10 Horror Movies Nobody Understands

10. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1991)

Shinyu Tsukamoto's low budget horror is a psychosexual acid trip rendered in heartstopping stop motion and shot on 16mm monochrome film. It tells the story of a Japanese office worker who crosses paths with a metal fetishist intent on a gradual metamorphosis into a machine, and who is also transformed - and ultimately transfigured - as a result.

Those are the bare bones of the plot, but the execution is something else. Veering wildly between the subgenres of body horror and cyberpunk like a suicidal driver steering into oncoming traffic, Tetsuo is obsessed with a hypermasculine idea of the generative impulse as aggressive penetration, reconstructed on a dirty factory floor.

The protagonist's transformation, at first a nightmare, spills uncontrollably into reality, destroying his relationship in a grotesquely sexual ordeal as his groin becomes a huge drill. A chase across the city climaxes with the man and the metal fetishist, both irrevocably mutated into tool-vehicle-factories, merging into a single monstrosity and promising to - what? Destroy the world? Remake it? Who knows.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man might have a lot to say about the rapacity of industrialisation in modern Japanese culture, but whether you can bear to watch it enough times to figure any of it out is another story...