One Cut of the Dead

Few hor­ror films gen­er­at­ed as much online chat­ter in 2018 as Shin’ichirô Ueda’s long-take zom­bie movie, One Cut of the Dead. Most recent­ly, on the eve of its UK release, an ille­gal copy of the film was uploaded to Amazon’s Prime stream­ing ser­vice, putting the indie flick’s inter­na­tion­al box-office hopes in jeopardy.

Until then, how­ev­er, the film had been a slow­ly sim­mer­ing suc­cess, from its unher­ald­ed ini­tial release in 2017 to its even­tu­al block­buster sta­tus in its native Japan the fol­low­ing year, where it made back 1000 times its shoe­string bud­get, beat­ing the likes of Ready Play­er One and Ven­om in the end of year tal­lies (lag­ging slight­ly behind that cul­tur­al jug­ger­naut, The Boss Baby).

Through­out the past 12 months, word spread: this is an audi­ence-pleas­ing, sur­pris­ing and very wel­come treat for film fanat­ics. A zom­bie film with a twist, best expe­ri­enced fresh, unspoiled and with a crowd. (Con­sid­er that a gen­tle warn­ing: there be spoil­ers ahead.)

An ultra low-bud­get zom­bie film is shoot­ing in a remote ware­house loca­tion. The direc­tor (Takayu­ki Hamat­su – flow­ery shirt, rat­ty demeanour, intense ded­i­ca­tion to the authen­tic­i­ty of dra­ma) turns to dia­bol­i­cal meth­ods when 42 takes of a key scene yield unsat­is­fy­ing results. Soon, real zom­bies start to flood the set, leav­ing the film’s two young stars and an unex­pect­ed­ly tough make-up artist to fight for their lives as, peri­od­i­cal­ly, the direc­tor pops up, grin­ning at the per­il, cam­era in hand, bel­low­ing ​‘actioooon!’.

Shot in one long take and replete with zom­bie-hor­ror clich­es, One Cut of the Dead lurch­es and lum­bers until, 36 min­utes in, our Final Girl emerges, drenched in blood but alive to act anoth­er day. And then the cred­its roll…

What begins as a charm­ing if ram­shackle take on well-worn genre con­ven­tion mutates in a moment. The action shifts to one month ear­li­er, and we are intro­duced to Takayu­ki Hig­urashi (Hamat­su again), a dead­beat direc­tor of karaōke music videos whose pro­fes­sion­al mot­to is ​‘fast, cheap, but aver­age’. A new project comes his way, the oppor­tu­ni­ty to launch a zom­bie-themed TV chan­nel with a live, sin­gle-take spe­cial called… One Cut of the Dead.

As the movie-with­in-the-movie plays out once more from a behind-the-scenes per­spec­tive, what first seemed tropey and ropey takes on new mean­ing as a chaot­ic back­stage farce unfurls. Parts are recast moments before broad­cast; scenes are rewrit­ten on the fly; actors turn rogue.

How­ev­er, in stark con­trast to the smart-aleck irony of post-Scream Hol­ly­wood hor­ror, One Cut of the Dead is remark­ably free from cyn­i­cism, play­ing out instead as a big-heart­ed cel­e­bra­tion of bodge-job, seat-of-your-pants, adren­a­line-rush film­mak­ing. In the face of end­less pro­duc­tion hur­dles, cast and crew come togeth­er to deliv­er the best they can, cul­mi­nat­ing in a tremen­dous­ly sat­is­fy­ing, resound­ing­ly whole­some cli­max as the final shot fades to black.

It’s this sin­cer­i­ty that makes One Cut of the Dead the per­fect film for hor­ror fans, and it’s no sur­prise that its rep­u­ta­tion was built on the fes­ti­val cir­cuit. After all, is there a com­mu­ni­ty more obsessed with how their cin­e­mat­ic sausage is made? The hor­ror appetite is made up of com­mu­nal movie marathons, tid­bit-filled audio com­men­taries, and piles of Fan­go­ria or Famous Mon­sters of Film­land mag­a­zines reach­ing up to the heavens.

One Cut of the Dead cel­e­brates the scrap­py spir­it that birthed a bil­lion B‑movies, and the make-do mav­er­icks that keep a genre churn­ing in defi­ance of the ebb and flow of pop­u­lar opin­ion. ​‘Ele­vat­ed hor­ror’ this is not: Ueda’s zany meta-hor­ror reveals how the shared expe­ri­ence of film­mak­ing can ele­vate us all.