Interviews
[Interview] Takashi Miike Looks Back on His Controversial “Masters of Horror” Episode, “Imprint”
On the anniversary of Takashi Miike’s controversial ‘Masters of Horror’ episode, the director looks back on what he considers to be his scariest work.
Takashi Miike is not only one of the most prolific directors that is currently working, but he’s made a strong name for himself in terms of delivering uniquely frightening and unexplainable visuals. Even his movies that aren’t specifically part of the horror genre still contain macabre sequences. It certainly seems like Miike has a mastery over the genre, which makes it so interesting that he’s actually pretty susceptible to becoming its prey.
“I’m actually quite a scaredy cat, myself. Since a child I’ve been this way,” admits Miike. “I’m even a little afraid of the dark. If I’m alone in the dark I’ll sometimes feel that there’s a presence behind me and I’ll even be afraid to turn around. But then if I do get the courage to turn around, I’ll just be scared that whatever was there has just jumped over to the other side of me.”
Miike elaborates on this fear and how it’s impacted his appreciation of the horror genre. “This sounds really silly, but as a child I’ve always been a bit of a coward so I don’t watch many horrors films myself. I personally don’t want to pay money to go to a theater to get horribly frightened!” Miike’s own works aren’t even exempt to this fear. He explains, “Even after I finish making horror films, I usually don’t go to a theater to watch them myself.”
Miike has crafted some truly frightening works with Audition at the forefront of the pack, but it’s actually Miike’s contribution to Showtime’s Masters of Horror series that’s stuck with him the most. “The scariest of the projects that I’ve worked on is ‘Imprint,’” says Miike. “Everyone kept telling me that America’s a free country and that I could really do whatever I wanted. It’s cable TV, so don’t hold back at all and make it as scary as possible. So I did that and then when I showed it to the producers in Japan, they were like, ‘I know we told you that you can do anything, but this is going too far. This is way too far.’”
“Imprint” tells a highly disturbing story that sets in 1800s Japan and involves a man checking in on a prostitute who he left behind many years ago. Needless to say, the prostitute’s life has fallen onto terribly harsh times and the end product isn’t just traumatic; it was too much for the network. Showtime shelved Miike’s episode, only to eventually release it much later on DVD.
“We even had to publish this article in the New York Times apologizing that said that this was supposed to be a 13-episode series, but an episode’s been cut because it was too scary, so now it’s just twelve episodes,” remembers Miike. “’Imprint’ was definitely the scariest project that I’ve worked on.”
With it now the anniversary of one of Takashi Miike’s most extreme and interesting works, why not find the time to revisit this eerie installment of television and see just what all of the fuss was about. All of these years later, “Imprint” still makes for an extremely unsettling experience.
“Imprint” is currently available to stream on Tubi and Amazon Prime.
Interviews
“Pretty Little Liars: Summer School” Series Creators on Bigger Slasher Season, Horror Influences, and Spooky Spaghetti
The slasher-themed relaunch of “Pretty Little Liars” from series creators/writers/executive producers Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (“Riverdale,” “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”) and Lindsay Calhoon Bring (“Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”) is back with the brand new season “Pretty Little Liars: Summer School,“ plunging the final girls into a summer of horror.
“Summer School“ begins TODAY (May 9), only on Max.
After surviving last season’s Millwood massacre and unmasking “A,“ Mouse (Malia Pyles), Noa (Maia Reficco), Faran (Zaria), Imogen (Bailee Madison) and Tabby (Chandler Kinney) are back to process their trauma and get on with their lives. Except they’ll be forced to take on summer school. When a mysterious new villain emerges, summer school won’t be the only thing derailing the girls’ plans for summer fun and romance (read our review).
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Lindsay Calhoon Bring about the second season, which continues the heavy emphasis on horror and packs in the references. That even includes an homage to Bloody Disgusting!
The pair also reveal more about this season’s threat, and what lies ahead.
“Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin“ saw the core five survive their violent confrontation with “A,“ presenting a unique scenario in creating a slasher centered around not one but five Final Girls. That presented a unique challenge for the writers this season.
Aguirre-Sacasa explains, “It’s funny, your first question literally cuts to the heart of basically every conversation we have in the writer’s room, which is most slasher movies or shows have one final girl. But the very essence, heart, and DNA of our show are that we have five final girls. Six, if you count Kelly [Mallory Bechtel]. One of the tropes of a final girl is that there’s always an amazing chaser test at the end of the movie. We landed, I think, pretty early on the idea that Bloody Rose would test each girl as though preparing them to be the final girl for the final test. So that was a very conscious decision early on, and that would be a cool way to create horror set pieces for each girl.“
“It was,“ Calhoon Bring adds. “In season one, our ultimate final girl ended up, story-wise, thematically, with our sins of the mothers being tied to the child, and the ultimate sinner being Imogen’s mother. Our ultimate final Final girl was Imogen. This season going in, we knew that we wanted to test each girl, as Roberto said, but we also did love this idea of one of our little liars being the final Final Girl. So without giving too much away, our finale does center on one of our liars as the ultimate Final Girl this season.“
There’s a distinct tonal shift this season, with “Summer School“ much lighter than the grim “Original Sin.“ While the setting contributes to that, Bloody Disgusting asked the showrunners whether the shift in horror – embracing everything from creepypastas to cult horror – informed that tone shift in any way.
