Horrors of Malformed Men

Suppressed by its own studio for decades and rarely screened, this is one of the strangest films Japanese cinema produced. A man escapes an asylum, assumes a dead double's identity, and washes up on an island ruled by a deformed mad genius conducting grotesque experiments, in a plot drawn from several Edogawa Rampo stories. The island's founder is played by a real butoh dance pioneer, and the film moves like a nightmare.

Toei buried it over content considered offensive, and it circulated for years only as a rumour. It is delirious, macabre and unlike anything else, closer to a fever than a narrative.

A legendary oddity, and a genuine lost-and-found treasure of Japanese horror.