Shintoho

I think Toei did quite a few.

And I know Shintoho

did a whole bunch.

Yeah.

A lot of really famous Japanese horror films.

And this is also a movie from Shintoho.

Which, also weirdly enough, I think this is the first Shintoho movie we've talked about on here.

Which is also... surprising, but I'm sure we'll get to more.

But Shintoho was a fairly short-lived studio in Japan.

After Toho had all of their crazy strikes and stuff in the 40s, they were having labor strikes, all kinds of crazy stuff going on.

But some of the defectors from Toho formed a new studio called Shintoho.

Shin being, you know, new.

Additionally, the S&M line of films began to infiltrate the wider pink consciousness where kidnapping, rape and subsequent BDSM training become much more common plot lines amongst many of these films.

Outside of Nekatsu, the Shintoho Rafis provided another important outlet.

You have Wakamatsu Serial Rapist from 1978 and Kan Makai's Tortured Women's Dark History from 1980.

These continued the earlier tradition of combining sexual violence with transgressive social commentary, albeit in a lesser form.

while Sachi Amano's Drifting in the Chaos from 1989 demonstrates how female directors could work within the increasingly marginalised and explicitly sexual pink film industry, including within topics such as rape and sexual assault.

As we have discussed on a previous episode of the podcast, Amano's depiction of sexual assault is truly horrific, it leaves no room for the eventual woman begins to love the sex trope, and the shock and trauma of the sexual assault is maintained through the sex scene.

Then you also have burgeoning directors like Kazuhiro Kamezu in the early 1980s pink films, where he's building off his legacy as an assistant director under Wakamatsu, where he established a market for violent pink films with various roughies himself, with Millions' Violence, Porno, Rope and Rape from 1982 and Shintoho's Pervert and Naked Rope, also from 1982.

The existence of all these films complicates any simple distinction between pink film as pornography and pink film as radical cinema.