Demon(ized) women: Female punishment in the ‘pink film’ and J-Horror

Abstract

This article argues that Japanese ‘pink film’, a cycle of exploitative soft-core pornography popularized throughout the 1960s, frequently brutalized women for their perceived role in declining social values following an assumed transgression of expected gender behaviors. Subsequently, films of this subgenre deployed sexual and fetishistic practices designed to reposition women within subordination, a theme particularly evident in Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion which utilizes this exploitative genre to explore a male fear of progressive female sexuality. Rather than a meditation on gender equality, Female Prisoner can instead be read as a warning from those who face disenfranchisement at the hands of social parity. Such concerns, this article concludes, manifest themselves throughout Japanese cinema, especially J-Horror with films such as Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge. However, whereas the pink film reflects male fears of female ascension, J-Horror rearticulates such issues from a feminine perspective. In the pink film, women are punished for challenging the status quo whereas J-Horror presents females as oppressed victims of masculine monstrosity within a transitional modernity.