'Scuse Me While I Kiss The Pipe
Amidst my formative high school years in the culture-dry suburbs of Mesa, AZ, I was first turned on to Japanese cult director Shinya Tsukamoto through a beat-up VHS rental of his hallucinatory flagship freakout, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988). Not terribly far removed from my misguided days of teasing my mother for watching foreign films (who wants to read their movie?), my cinematic vocabulary was still too underdeveloped to productively dissect the film's black-and-white, post-industrial landscape of phallic drills, skull-eating metals and suicide by rusting. If forced to synopsize for a friend, I probably babbled something like: "Imagine a young David Lynch remaking Evil Dead 2 with nothing but junkyard sets and hardware-store props." Thank god I branched out and found Fassbinder, Godard and Tarkovsky when I did, or I'd have ended up worshipping at the cult of Harry Knowles -- parents' basement, factory-sealed action figures, spectuactular(ly dusty) video collection, virginity and all -- for the rest of my life.
The funny thing about The Iron Man-Maker's career is that my then-amateurish critique wouldn't be entirely off the mark today. Disturbing, disorienting and often attempting to commingle inorganic clashes (body vs. technology, man vs. metropolis, inner psyche 
vs. outer beast) into physical relationships, the visually frenetic films of Tsukamoto are sage monstrosities, too linear to be pigeonholed as avant-garde and too experimental to provoke a right or wrong analysis. They don't just make your skin crawl, they make your skin try to burrow under itself to hide, which I can only say with genuine admiration and a satiated taste for surprise. To update my oversimplified take, if early Cronenberg were the perversely brilliant scientist of flesh-transformation horror, then Tsukamoto would be the unchained pit bull devouring said genius. If you're feeling adventurous, I'd highly recommend his mesmerizing blue-tinted study in erotic voyeurism, A Snake of June (2002), a Venice Film Festival prizewinner and perhaps his most user-friendly, for whatever that's worth.
Tsukamoto's first digital project, the 49-minute Haze (2005), will be the single midnight screening at NYFF this year, and while I'm still assimilating its intentions and after-effects into my definitive opinion, my initial gut reaction (the only kind you typically get from his films) is to call this reductivist trial in art-horror a front-loaded success in culling dread from negative space. Condensed into a 25-minute short for an omnibus project commissioned by the Jeonju International Film Festival (along with Korean director Song Il-gon's Magician(s) and another from one of my fave Thai filmmakers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Worldly Desires), 
the full-length Haze startles you alert and rigid from its very first frame. Tsukamoto himself stars as a nameless man who has insoluably woken up into a personal hell, a close-quarters cavern of concrete and darkness with no logical escape. Alone, confused and nursing a bleeding belly wound, this poor bastard desperately and uncomfortably contorts himself through blackened mazes of heart-racing ambience (ours and his), frequently passing out from exhaustion. Upon awakening, new tests await:
How do you free yourself when you are trapped teeth-first to dirty piping and cannot move your head backwards? You painfully grind your teeth laterally until you find a gap in the pipe. When you make your way down one end and find only a wall, you grind your way back the other direction. (This caused a couple walkouts.)
How do you evade a spring-loaded hammer you can't see in the dark, repeatedly smashing your head? You painfully squeeze yourself into a tiny tunnel that drops you headfirst down a slide into face-targeted stalagmites. (This caused a few more.)
Occasionally, he hears a woman's apology in his subconscious and witnesses surreal blurs of blinding light and flying fish that could possibly be from his past, or is he merely suffering from sensory depravation? Tsukamoto seems a bit too content with the ambiguity and offers no hints to the what or why of this torment, but the visceral impact of fear in the nothingness is a full-bodied reminder that the most authentic frights come from what you can't see, not what's poked into the camera's eye to make audiences flinch. (Hollywood, take note!) In the film's substantially weaker back half, a second character and pools of bloody man-burger meat are introduced to take the film into latter-day Takashi Miike territory (I'm thinking of the smugly abstracted imagery of Gozu and Izo), but even if you're ultimately scratching your head at the final credits sequence, Haze's strongest moments prove that graphic brutality -- or even discernible lighting -- aren't necessary to conjure terror as raw as sushi.
For fun, here's what the high-school me might have said in 2005: "Imagine Dario Argento and Miike collaborating on a film called Cowards Break the Kneecap, or Gaspar Noe remaking the indie sci-fi gem Cube. That's totally Haze."
