20 Cult Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die

A man who collects scrap metal (identified as the “fetishist”) slices his leg open with a knife and inserts a metal pipe beside his thigh bone, then runs into the street when he notices maggots in the wound, where he is struck by a car driven by a salaryman and his girlfriend. 

The salaryman leaves the scene of the accident, and later finds a piece of sharp metal growing out of his cheek; as the days go by, his entire body begins to transform into a machine. Many hallucinations later, the fetishist, still-alive and also half made of metal, returns to do battle with the now almost completely mechanized salaryman.

Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a relentlessly energetic film made at a time when the energy had all but disappeared from Japanese film. The culmination of a decade's worth of amateur short filmmaking and the crowning achievement on the activities of a private, experimental theatre group, Tetsuo has all the characteristics of unbridled zeal and amateur enthusiasm, and all the signs of true filmmaking talent. A film that combines nightmare imagery with modern industrial sensibilities. In short, this is extreme Asian cinema at its finest.