My dear readers, while horror cinema is the specific focus of my endeavors, I still attempt a pleasant familiarity with a wide gamut of artistic media. Staged dramas have been a fond subject for me since boyhood and I have written previously, as some will surely recall, of my recent financial involvement in a one man version of John Carpenter’s The Thing. I can also happily boast of being a distant relative of Bancroft Hauntehouse, the “Mad Match Man of Wandingham.” Bancroft was an artist of the purest sort and I am told he put an impassioned quill to the page many a time in the service of the theater before his inventive spirit was seized by a more illicit and literally fiery pastime. While his more famed works certainly captured the public’s imagination with their flashy body count and headline news coverage, I feel Bancroft’s catalogue of one acts and satirical sketches remains shamefully uncelebrated. That is all to say, in a somewhat roundabout fashion, that I have some sense of what a difficult and dodgy business live theater can be. 

I have no doubt that Miyuki Goto (Kō Shibasaki) and Kosuke Hasegawa (Ebizō Ichikawa XI) would agree with me. They are co-stars in an elaborate theatrical production of Yotsuya Kaidan, a famous Japanese account of love, ghosts and bloody revenge. Kosuke plays the part of a truly unscrupulous samurai. I mean, the man is really all sorts of bad. Here I thought samurai were these unflappably ethical chaps who do themselves in at the first sign of dishonor and yet Kosuke’s character seems positively immune to shame. Miyuki plays a woman who has the great misfortune of spending the bulk of her time with this indefensible cad. During the course of their relationship, he manages to murder her father, dupe her into marriage, abuse her once they’re wed and conspire to poison her so that he may marry another. Ultimately, the indefatigable villain somehow manages even more sickening betrayals, ones that I would hate to spoil for the first time viewer.

The story of the samurai and his bride is pretty crushing all on its own. However, Over Your Dead Body really compounds the misery by letting us get a sneaky peek at the lives of Miyuki and Kosuke outside the confines of professional theatricals. As it turns out, the arty pair are finding some inadequacies of their own around the house and Kosuke strikes up an affair with Rio Asahina (Miho Nakanishi), the actress portraying Miyuki’s on-stage rival. As though their personal and professional stresses weren’t enough of a nuisance, the whole business of fiction and reality gets considerably blurry and it’s hard for a regular Johnnie to know what’s what. And as this is a horror film by director Takashi Miike, all this simmering domestic resentment business builds towards cruel spectacles of nauseating violence, horrors unrivaled by anyone in the current business of show.

During a prolific and untamed career, Mr. Miike’s forays into the horror genre have been memorable, to say the absolute least on the subject. Audition (1999), Gozu (2003) and the rather upbeat Visitor Q (2001) all demonstrated a fairly imaginative approach to terror and I find Imprint, his never-aired entry for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, to be a wonderful emetic during times of gastronomical distress. Over Your Dead Body is much the same in this regard and I imagine even seasoned veterans of the genre may find themselves viewing portions of this tale with eyes widened and jaw dropped. And much like those aforementioned efforts, one question hangs most prominently over the film -- what’s this all about then? Well, bold as it may be on my part to make assumptions about the mindset of such a bizarre and brilliant filmmaker, I think it’s all quite clear. Evidently some warnings against romance in the workplace prove to be quite astute and while wounded parties and bruised reputations seem all but inevitable, apparently genital mutilation and headlessness are equally likely outcomes.

At this time when we find ourselves reevaluating our attitudes towards gender dynamics in professional environments, Mr. Miike is clearly delivering a timely and responsible message about the perils of such an undertaking and for that I applaud him most heartily. I only wish more subversive artists took to public service in such a vivid fashion.

Over Your Dead Body runs 112 minutes and does not possess a certified rating in the United States.