Guinea Pig 2 is a cartoonish exercise in excess, a distasteful piece of pseudo-snuff, and a contorted metatextual manifesto. It is a true aberration, quite possibly the most bizarre artifact of the found footage Stone Age.
“Got me a movie, ah-ha-ha-ho / Slicing up eyeballs, ah-ha-ha-ho.”
— “Debaser,” Pixies
This is not the evilest video in the world. No, this is just a tribute. Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood sets up its premise with a dollop of ludicrous self-mythology: Japanese filmmaker and “bizarre cartoonist” Hideshi Hibino (clearly, amusingly a thinly veiled pseudonym for director and manga author Hideshi Hino) is sent a suspicious parcel by a devotee of his horror illustrations. The package contains an 8mm film reel, 54 still photographs, and a 19-page letter — all alleged evidence of a grisly murder inspired by Hibino’s work.
Hibino’s work is so vivid and compelling that he has unwittingly forged a parasocial bond with his most extreme fans, those who view his macabre illustrations as an instruction manual. The images contained in the parcel were far too shocking and upsetting to share so he reframed them from his perspective, reshot and filtered through his artistic vision. It’s certainly one way to get around the logical improbabilities of found footage: simply don’t show the real version. We just have to take Hino/Hibino at his word that these details are true to the genuine articles that only he had the nerve to witness.
The cartoonist took these raw materials and reconstructed them as a stylized art project-cum-investigative exercise that he oxymoronically labels a “semi-documentary.” The entirety of Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood is as follows: a man, billed as the Samurai (Hiroshi Tamura), kidnaps a random woman, billed as the Victim (Kirara Yūgao), in Tokyo, takes her back to his subterranean torture chamber, and cuts her to pieces — first the hands, then the arms at the shoulders, then each leg just above the knees, then her abdomen flayed open, then her head in one swift chop, and finally her eyes, scooped out with a spoon. The victim is never given a name, or any dialogue, personality, or backstory. She spends most of the duration in a drugged stupor, then the pieces are dumped in a formaldehyde bath before assuming their place within his extensive modernist collection.
Guinea Pig 2 is quite possibly the most bizarre artifact of the found footage Stone Age, a true aberration. It is a stylistic mashup, a cartoonish exercise in excess, a distasteful piece of pseudo-snuff, and a contorted metatextual manifesto. Hino has contrived a piece where his avatar has closed a creative loop: his horror works inspired the crimes of the killer, and he returns the favor by memorializing the murders through film, taking the killer’s work as inspiration. Through this unholy cosmic communion between artist and killer, the acts of murder and filmmaking are bonded together and inextricable.
By staging a recreation, Hino is able to interpret and inject his own personality and style into the scenes. He’s both beholden to approximating the authentic gnarly tone of the (fictional) original materials but also free to riff. We get whip pans, rapid-fire edits, slow motion, extreme close ups, exaggerated sound effects and occasional musical tones, expressionistic lighting, and symbolic mise-en-scène. It has the same anesthetizing effect as the cocktail the killer injects into his victim, delivering pain but eliciting an overriding feeling of ecstasy.
Questions surrounding the origin and cultural value of Guinea Pig 2 have been subject of numerous investigations. A few years after its release, the video came to the attention of the Fukagawa Police during the search for Tsutomu Miyazaki, a serial killer who murdered and dismembered four young girls in Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture between 1988 and 1989. Miyazaki — who was dubbed the “Otaku Murderer” due to his substantial collection of anime, manga, hentai, horror videotapes, and various other forms of pornography — was eventually convicted and hanged. The parallels to Hino’s entry in the Guinea Pig series were apparent enough at the time that Flower of Flesh and Blood was analyzed by the authorities before Miyazaki was apprehended. When he was identified and captured, one of the Guinea Pig films was found in his sizable home video collection, permanently linking the serial killer with the series. The police claimed it was Flower of Flesh and Blood, but Hino denies it.
The confusion only stokes the urban legend of Guinea Pig 2 and binds Hino’s claim to relative-fame, and the series’ undisputed high point, more tightly with one of Japan’s most savage serial killers. During the backlash, journalist Taro Kimura asked film critic Haruo Mizuno on a TV news program, “Is this sort of video really necessary in this world?” It’s a common refrain over the years for many who have encountered this mysterious piece of outsider art.
The cultural response was swift and decisive in the wake of the Miyazaki murders. All copies of the Guinea Pig sextet were pulled from the market. And plans for Hino’s feature-length adaptation of his second Guinea Pig contribution, Mermaid in a Manhole (1988), which was already in pre-production, were scrapped entirely. Hino’s manga work also came under fire and disappeared from stores. And several compilations of his back catalog that were set to be published were subsequently prohibited. In the years that followed, Hino mainly retreated into educational children’s stories and soccer comics to escape the stigma of his horror work.
