World Apartment Horror (1991)

directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

Japan

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm a big fan of Satoshi Kon, but prior to this I was somehow not aware that he did anything outside of animated films. And now that I've seen it, forgive the hyperbole, but I have to ask how have more people not seen this? It's got popular names attached to its creation, but more than that, it's just an absolutely brilliant, fun, imaginative, and original film with genuinely important social commentary. Is its message so unpopular that it's led to it becoming obscure, or is its obscurity just down to low distribution worldwide (which is ironic) for some other reason? I would hope the latter is all it is.

The film opens with a long shot of the crowded streets of Tokyo with specific emphasis on people milling around who are not Japanese. Pay attention to this, because it's essentially the theme of the entire film. Our main character is a yakuza enforcer who's picked specifically to clear out a building that the shady "construction company" he works for wants to raze because he runs a prostitution service dealing with - again - non-Japanese women, and the last remaining residents of the building are all foreigners. The yakuza assume that these people are going to be so naïve that it'll be easy to sway them to leave their homes, or possibly that they're all there illegally, and just dangling that fact over their heads will be enough to get them to acquiesce. Basically, racist assumptions of inferiority all around.

The guy they send begins a campaign of annoyance, doing everything your least favorite apartment neighbors have done, but times ten and more actively malicious - playing loud music, doing karaoke in the halls, having loud nasty sex in plain view, you get the idea. But the whole point of this is that the people who live in the building and come from all over, most barely or not at all able to speak Japanese, are never the ones being made fun of or caricatured. It's the guy who walks in assuming he has birthright to any and all space he wants just because he believes he "belongs" there who is made to look stupid. This is something that's still relatively rare to see in Japanese media: not only the message that nationalism is bad, but a demonstration of how ridiculous Japanese people look when they act racist against people who are just going about their lives, daring to not be Japanese. This is something I don't really have any place to speak about, being a white American, but it's also something that I want to see more of as somebody who is also trying to be anti-racist.

Of course, racism and xenophobia is horror enough, but where the "horror" in the title comes in is the fact that the apartment building also happens to be haunted by a hateful spirit. Eventually the spirit possesses the yakuza guy and it's up to the rest of the inhabitants to deal with it and drive out the spirit. I can't help but feel like the possession was a direct metaphor for what being a racist can do to a person: That kind of obsessive, teeth-gnashing, childish "this is mine and only mine and all mine and everyone else go home!" attitude can do nothing but eventually take over your life, growing and growing in influence like an evil spirit until you're not a person anymore, just a vehicle for hatred. The possessee is saved and realizes how stupid he had been, but the ending of the film, while optimistic in some ways, is ultimately a fairly grim reminder that the shadow of the things we've done out of hatred will hang over us forever - unless we learn to recognize it, and to actively work on doing what we can to repair the consequences that our actions have had for other people. "No more Japan. World apartment."

All of this is delivered in a subtly stylish and at times very humorous - but never, ever mean-spirited towards the wrong people - film. The set design is something you might not immediately notice but it is extremely important in creating atmosphere; I loved the look of that cluttered, run-down building where everybody lives in slight fear mixed with reverence of some awful malevolent force behind the walls. If you watch a lot of Japanese horror from the 90s to early 2000s, this looks really familiar. The dingy paper screens, very little furniture, trash in the halls, stuff piled on the floors. You could walk in and go "yup, there's a ghost here." I don't really consume enough anime to be able to compare this to specific films, but there is definitely an artistry here that does feel a lot more like, well, art than visual media (not saying the latter is not art, but I'm talking about drawn artwork). Again, it's amazing to me that this doesn't have a high-quality official release and not a lot of people have seen it.