them can be appreciated by nearly any kind of open-minded audience.
Not so with body horror. A work like The Substance or The Fly, hell, pretty much anything by Cronenberg Jr or Sr, is not for any kind of audience, however open-minded they might be. Because you are fundamentally asking an audience to buy into watching the most disgusting things imaginable happen to human bodies, and that’s just not something that most people will buy into. It’s something for only the realest of horror sickos.
If you want proof of this, look no further than Shinya Tsukamoto’s grisly masterpiece Tetsuo, The Iron Man. Don’t let the title fool you, there are no Marvel superhero antics softening this one for you, this is a bleak, psychosexual, utterly horrific bit of J-horror that essentially works as a cyberpunk version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. An unnamed Japanese salaryman wakes up to find pieces of metal sprouting from his body and is haunted by disturbingly murderous sexual fantasies involving them.
Forget about the audience finding this grotesque; this was a picture that the whole damn crew had to tap out from.
Why did the crew quit this film?
In fairness to Tsukamoto and the crew behind Tetsuo, it wasn’t necessarily the visions in the film that made the crew quit en masse. I’m sure they didn’t help. Even though the film is closing in on 40 years old, the viscerally horrible things the film depicts still shock even today. If you can get through the first dream sequence of the film without pausing the film for a break, then you’re made of sterner stuff than I. However, the reason the crew quit came from a much more relatable source.
Put simply, the film was made for the Japanese equivalent of 20 bucks and a tub of Pringles. Put it this way, the production couldn’t afford on-site hair and make-up work. So, the disturbing prosthetics worn by the actors had to be donned before they left for the set, worn on the train there for the public to see, then not taken off for the entire day of shooting. This caused tension on set. Tensions that were fuelled even further by the production constantly running out of money.
Through all this, Tsukamoto will be the first to say that he never stopped acting like a tyrant on set. He was a demanding perfectionist, and many people (quite reasonably) decided that making this exhausting, horrific film for this bully without getting paid for it was a step too far for them. Many shots of the film were completed with only Tsukamoto and the film’s lead actor, Tomorowo Taguchi, on set, the two of them spinning as many plates as they possibly could to finish the film.
Shockingly enough, it was worth it. Tetsuo: The Iron Man is still one of the most infamous pieces of Japanese horror cinema around. Even if the only people who will actually watch it are the biggest sickos around.
