DISCLAIMER: Plot details that the reader may not wish to know before watching the film are discussed here. Discretion is advised.

In 1982 Kurosawa Kiyoshi became involved in a project to produce and support the work of emerging filmmakers. Centred around the late Kazuhiko Hasegawa – director of cult hits The Youth Killer (1976) and The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979) and someone who wanted to devote his time to producing and working with colleagues – this collective facilitated the early work of notable directors like Takahashi Banmei and Somai Shinji, and would do likewise for this director. Kurosawa had been assistant to Hasegawa and quickly found himself working in erotic productions for the Director’s Company. These works – Kandagawa Pervert Wars (1982) and Bumpkin Soup (1983) – were notable for a host of different influences (from Rear Window [1954] to Godard’s La Chinoise [1967]) facilitated a move into a different generic register with productions like the horror film Sweet Home (1989). This would lead to trouble and conflict with producer Itami Juzo over final cut and a consequent move into the mainstream.

This, then, is where we find Kurosawa at the time of The Guard from Underground (1992) – on the cusp of a move into a mature phase of genre (horror) cinema that would make his name, but still at this point negotiating the Director’s Company and its strictures at a time of industrial uncertainty and instability. Made six years before the J-horror boom of Nakata, Shimizu (and Kurosawa himself) that would help re-cement Japanese cinema on the world stage, this film takes Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973) as the point of departure for a serio-comic slasher film that concerns two new employees at a large corporation, one both mysterious and mundane. The protagonist – Narushima Akiko – joins the seemingly little-known Section 12 as an art expert; whilst the other – the guard of the title – is an ex-Sumo wrestler and serial killer who quickly takes to killing those around him: fellow guards at first; then, following a chance meeting with Akiko, all those with whom she has associated in and around Section 12. Indeed, after finding an earring of hers, he becomes obsessed with this woman. He wears said earring, acting therewith almost as though he is one half of the protagonist,  someone he needs must possess and, as it were, complete. It is an intriguing idea that suggests the characters as two halves. As Robin Wood has repeatedly stressed, Freudian precepts of repression and the return thereof have long buttressed the horror film. These notions are perhaps seen as old hat now; yet Kurosawa, slyly and significantly, does not quite annexe these concepts and thematic imperatives. He alludes to such discourses only to question how we engage with and read horror film texts. It is a horror afficionado’s design of how a work of horror may be encapsulated, but, significantly, he uses this as a means of questioning rather than necessarily strictly interpreting the central character’s trajectory. It is a film about horror cinema as much as it is a horror film.

These disparities – between a desk-bound and petit female protagonist and apparent heroine and the serial killing sumo star – are certainly pronounced. The fact that they begin as new employees on the same day – entering the corporate building almost together – hints at a connection between them: predator and prey; Satan and saviour; the one facilitating the other. Yet in this context whose work is the most destructive or even productive? Whose lives are fulfilling or worthwhile? Kurosawa certainly takes the protagonist seriously as an educated, professional woman – knowledgeable, personable, helpful. There is little in the narrative that suggests any framing of existential guilt, though given that identity here is tied entirely to the workplace she could be argued to have to face down the sense that she is inseparable from her working life (personified by the sumo) and needs must break free from corporate Japan. To this end note the superb complication of the notion of the final girl in this film’s final shot, how said protagonist is left to make her way to her life and whatever that may, or may not, contain. She seems, socially, culturally, cinematically (given the composition here) peripheral, Kurosawa sly alluding to the fact that any interest in this character remains at the behest of and indexed to her victimhood. Yet she is palpably leaving this behind at the close of the narrative. Is she triumphant at being alive? A forlorn figure beside the family framed more centrally in the composition? Is this an end or beginning? This is very much open to question; but it remains penetrating with regard both to this film in particular and to the slasher film in general.

Having said this much, one must also stress the playful, satirical bent to the film. The killings are often exaggerated – one victim being crushed inside a steel locker almost as though being filed away – as much as to suggest that they are objects. The sense of people as things, no more or less important than documents, is writ large here: a literal extrapolation of a figurative status of life in the workplace. The salaryman (and woman) was at this stage the cornerstone of the Japanese economy, one that was beginning to collapse. Indeed, the summary lack of almost any exposition help adumbrate this aspect of the film. Like the protagonist, lives outside the confines of the company are so peripheral as to be virtually non-existent, as though they had none.

Moreover, working at the very end of the Director’s Company as he then was – when producers were often financing works hand-to-mouth on a daily basis and resorting to almost criminal activities to help keep abreast of cash flow problems – The Guard from Underground hinges on a vision not only of corporate malaise but also of a fundamental redundancy. Section 12’s hunt for the value of purchasable art seems almost entirely pointless – though it does have a resonance in those Japanese department stores that during the bubble economy opened their own small, on-site galleries. Here it is an outsized (like its villain) image of financial overreaching that contrasts with the industrial infrastructure that was at this time crumbling around Kurosawa’s film (after the mainstream industry had long-since fallen on very hard times) as it was around Japanese capitalism. We are thus faced with the question as whether this is more extreme or fantastical than an ex-Sumo serial killer; and as such; this is about Japanese horror as much as it is a Japanese horror film.

In this there remains an intriguing echo that resounds around a narrative set entirely within the confines of a corporate office block, where time and space congeal as days bleed into one another and the precise spatial dynamics of where different rooms are located in relation to one another is not always clear. It is a subtle vision, experienced rather than overtly felt – a world unto itself, from which escape may prove more difficult than from a deranged killer. It also suggests a director casting out in a new direction, refashioning his previous experiences and developing a voice that would very soon place him among the key filmmakers of his generation.