The "dangerous" 1974 movie that turned Takashi Miike onto horror

The 'dangerous' 1974 movie that turned Takashi Miike onto horror: 'I started to feel affection' Most of us will have a memory of having seen a movie growing up that we really had no business watching at a young age. For me, it was probably The Terminator at about 12, which was going fine until Arnold Schwarzenegger cut his own eye out in the mirror, and then I had nightmares for months. For Japanese actor and director Takashi Miike, the film that got his attention as a youngster was one that probably had a similarly traumatising effect on a lot of people who saw it back in 1974, and that was the seminal horror The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Most upsettingly for Miike, who was just 15 and a teenager in Osaka, Japan, when he sat through the Tobe Hooper-directed slasher about a gang of friends who get set upon by cannibals, he hadn't even gone to see the film specifically, as he recalled, 'Charlie Chaplin's City Lights was having a revival. I went to watch it, but the screening was sold out'. Watching Leatherface do away with a bunch of not particularly bright American students with a variety of sharp implements in the Deep South certainly had an impact on Miike, who added, 'Up until that point, movies had been something safe. For the first time, I felt that movies could be something dangerous. As I watched the film, the characters became more endearing. I started to feel affection for them. By the end, I was rooting for them and laughing out loud.' And the fact that he did spelt bad news for us future film fans, because Miike would go on to make some of the more disturbing films released in the modern era, including Ichi the Killer and the frankly horrendously upsetting Audition from 1999, which regularly finds a place on the best horror films ever made and was a big influence on the likes of Eli Roth. You can trace it back to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, though, because the director maintains that nobody in Japan had ever experienced a film like that before, and that because of it, everyone in his homeland was convinced that Texas must be a desolate, dangerous landscape. And the general influence of the 1974 horror can't be overstated, because not only did it bring in $31million on a budget of just $100k, the fallout from it can be seen in almost every similar film since, from John Carpenter's Halloween a few years later, to Ti West's masterful X in 2022, which paid direct homage to Hooper's film. It would also spawn a franchise that would go on to include eight more movies, plus comic books and two video game adaptations, all of which brought in more than a quarter of a billion dollars over a 50-year span. As for Miike, he's still going strong and is about to unleash the third film in the Bad Lieutenant series, which started back in 1992 with Harvey Keitel and continued seven years later with Werner Herzog directing and Nicolas Cage in the lead role. This time, the movie is Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, and is set for a world premiere on September 14th. The action thriller will involve a police officer, an FBI agent and a gambling addict getting sucked into the disappearance of a leading politician's daughter, and you can be sure it'll be as twisted as the rest of them.