When the Showtime cable network tasked director Mick Garris with creating a horror anthology series for American television, Takashi Miike’s name may well have been high on the wish list. The director of ‘Audition’ (1999) and ‘Ichi the Killer’ (2001) was a generation younger than many of the other luminaries on Garris’ proposed roster – Carpenter, Coscarelli, Gordon, Hooper, Argento and others were all directors who had arguably produced their most famed and consistent work years before – while Miike’s stock was on the rise. Garris would have known that Miike would deliver something different considering how audiences (barf bags) and censors (outright bans) had reacted to some of Miike’s previous efforts. He’d also have believed that the format’s promise of offering directors a chance to produce a work free of censorious cuts would suit the Japanese director. Miike was keen to rise to the challenge, even conducting research into American audience sensibilities so he could deliver something suitable.

You can probably already tell that things didn’t exactly work out.

Imprint tells the tale of an American newspaper man named Christopher (Billy Drago) who is searching for a lost love – Komomo (Michie) – in feudal Japan. His search takes him to an island famed for its entertainments (also for being a place where only demons and whores live), where he becomes transfixed by a deformed young brothel employee (Youki Kudoh) who has a very interesting tale to tell. Over the course of the night, Kudoh torments the journalist with different versions of the truth, one of which may or may not hold the key to what happened to Christopher’s lost love. By morning, Komomo’s fate seems even less certain while the audience is left to ponder whether or not Christopher has been able to retain any of his sanity. Or if he hasn’t already entered hell.

Garris has referred to Imprint as potentially the most disturbing thing he’s ever seen. The work is highly polished, intensely visual, with performances which veer from the naturalistic to the hammy (Drago’s in particular seems reminiscent of Tommy Wiseau’s turns). It’s 1,001 Arabian Nights, Rashomon, and Japanese ghost stories blended into a concoction that even seasoned horror watchers will squirm at. Youki Kudoh as the story-teller delivers a performance that swings the full gamut from innocence to outright malevolence, reminiscent of Eihi Shinai’s Asami in Audition. She is, much like Asami, a vessel perhaps of rage, of cruelty, of pure vengeance. Christopher may begin his evening feeling sympathy and even arrogance over her, but by the end she’s turned the tables on him to horrifying results.

Watching again, I can’t help but feel some sympathy for show runner Garris. He has said himself that ‘Imprint’ is a feature for which cuts won’t work, with barely a scene passing which doesn’t contain some horror. That said, what Garris and Showtime executives thought they were getting from a director like Miike is tough to tell. Miike was given a remit, told he’d have carte blanche to produce a work of horror, and even was able to shoot in Japan where he’d have total autonomy. Miike himself seems sanguine over the experience, accepting his own audience miscalculations and seems almost thankful that the work was pulled from the season’s roster rather than being cut beyond recognition. Occasionally showing at horror festivals and available through streaming services online, Imprint remains one of Miike’s most singular work and should probably be regarded as one of the best episode’s of Master’s of Horror’s two seasons. Not that the Showtime audiences in 2006 would have known that.

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