From Our Nightmares: Tomie (1998)

Director Ataru Oikawa’s cinematic adaptation of Tomie uses the basic premise of manga artist Junji Ito’s identically titled source material as a foundation to tell an otherwise entirely original story—a creative choice that some purists might decry as blasphemous, but which this particular fan considers elegantly pragmatic. The conflict is a convoluted web of relationships, revolving around (reduced to the bare essentials): an amnesiac young woman, her unfaithful punk rocker boyfriend, a no-nonsense hypnotherapist, an obsessed police detective, and (of course) an escaped insane asylum patient.

And at the center of these various characters’ intersecting orbits is the eponymous immortal femme fatale herself, the magnetic force that she exerts upon the narrative as irresistible as the gravitational pull of a black hole. For much of the film’s running time, Tomie is an enigmatic absence—an outlandish rumor about a murder victim that leaves behind no corpse, repeatedly slain and resurrected ad infinitum. Her name isn’t even uttered until the movie’s halfway mark—but by that point, the audience is already fully invested in the mystery surrounding her.

Her physical presence is unveiled only gradually. When we initially encounter her, she is little more than a severed head in a tote bag; the camera magnifies and fragments the details of her dissected anatomy via claustrophobically extreme closeups—a bloodshot eye here, a flash of clenched teeth there. As her body slowly regenerates, her face is carefully concealed from view, obscured by framing, blocking, and her own long, lustrous hair. When she finally emerges in all her glory, she absolutely lives up to her fearsome reputation: bathed in an eerie red glow, her features are distorted into an uncanny caricature of supernatural beauty and inarticulable wrongness—especially the tight, insincere grin that accompanies her bursts of shrill, mocking laughter.

Monstrously sadistic, yet tragic enough to invite a degree of sympathy (judging by the innumerable examples of casual misogyny we witness as the plot unfolds, her unfavorable opinion of men is hardly unjustified), Tomie makes an immediate and indelible impression, distinguishing herself as a bona fide J-horror icon in the same league as The Ring’s Sadako, Ju-On’s Kayako, and Audition’s Asami.