Poster for Tetsuo: The Iron Man
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Year
1989
Country
Japan
Runtime
67 min
Director
Shinya Tsukamoto
Updated
10 Aug 2026
Obscurity
known (25/100)
Also known as
Tetsuo: The Ironman

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Sixty-seven minutes of industrial nightmare. Nothing else looks like it.

Sixty-seven minutes of industrial nightmare, and nothing else on this site looks like it. A Tokyo salaryman begins mutating into a mass of scrap metal, and Shinya Tsukamoto films the transformation as a black-and-white assault of stop-motion, strobe and shrieking noise. Narrative is almost beside the point.

It plays like a Cronenberg body-horror crossed with a Nine Inch Nails video made by hand, relentless and disorienting. Tsukamoto did nearly everything himself, and you can feel the obsession in every frame.

Not for everyone, and unforgettable for the people it is for.

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Filed alongside

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The Burning Moon

1992 · West Germany · 98m

Shot-on-video German splatter so homemade you can smell the garage. Ittenbach's Herschell Gordon Lewis tribute act.