Audition

Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is a lonely widower looking for a mate, a dream girl or perhaps merely a receptacle for his misery. Pretending to audition women for a TV show, he finds Asami (Eihi Shiina), who will both bring his lust to boiling and knock his fantasies into agonizing reality. “Words create lies,” Asami sagely says. “Pain can be trusted.” She tests that trust by severing a foot with piano wire and employing a method of needle probing we might call eye-cupuncture. The crafty, impossibly prolific Takashi Miike — he has directed 75 movies and TV films since 1971 — is a master of the grotesque in many genres. (Catch his comix fantasy Fudoh: The New Generation, his yakuza drama Gozu and the indescribably strange family epic Visitor Q.) But unlike Saw and its imitators in the genre of torture porn, Audition doesn’t go for gore-ific money shots. Miike’s films live inside their characters, taking the temperature of their longings, the ridiculous ambitions they chase so obsessively and their need to experience the extreme to prove they’re alive.
The Phantom of the Opera

One of the great “reveals” in horror films comes when the phantom’s mask is removed to show a grotesque visage with distended eyes, misshapen nostrils and cadaverous teeth. Director Rupert Julian’s lavish subterranean nightmare (best seen on Milestone’s two-disc set) is a tribute to the artistry and masochism of Lon Chaney, the “man of a thousand faces” who endured extraordinary pains to scare audiences and burrow into the sad hearts of characters like Quasimodo, Mr. Wu and the phantom. This film was remade many times, most recently as V for Vendetta.
More Best & Worst Lists
View AgainHorror Movies
- Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
- The Fly
- The Exorcist
- Night of the Living Dead
- Freaks
- Blood Feast
- Carrie
- Men Behind the Sun
- Paranormal Activity
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
- Thirst
- Braindead/Dead Alive
- Jaws
- Bambi
- Audition
- The Phantom of the Opera
- Trilogy of Terror
- Peeping Tom
- Halloween
- Frankenstein
- Nosferatu
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers
- Alien
- Psycho