Calhoon Bring answers, “We always approach every episode, every season with story first, character first, and what are our little liars going through? We knew that with season two, we didn’t want to forget the events of season one. We didn’t want them to jump past them. We wanted them to live in them and move through them. At the same time, per your tone question, we thought, ‘Gosh, season one was really heavy. The girls were grappling with really dark, grounded horrors and dramas, as well as the heightened horror of having a Michael Myers chase them with a knife.‘ We did want to infuse more fun into this. Summer, to us, did feel like the perfect backdrop for fun, slasher horror, a little more fun for the girls bringing in Dr. Sullivan [Annabeth Gish] to help them work through their traumas, but also give them permission to have summer flings, have summer jobs, have a good time. So we did consciously do a bit of a tonal shift as well.“
Creepypastas influence the horror in a huge way this season, both with the villain, Bloody Rose, and the mysterious “Spooky Spaghetti“ website. Aguirre-Sacasa breaks down the idea behind “Spooky Spaghetti“ and a surprising source of inspiration for its creation.
“Obviously, one of the inspirations for season two was the Slender Man,“ the showrunner says. “Lindsay and I love not the Slender Man fictional movie but the Slender Man documentary, and we are obsessed with the Slender Man true crime case. I think one of the things we think is so terrifying about the Slender Man is that you kind of don’t know if he’s real or not. You don’t know if it’s this supernatural figure that crossed over into the real world. So, we needed a website that held that legend, and thus Spooky Spaghetti was born. One of the really fun things about it that we liked was that it took one of our favorite Pretty Little Liars, Mouse, and put her at the heart of the mystery in a really organic, cool way. Sometimes, that can be the hardest thing to do. But I remember when we got the cut of the first episode, I think, Lindsay, you got to see it before me, and you called, and you were like, ‘Oh my God, here’s what really works. Spooky Spaghetti.‘ We agree.
“But for sure, listen, I think we all check Deadline and Bloody Disgusting ten times a day, so it’s an homage to Bloody Disgusting as well.“
The default aim for slasher sequels is to go bigger than before, and “Summer School“ takes that to heart with more elaborate, visually creative set pieces this season. Especially the more Bloody Rose tests the Liars.
“We have such an amazing team, and we love talking about them,“ Calhoon Bring says of this season’s sets. “Our production designer, Brett Tanzer, and his set decorator, Lauren [Crawford]. We also have an amazing locations manager, Dave Lieber, who has so much fun. Sometimes, the locations will inspire a story for us, too, because as he’s looking around the locations in the upstate New York towns that we’re seeing, he’ll send us photos and say, ‘Hey, I found this amazing roller rink.‘ Then we think, ‘Well, we have to use that amazing roller rink. We have to find a space for this.‘ ‘Hey, there’s this an abandoned campground. What could we do? Can we do an outdoor movie at an abandoned campground? That would be amazing.‘
“We worked very closely with our team to make sure that every episode was very special and had a special set piece. A big ongoing conversation for us that was a tricky thing to do actually was that we knew early on that we wanted Faran to be a lifeguard, and we knew that we wanted to have a pool as a summer set piece. Those conversations happen so early, and finding a pool isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s like finding the right pool, making sure that it’s the right aesthetic, that it’s broken down, that there are woods nearby, that it feels scary, that it’s operational, that we can use it. So, those conversations happened even sometimes earlier than we were writing the episodes.”
Aguirre-Sacasa elaborates, “Just to piggyback off that, the day that Lindsay and I got emails from Dave, our locations manager, for the church where Redemption House, that storyline was set. When we toured it, it was like, ‘This is the creepiest.‘ Literally, it’s next to a cemetery, and across the street from it is another cemetery. It’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to be setting up shop here.‘ We just moved in for the season. It was really great.”
While the series creators won’t spoil all the horror fun ahead in “Pretty Little Liars: Summer School” – but definitely expect the new season to really embrace all of your summer horror favorites in a big way – the pair do offer some exciting teases for what’s ahead.
“We’re so happy that we have Annabeth Gish with us, reprising her role as Dr. Sullivan,“ Calhoon Bring tells us. “Roberto, you’ve mentioned this; one of our favorite things in horror movies is the amazing monologue that a harrowed, usually final girl gives talking about her trauma. Roberto invoked Phoebe Cates in Gremlins, talking about that ill-fated night. We love those. We think that Annabeth, as Dr. Sullivan, delivers a tour de force horror monologue and a horror sequence in our penultimate [episode] that we’re very, very excited for people to see.“
“Yeah, it is kind of like Jason’s mother’s monologue about Jason drowning,“ Aguirre-Sacasa added. “It’s about Dr. Loomis talking about Michael Myers and the devil’s eyes. We love that. I think we can also tease in our finale. It’s our favorite episode of the season, the finale, and knowing that we had done essentially a handful of final girl chases and tests throughout, we knew that our finale had to be pretty apocalyptic and pretty epic. So we looked at some of our favorite movies like Midsommar and Texas Chain Saw Massacre for those truly apocalyptic horror movie endings that are just so gonzo, and without spoiling much, we wanted to do our version of that.
“And it is pretty harrowing, pretty harrowing.”
Which Final Girl will become the ultimate Final Girl this season? “Pretty Little Liars: Summer School” debuts exclusively on Max on May 9 at 12:00 a.m. PT with two episodes, followed by one new episode airing weekly through June 20.
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