Pikunikku (1997, dir. Shunja Iwai) | Field Notes From Hell! #21
Hey, hey!
I come bearing a new dispatch from a week of watching horror movies and TV. This week, I rewatched Shunji Iwai’s 1996 [categorically] horror film about Japan’s often-forsaken outcasts.
Enjoy, friends!
GRATEFULLY, I’VE BEEN REMINDED by a YouTube video of my love for Shunji Iwai’s Pikunikku, a singularly disturbing fable about the horrors that plague the minds of Japan’s youth from the late nineties to the early aughts. This is my favorite era of J-horror: fears predicated by existential dread, a tragic yearning for kinship or connection, and socioeconomic anxieties. I’ve produced quite a long list of those sorts of films I like over the years, but there’s plenty to talk about this one, which, in true Iwai fashion, fixes these heavy themes in such a frenetic and vibrant package. Watching it quite literally feels like trying to cup livewire with your bare hands.
The film follows three young mental institution patients on their excursions slipping outside their asylum. Coco, a young woman who has just been admitted to the facility, inadvertently leads two boys, Tsumuji and Satoru, to a Christian church who gifts them a bible. Reading the colophon date incorrectly as Day of Reckoning, the three journey on walls and fences hoping to find the best spot to watch the apocalypse happen, as if the end of days were any other hanabi.
Though not “horror” in the traditional sense, the events that transpire in this ostensibly kooky coming-of-age film are bleak and heart-rending. As noted by @NightmareMovies’ video essay, Tsumuji’s hallucinations about his deceased (and heavily implied to be abusive) teacher is an episode doused in Lynchian dread. The use of animatronic dread is made more uncanny on the HD remaster; it presented the abuse in viciously clear detail, both the act and its escalation from manipulation to full molestation. Tsumuji is played ably by a young Tadanobu Asano five years before he takes on Ichi the Killer.
Coco (Chara), meanwhile, is this self-mythologizing character ripped right out of a magical realist novel. The world, she notes, begins and ends with her — a solipsistic thing to say, sure, but the film frames it as a way to give outcasts on the fringes of society (read: the institutionalized) some semblance of agency when theirs have been stripped away by the very social units that have sworn to protect it. Their families, their church, and their country.
ABOUT THE FILM
🤖 Pikunikku dir. Shunji Iwai | Drama, Horror | 🇯🇵
Believing that the world will end that very day, three mental patients Coco, Tsumuji, and Satoru set out upon a journey. Walking upon the tops of the walls of the city, they seek to find a picnic spot with the best vantage point to view the final event.
Horror recs this week
Every FIELD NOTES FROM HELL dispatch includes a three-pack of horror recs: 1.) recent horror, 2.) horror classic, and 3.) guilty pleasure/underrated horror.
Here are this week’s recommendations.
1️⃣ New Horror: Best Wishes To All (2023, dir. Yûta Shimotsu)
Viewers will struggle stomaching the horrors in Yuta Shimotsu’s absurdist nightmare, Best Wishes To All, an unnerving fable about the social indifference cultivated under a zero-sum, late-stage capitalist society. It insists that it’s a dark comedy, but there’s really no humor in having to inflict suffering to achieve true happiness. It’s a nihilistic fever dream that, on first watch, will come enshrouded behind the ooky-spooky J-horror antics. But the longer this movie sits in your head, the harder it screws with it. I still haven’t been able to get it out of mine.
Best Wishes To All is a recent import to Shudder. Watch it here.
2️⃣ Classic Horror: Martin (1977, dir. George A. Romero)
When I think George A. Romero, I don’t always think zombies. Recently, my mind goes to his 1997 film, Martin, a disarmingly intimate and sickening portrait of social isolation through the lens of vampirism. It’s such a rich character study that you catch yourself almost sympathizing on the titular killer’s side. Easy recommend to anyone who’s looking to be unnerved.
Martin is streaming on Shudder. If you’re outside their serviced countries, there are dubious copies uploaded all over YouTube — but you didn’t hear that from me *wink!
3️⃣ Underrated Horror: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, dir. Jim Gillespie)
With Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s requel finally in theaters, I figured this week is ripe timing to shout out the 1997 original, directed by Jim Gillespie and written, perhaps more notably, by Kevin Williamson. I say that because I Know What You Did Last Summer has always felt so akin to Williamson’s other major project, Scream. And in some ways, it has cast a big shadow over this perfectly worth-to-revisit teen slasher that, like Scream, has plenty of wits, thrills, and indelible movie moments (look: Jennifer Love-Hewitt screaming “what are you waiting for” is elite meme-ry).
Every week, we’re listing down upcoming horror films and television series. We’re also throwing in some notable horror news to keep you all looped in.
Here’s what’s new in horror this week.
🪝 The new I Know What You Did Last Summer requel is out now in theaters. For my Filipino readers, it’s out next week!
👁️ Michael Shanks’ Together, starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, is premiering in theaters next week.
🔪 Dexter: Resurrectionisn’t so terrible as so many have feared. The cast is stacked, with Uma Thurman playing a right-hand woman to a kind of Jude Coyne character, played by Peter Dinklage. Watch it on Paramount+.
👾 Predator: Badlands has dropped an official trailer — and they’re not hiding its ties to the Alien franchise.
👽 Speaking of aliens, Alien: Earth is just a few weeks away. Just thought I’d remind you. Oh, they also released a four-minute preview.
🦖 There’s a new horror movie that can only be described as Jurassic Park set in the Vietnam War. It’s called Primitive War, and the first trailer just dropped via Bloody Disgusting.
Terror trinkets & threadfuls
O.K., so I’ve decided this is going to be a weekly thing. This week, let me put you on some cool trinkets, merch items, and collectibles. Mainly, I want the Alex G vinyl of the I Saw The TV Glow soundtrack, but here’s the rest my weekly reco.
From left to right, here are the products featured:
Jaws 50th AnniversaryResin Dunny Art Figure — I loooove the poster recreated in this dunny silhouette, though at $150, I’m not too sure if I’m loving the price. But hey, if you have the dough to knead on this kind of thang, get it!
That’s it for this week’s digest! Thank you so much for reading through.
ABOUT FIELD NOTES FROM HELL
FIELD NOTES FROM HELL is Deep Cuts’ weekly email digest. Dispatches go out every weekend, with handpicked capsule reviews, news updates, and horror recommendations.