Related: Begotten: Images Never Meant to Be Seen by Brett Wright
Though the series as a whole was caught in the uproar, the Guinea Pig videos took a decisive turn into more run-of-the-mill horror anthology fare after the second installment — playing like especially schlocky Tales from the Crypt episodes. Guinea Pig 3: He Never Dies (1986) is as much comedy as horror. Even Hino’s follow-up entry, Mermaid in a Manhole, follows a narrative — you might even call it a star-crossed romance. Though, it’s ultimately telling that Hino renders the aquatic creature’s oozing, hemorrhaging pustules with more affection than the characters, making his fall from the horror annals all the more tragic. His only other directing credit is a seemingly lost soft-core film, Bara no Meikyu (2014). What little evidence that exists about this project indicates he was leaning into visual motifs from Flower of Flesh and Blood, embracing his cult status after many wilderness years.
The thing is, the Miyazaki case is not even the most noteworthy piece of Guinea Pig 2 lore. No, the most often cited anecdote is the Charlie Sheen story. In almost every account of the movie, you’ll hear about how the actor tracked down a copy of Flower of Flesh and Blood and was so convinced it was legitimate evidence of a criminal act that he reported it to the MPAA, who subsequently reported it to the FBI for further investigation into its origins and authenticity. This story has burnished the film’s reputation over the years, turning it into a cultish object sought out by collectors and those with a taste for transgressive underground cinema. It effectively secured the Guinea Pig series’ place — Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment and Guinea Pig 2 especially — in the lineage of disturbing non-narrative videos that blur the line between reality and fiction.
That is to say that Guinea Pig is a benchmark in the video nasty timeline, lumped in with sought-after cultish objects passed around by hand during the VHS heyday like the Faces of Death (1978) series and the continuum of extreme Japanese offerings like the decadent ero guro films Shogun’s Joy of Torture (1968) and Shogun’s Sadism (1976), exploitation fare Beautiful Girl Hunter (1979), Guts of a Beauty (1986), and Bloody Fragments on a White Wall (1990), splatter porn Tumbling Doll of Flesh (1998), and, perhaps most infamous of all, Rare: A Dead Person (1997), which circles around and ups the ante in a regrettable duel with Faces of Death to depict real-life carnage. The Guinea Pig series even received the overheated Americanized reboot treatment, with Guinea Pig 2 as the foremost inspiration, nearly 30 years later with American Guinea Pig: Bouquet of Guts and Gore (2014).
Guinea Pig 2 will send you down a rabbit hole of the most unseemly portions of the Internet Archive sewer. It’s a precursor of illicit Internet Age content on sites like Rotten dot com and Portal of Evil aimed at audiences’ inexplicable desire for the worst of the worst, laced with a trolling sense of humor. For a brief window, this series, with its roots in a wave of experimental manga, and DIY dōjinshi ethics, approached the mainstream, the videos outselling American video imports. After this flash in the pan, tapping into a bubbling taste for extreme pseudo-snuff in Japan, Guinea Pig effectively brought this chapter to an ignominious close. In retrospect, Guinea Pig 2 sticks out as a uniquely off-kilter piece of auteur art. Unlike its provocative kin, it doesn’t succumb to its winking nastiness. It’s as much a love letter and self-portrait as it is a numbing exercise in abjection — a lullaby of hell.
Pruned to a minimalist video, Guinea Pig 2 is an object of pure perversion. This is still the primordial era of this type of movie storytelling, but reducing this to a found footage/torture porn ur-text is too limiting for this particular artifact. In spite of its brevity, this is a work of surprising and audacious complexity. Guinea Pig 2 is, in its own sick way, a movie about the creative process, a twisted yet meditative tone poem about an artist in his element and at work. In focusing on the tools he uses, the carefully considered method, the layout of the studio, the stylistic flourishes, the pronounced influences, and the perverse pride of the Samurai, Hino reflects on his own work and the irreducible madness of horror auteurs. His then-recent manga opus Panorama of Hell (1984) is particularly embedded in Flower of Flesh and Blood.
