Fright Club Live: The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)
Director: Takashi Miike Run Time: 113 min. Rating: R Release Year: 2002
Starring: Keiko Matsuzaka, Kenji Sawada, Kiyoshiro Imawano, Naomi Nishida, Shinji Takeda
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Fright Club Live at Gateway Film Center
July 14, 2023 | Meet up with fellow horror movie lovers at 7:30PM and then join us at 9PM for the live recording of MaddWolf’s Fright Club podcast hosted by George Wolf and Hope Madden before the screening.
See more Fright Club LiveAbout the film:
From Takashi Miike, the prolific director of genre milestones Audition (1999) and Ichi the Killer (2001), comes The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)—a movie that can best be described as The Sound of Music (1965) meets Dawn of the Dead (1978).
“A go-for-broke animation-comedy-fantasy-horror-musical spectacle”
—Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine
Guests are turning up dead at a peaceful country inn owned by the Katakuris family. To keep bad word of mouth from spreading, the Katakuris chop up and bury the guests. But that’s only the beginning of their problems. Featuring grotesque stop motion animation, surreal musical numbers, and gore-lusting zombies, The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) stands tall as one of the most unique, bizarre, and satisfying horror-comedies ever made.
Restoration courtesy of Arrow Video and the American Genre Film Archive.
About the filmmaker:
Takashi Miike is an iconic Japanese film director, producer and screenwriter. He spent almost a decade working in television before becoming an assistant director in film. During the first stage of his career, Miike mostly directed low-budget films for the Japanese direct-to-video market. His cinematic debut, Shinjuku Triad Society (1995) gained a nomination from the Director’s Guild of Japan, and its extremely violent depiction of underworld gang wars would become a recurring theme in his work.
Since then, Miike has made over 100 films and has gained a strong cult following. His international breakthrough Audition (1999) won the international film critics’ award at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000. His other features include Ichi the Killer (2001), Gozu (2003), One Missed Call (2003), the Dead or Alive trilogy, and 13 Assassins (2010). His films have screened at festivals all over the world, with Hara-kiri (2011) and Straw Shield (2013) premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2019, Fantastic Fest honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
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