As in Black Lizard, men fall hard for Miwa’s character, yet her melancholy nature renders her almost indifferent to their affections. For she is essentially waiting for a fairy tale prince: the man who can turn the petals of the rose she carries from black to red. While just as beautifully composed as Miwa and Fukasaku’s first collaboration, Black Rose Mansion’s slow burning drama lacks Black Lizard’s colorful fizz and pop.

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Just as the stories of his namesake Edgar Allan Poe continue to be used as source material by horror film directors, so Edogawa Rampo’s tales of mystery and imagination have undergone many an adaptation by Japanese filmmakers. Some of the finest examples of classic exploitation cinema—Black Lizard included— are based on Edogawa’s work.

Teruo Ishii’s 1969 epic Horrors of Malformed Men (Edogawa Rampo taizen: Kyofu kikei ningen) uses a few different Rampo tales to launch its all-out attack on the senses. To quote the ever informative Japanese film website Midnight Eye: “[Horrors…] taps into the country's post-nuclear trauma so audaciously that people fled theaters in disgust upon its release and that it has been consistently barred from appearing on video or DVD since.” (Well, at the least the last part is no longer true outside of Japan. Synapse Films and Panik House Entertainment co-released a new DVD of the film last year).

Horrors of Malformed Men trailer

Known for his tit-and-torture films (check the Joys of Torture series), Ishii takes his no-holds-barred aesthetic to new levels of crazy with the help of famed butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, who plays the film’s central Dr. Moreau figure to his dance company’s flock of man-beast mutant hybrids. The film’s final third could easily be a Jodorowsky film unto itself. Ishi’s final video, the ridiculously titled Blind Beast vs. Dwarf (Moju tai Issunoboshi, 2001) was another amalgam of Edogawa tales. Sadly, it is far less successful than its controversial predecessor in terms of cobbling together source material.

In an interview he did with Midnight Eye towards the end of his life, Ishii reflected on his long-standing love of Edogawa’s work and why he so often chose to adapt it in his films:

“I deeply love Rampo's work. It's a frightening but also an exciting and enjoyable experience to immerse yourrself in his very mysterious world, and it was that feeling that was at the source of all the adaptations of his work that I've done.

“Every boy from my generation up until the generation of Shinya Tsukamoto, who I get along with very well, has read the work of Edogawa Rampo. His writing was serialised in a magazine called Shonen Club, which was very popular among boys for many years. It's because we all began reading him during our childhoods that we feel very close to Rampo's work.”

Blind Beast may ring a bell for those who have seen Masamura Yasuzo’s 1969 stunning adaptation of the Edogawa story of the same name (the film has been released on DVD domestically by Fantoma). Blind Beast (Moju) tells the story of blind sculptor Michio, who with the help of his domineering mother, kidnaps and murders curvy females in the hopes of using their bodies as inspiration to create the ultimate female form.

Blind Beast trailer

Masamura stages the psychological showdown and S/M relationship that develops between the crazed artist and his voluptuous victim Aki (Mako Midori) in Michio’s warehouse-sized lair/studio. The set is a testament to art director Shigeo Mano’s genius: the two leads cavort on a huge sculpture of a nude woman and every surface is covered in giant reproductions of female eyes, ears, noses and breasts. If the outlandish sets don’t cause your jaw to drop, then the film’s tour-de-force ending certainly will. You want to know the real meaning of sacrifice in a relationship? Watch Blind Beast.