A cruel dispatch from the less traversed regions of the burgeoning late ‘80s video industry, Evil Dead Trap anticipates the much more famous Japanese horror explosion of the late 1990s and early ‘00s that cast such a frigid, despairing shadow on the international horror scene. Following the likes of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Evil Dead Trap is a brutal and deeply disturbed portrait of modern urban ennui that turns a videotape – nominally a flourishing frontier of futuristic possibility – into a rumination of the darker side of technological democratization. In director Toshiharu Ikeda’s film, industrial modification and media transfiguration become conduits for a world on the edge of something fundamentally other than whatever it might have been before. In its disturbing force and multi-media experimentation, it sometimes plays like the grimy, unholy B-side to the Japanese sequences of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, framing modernity as something almost alien to itself.

Evil Dead Trap wastes no time winding and rewinding us. After a series of dismembered close-ups of bodies typing, watching, and bruising shot on video tape, the film cuts to a long cinematic shot of TV station employee Nami (Miyuki Ono) walking through the bowels of her office building to a backroom in search of a monitor and VCR to watch a recently arrived video cassette, to discover what alternative view of the world hides within its tape. The sudden shift – from a montage of cut-up incisions to a winding image of connective tissue – not only generates a frictive charge but directly engages the transition from one medium to another. By sheer force of its insatiable need to search for new technological life, to propel modernity, the cinematic detective slowly inevitably approaches the destructive monster of videotape which may doom it but which it simply cannot avoid.

When the film cuts to the videotape Nami puts on, what we watch is far beyond a mere snuff film. Gruesome images of eyes being gouged out intersperse with opposite-angle shots of eyes being gouged to form a perverse shot-reverse-shot conversation, making it seem like Nami herself is being penetrated in the sheer act of looking at the violence, her world coming undone, her body and soul no longer solid and unperturbed.  The abstract, black-and-white footage of an eyeball leaking blood suggests liquid metal seeping out of a robotic iris, as though she’s become irrevocably mutated into the strangest robotic-human hybrid this side of the more famous Tetsuo: The Iron Man from the same year. Cinema’s extension of technological life, its search for new mediums, becomes cinema’s death drive.

This tension defines the film. Ikeda continually switches between stately, almost classical long-shots of film as the characters wander around the space and violent seizures of videotape that upend and render moot their quest for answers. There’s an obvious, giallo-inflected madness to the film’s outré style, which trades formal logic and character reasoning for an increasingly absurd descent into a madness that only obsessive desire for the truth can wreak. The characters’ decisions increasingly don’t really “make sense,” but they’ve entered a world in which our mechanisms and assumptions need not apply, and in which the power of technological art to warp their ability to act reasonably is far beyond their ability to fight it. When the first named-character death occurs, her once-living body becomes what can only be described as a metal puppet. The “human” killer is never even seen. Her death seems to emanate from the very architecture of the worn-down factory building, and the worn-out filmic medium, she explores. It’s as though the space itself is forcing the characters to become a part of this metal manse, one with the analog detritus of the past.

Meanwhile, the nominal human “killer” – and this seems entirely intentional – hardly makes an impression early on. When we first catch a glimpse of a foreboding human presence, a hand reaching into the frame from below, it is immediately revealed to be another victim, and when his captor appears behind him, he just seems like part of the décor. Most of the kills are, narratively, straightforward “slasher” demises in which a human is stalking a victim and using a hand-held weapon they wield to murder them. But the way the film shoots these sequences entirely mutates their meaning. Throughout, many of the kill scenes are cut-up into abstractions of flesh and metal interacting in obtuse and elliptical ways, a violent experiment the killers seem to be conducting while they lurk in the background. Formally, the film seems to be pushing beyond the meeting of individual killer and individual victim that defined the ‘80s slasher boon, conscripting the very medium itself to enact a violence that had been wrought upon it by the video revolution.

It is perhaps not surprising that the ostensible reveal of the killer’s identity is both obvious and recognized as such by the film, a deliberately deflating banality. No human killer, the film seems to say, can best the creativity of the medium. That is, until the film throws us for another loop, adding supernatural body horror to the mix in an exquisitely absurdist coup that had to have materialized out of shadowiest corner of writer Takashi Ishii’s mind. The “real” killer, whose POV is rendered in videotape, literally deforms and escapes the apparent killer’s body. Suddenly, it is able to teleport anywhere and everywhere via its video-perspective, a deftly looney maneuver that signals its ability not only to “escape from out of my body,” as one character remarks, but to escape any body, the very idea of a body, one either cinematic or corporeal, the film suggests. This godless, blasphemous creation is a monstrous new technology far beyond cinema’s ability to coherently organize a space or develop individual characters. Rather than shoring up the body and the individual personality, it unmakes it and tears it to shreds. This impossible, demoniacal force cannot be demarcated into a single villain’s body, cannot be localized into a single being deemed “evil,” cannot be contained by classical cinema’s focus on constructing spaces for individuals to act in. Videotape, with its destabilizing energy and disregard for classical form, has been unleashed by cinema to murder cinema itself.

Evil Dead Trap is an exquisitely screwy motion picture, in other words, but it is most certainly not messing around. In the film’s most diabolically disturbing image – and there is stiff competition here – a dark background is slowly illuminated by an icy-blue wall of televised images of a woman tied up, her face painted in ghostly white, pleading in a chorus of many images of herself for help. Her multitude call, severed across many TV screens, becomes a hive-mind of repeated images droning in haunted unison. Evil Dead Trap suggests a devilish transmission in which the new technological light shining in the darkness may not be a beacon of a better world, and may mock the desire to see clearly in the first place. Masaki Tamura’s cinematography alternates frigid, spectral blues with blood-curdling reds. Near the end, it conjures a glistening rain of concrete ash, video dust, and static fuzz that fall like a post-modern version of the snow that blankets so many classic Japanese folktale horrors in a mood of spectral woe. In images like these, Evil Dead Trap emerges as a cunning and uncannily potent portrait of a nation on the verge of international power grappling with its version of modernity as a gaping maw in which much of the old is being swallowed whole, and in which humanity will never be the same.

Score: 8.5/10