The micro-budgeted One Cut of the Dead was a surprise success in its native Japan when it was first released in 2017, and has steadily accumulated cult cred in stateside horror circles as it has made the festival rounds and inched its way towards wide distribution. Now available to stream via the horror service Shudder, a wider audience is finally getting the chance to see what all the fuss is about.
I’d like to take a moment to explain precisely what said fuss is about, to illustrate why One Cut of the Dead is not only a terrific film in its own right but precisely the kind of perfect fare that should be a fixture of your October viewing line-up, but there’s a catch. One Cut of the Dead is built around a structural trick that you really, really, really owe it to yourself to see cold for the first time. Spelling out what the film is doing won’t ‘ruin’ it for you, but it will sap your first viewing of a truly terrific sense of surprise and discovery.
So here are the basics: One Cut of the Dead opens with a film crew attempting to shoot a low-budget zombie film in a big spooky abandoned building that is said to be haunted. The film’s director is an abrasive-bordering-on-abusive tyrant who eventually gets fed up and storms off to do…something. Whatever that ‘something’ is, it results in actual zombies appearing on the set to attack the cast and crew. As this mayhem unfolds, all of it is captured in one continuous take without even the kind of ‘hidden’ cuts usually used to stitch a oner together.
You may notice something…off, let us say, at times during this opening, and rest assured that this is very much intentional.
OK, hopefully that’s all you need. Go forth and enjoy One Cut of the Dead. But if you’ve already seen the movie, or need a little more convincing, then read on so we can talk about why this gimmicky zombie movie is so special in a world filled with gimmicky zombie movies.
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Last chance.
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SERIOUSLY, last chance.
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Right.
It’s because One Cut of the Dead is not a gimmicky zombie movie. It’s a ‘put on a show!’ comedy, and a spectacularly great one, with a second half that is one of the best sustained comic set-pieces in recent memory.
You see, the ‘real’ One Cut of the Dead is actually the story of harried director Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu) trying to stage the film-within-a-film for live broadcast, even as everything that could go wrong does. The leading man doesn’t show up meaning the mild-mannered Higurashi has to step in and play the aggressive auteur himself. There’s a method actress who makes things a little too real, a camera-guy with a bad back, a supporting actor with a drinking problem who picks the exact wrong moment to fall off the wagon, all this chaos unspooling just out of frame of the zombie action we’ve already witnessed.
The moment this became clear, when it clicked in that director Shin’ichirô Ueda was going to take us back through the entire single take, and that every slip-up and incongruity within that first section was actually a set-up to a delayed payoff as we now got to see how and why everything within that shot went right and/or wrong, man, I just started laughing and I didn’t stop until the (real) credits finally rolled.
Structurally, the only precedent I can think of is the brilliant 1966 caper film, Gambit, starring Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine. That movie let you see the same heist twice, once in a perfect run-through, and then again, for real, in which pretty much everything predicted and expected goes wrong in a dozen different ways. It’s funny, yes, but it’s also a ludicrously satisfying experience for a viewer who is paying attention. One Cut has that same quality, as Ueda (who also wrote the film) snaps all the pieces of his mousetrap into place.
And “put on a show!” stories are innately compelling in their own right. Watching people do their jobs well is always entertaining, and watching them try to continue doing those jobs well even as mayhem befalls their plans as if sprinkled freely by a deranged trickster god are only doubly so. Even in abbreviated form, Ueda convincingly sells you on the production team being a lovable crew of underdogs working like crazy to pull this show off, turning those moments within the oner where everything is clicking and working just as they should into sublime triumphs.
So the movie is great. It is, that’s a proven scientific fact like gravity or Jesus. But what aside from quality makes it the perfect film for this spooky season?
Everyone has their own tastes and their own way of doing things, but what I’ve always loved about the Halloween seasons is the chance to celebrate how fun horror can be. There’s a time and a place for the Martyrses of the world, but the sense of pageantry and community that comes with Halloween has, to me, always served as a reminder that horror need not be limited to purveying trauma and terror. It’s fun to be scared, and it’s fun to create scares, and the best Halloween-centric films are the ones which pair bloodlust and body counts with a wink and a smirk.
For my money, the ultimate October/Halloween movie is William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill starring Vincent Price. An unabashedly silly, gimmick-laden programmer, House on Haunted Hill throws every kind of ghoul and ghost it can think of at the camera, an approach made all the more delectable by a final twist revealing that all the spooky things encountered were elaborate stunts and pranks being played by Price and his character’s wife (Carol Ohmart) on each other, each spouse endeavoring to scare the other to death. Treading that thin line between malice and delight was always a specialty of Price, with a presence juuuuuust this side of camp and a permanently-bemused disposition underneath his unfaltering professional decorum.
That same spirit of naughty play pervades many of the other Halloween classics (one notable exception to this being, you know, Halloween) including Mike Dougherty’s proudly schlocky Trick’r’Treat. It’s in the hand-crafted appeal of the prosthetics and make-up, in the reverential nods towards horror’s past within movies, comics, and folklore, that understanding of the process that goes into earning a really good scare.
One Cut of the Dead is all about that process, with its second half delighting in the nitty-gritty of staging and capturing horror imagery in a way that will be, well, scary. The first section scares you, the second half breaks down the how and why that went into that scare, allowing you to revel in both halves of the horror movie equation. The film’s shockingly sweet conclusion takes it another step, depicting how the creation of horror can be a healing experience for the people involved in that creation.
One Cut of the Dead is all the more impressive for being Ueda’s debut feature film. There is so much confidence dripping off this thing, this absolute assurance that of course the technical marvel of the first section will work, of course the tonal needle of the second portion will be threaded, and of course the grand farce of the final stretch will play like gangbusters. Every shot feels surgical, and every performance feels dialed in to the exact right frequency.
For all these reasons, One Cut of the Dead deserves to be seen, and seen often. I’m already plotting a movie night with my buddies so I can spring this thing on them and watch as the movie does its work.
But in its celebration of how much effort goes into executing a really good scare, in its concerns with the practicalities that go into bringing a spooky fun time to life, One Cut of the Dead is keyed directly into the spirit (natch) of what makes this season so special.
So, if you’ve burned out your copies of Hocus Pocus, and have long since memorized every song in The Nightmare Before Christmas, if you’ve exhausted yourself on the Evil Deads and taken one too many trips down Elm Street, this may just be the new seasonal favorite to add to your line-up.