Guinea Pig 2 mimics (mocks?) the suddenly booming non-fiction, non-narrative underground cinema of the moment while also celebrating a long history of violence in Japanese art. The first image we see in the Samurai’s dwelling is a grotesque, abstract mural of tentacle erotica prominently displayed above the bed. A curtain depicting ancient Japanese demons preying on human victims leads to the Samurai’s cherished collection. This sly and subversive combo of cinéma vérité and cinema vomitif folds in a number of Japanese film movements, such as pinku eiga soft-core and chanbara eiga samurai markers — including hara kiri ritual. It’s gritty as hell but ventures into a heightened, feverish, fetishistic plane. But Hino’s influences are also personal, pulling in connections to the vivid independent horror manga he helped pioneer and showing how these riff on centuries-old styles. The film plays out like an ancient scroll or an especially dark shunga woodblock brought to life, harnessing the visual virtuosity, compositional elegance, and abstract power of these graphic tableaus.
Guinea Pig 2 is a portal into the Japanese avant-garde film scene of the time, and underground comics by extension. But it’s also aware of its place in avant-garde cinema at large, toasting no less than Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist landmark Un Chien Andalou (1929), which was undergoing a resurgence with edgy young artistes around this time. Flower of Flesh and Blood’s climactic eye-scooping pulls a double whammy: it acknowledges the transgressive like-mindedness with the Spanish avant-garde icons and one-ups the eye-piercing finale of Satoru Ogura’s Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment.
Flower of Flesh and Blood is also dialed in to its horror contemporaries. The opening abduction is a paeon to mass-market horror cinema, indulging a leering, predatory camera and making it feel, momentarily, like a straight-up slasher flick — at the peak of the subgenre — before thoroughly subverting expectations. And the kabuto-wearing, chicken-decapitating antagonist, and the rubbery gore FX now read as a nod to ’80s Troma-style B-movie gorefests. But what’s especially fascinating here is how Hino brandishes unmistakable flashes of giallo — which in theory should be incompatible with Hino’s quasi-found footage gimmick. The hot pink high-heels, ruby-red lips streaked in blood, bright red undergarments, monochrome lighting for each chapter, lurid-yet-campy practical effects that skirt erotica, and pulsing music all point to an affection for Fulci and Bava, et al. He’s picking up the mantle as the movement is winding down.
And yet, Guinea Pig 2 is a relatively uncelebrated benchmark in the asymptotic quest to create FX that are as lifelike and visceral as possible. Hino, series originator and Devil’s Experiment director Satoru Ogura, and their principle SFX artists are striving to usher in a new age of Japanese special effects work, a neo-splatter renaissance in the vacuum left behind by a previous generation of pioneers like Eiji Tsuburaya. Operating on a microscopic scale in comparison, they sought to inject a boundary-pushing tenacity and focus after a prolonged period of decline, as they saw it. With its overwhelming femicidal and misogynist overtones — where a helpless woman is literally, methodically carved like a piece of meat — wall-to-wall gore, and bouillabaisse of stylistic tones and genres, Flower of Flesh and Blood is a potent and disorienting experience that dares you to behold and even to admire it.
The killer’s back room, which he eagerly guides us through at the film’s close, is essentially a collection of the props and prosthetics used by the crew, spruced up with flowers and annelids. The making-of documentary, Making of Guinea Pig (1986) — a hastily compiled, court-ordered behind-the-scenes look covering the first three franchise films — displays the SFX artists and filmmakers’ fervent dedication to anatomical fidelity. They have a morbid collection of their own: rubber heads, limbs, and torsos stacked on shelves for later use. You can see how these types might identify with the Samurai’s conceptual art garden.
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As these things go, Guinea Pig now looks quaint, which is actually good for appreciating the execution of the primitive shock FX, the gleeful oil-and-water mashup of genres, and the dedication to the craft. What emerges from the gutter is a litmus test for your personal relationship with disgust that leads to other obscurities that gauge your tolerance levels. It asks the unavoidable question that cuts to the heart of horror fandom: why, and under what conditions, are our instincts for aversion balanced with curiosity and even pleasure? Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood exists at the gnarly root of our benign masochism.
Compared to Devil’s Experiment, Hino upped the stakes and elevated the artistry. Instead of an amateurish exercise in sadism, it becomes a filmmaker speaking to an audience through the language of horror movies, manga, and a deep, sordid history of Japanese extremity. He brings a lived-in artistic panache to the series — as elegiac as it is depraved — as well as an uncomfortable level of identification. The role of the killer was played by his drinking buddy at the time, an underground theater actor, and the victim was played by Hino’s wife. This personal connection to the filmmaker is in keeping with the DIY nature of the video but also adds another undeniably queasy dimension. As the Samurai surveys his accomplishment, the blood running down his face almost looks like tears of joy, as if he’s moved by the beauty he’s wrought and the sacrifice of the slaughtered. Then he savors a cigarette after his orgasmic moment with his victim’s eyeballs.
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