The Best Episode of Masters of Horror Is the One Showtime Wouldn't Air

The biggest names in horror, uncut and uncensored. That was the hook of Masters of Horror, the short-lived anthology series that premiered on Showtime in 2005, bringing a who's who of fright cinema — including John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, and Joe Dante — to the small screen, 60 minutes at a time.

A new scary movie by a different director every week was probably enough to get Fangoria subscribers to update their cable packages. But the truly enticing part was that none of these giants of the genre would have to water down their vision for television. In exchange for working on a tight schedule and a modest budget, each had been given complete creative control, with no limits or restrictions on the content of their episodes. It was a selling point for fans and the participating filmmakers alike.

Many of those filmmakers capitalized on the mandate to misbehave, indulging in the kind of gore and (this being Showtime) explicit sex that would usually get flagged by the MPAA, to say nothing of network execs. But there was one director in the stable who took the freedom to push the envelope as more of a challenge. Granted permission to show anything, he decided to show everything. But what exactly were they expecting when they gave carte blanche to Takashi Miike, the prolific Japanese director of such exercises in extremity as Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q, and the unforgettable Audition?

"The most disturbing movie I've ever seen" is how Masters of Horror creator Mick Garris described Miike's episode, "Imprint." The suits at Showtime evidently agreed. They had already walked back the uncut promise earlier in the season, trimming some gruesome phallic violence from Dario Argento's installment, "Jenifer." But a little carnivorous castration was nothing compared to what Miike had in store. Attempts to lose the most objectionable moments left something that was still fundamentally and inherently objectionable. And so Showtime opted to not air the episode at all; it was only when the first season came to DVD that fans got a chance to see (and never unsee) what was too extreme for premium cable.

In one sense, "Imprint" feels like Miike's attempt to live up to his whole bad-boy reputation — and maybe to top his previous assaults on the very concept of "too much." Basically opening the episode with the bloated corpse of a dead pregnant woman floating in the water, the director proceeds to violate every taboo he can think of, offering an escalating gauntlet of murder, rape, pedophilia, incest, backwoods abortion (complete with graphic footage of fetuses flung into a river), and some of the most nightmarishly prolonged torture ever depicted in a nominally mainstream movie. "Imprint" is appalling. It also happens to be the best episode of Masters of Horror — a genuinely daring and deranged plummet into Hell on Earth.

Based on a story by Japanese author and pornographic director Shimako Iwai (its title, "Bokkee Kyotee," translates to "very scary" — no kidding!), the episode is set during the Victorian era, on a secluded island that's basically one big brothel. Here, American journalist Christopher (frequent onscreen villain Billy Drago, who's so over-the-top he damn near upstages the violence) has come searching for Komomo, a sex worker he loved years earlier, promising to one day take her away from it all. To his horror and anguish, Christopher discovers he's too late — his beloved has died by suicide. A disfigured prostitute (Youki Kudoh), face half-caught in a rictus grin, regales him with the bedtime story of her own life, as well what happened to Komomo.

Except that the story keeps changing. The woman amends it several times, and each version of the truth is more horrifying than the last. In some respects, you could call this a twisted take on Rashomon, the Akira Kurosawa classic of unresolvable subjectivity. But rather than offering conflicting accounts of the same events from different witnesses, Miike adopts the perspective of the same unreliable narrator, gradually filling in the missing blanks and performing a kind of reverse sugarcoating. It's the truth as a nightmare you wake into: However pessimistic you may be, things can always be worse than you imagine.

"Imprint" also can't help but resemble the deformed, attic-dwelling twin of Memoirs of a Geisha, whose splashy big-screen adaptation hit American theaters in December of 2005 — one month before the episode was originally scheduled to air on Showtime, as the season finale of Masters of Horror. If that movie offered a glamorous, exoticized depiction of Japanese sex work — and the competitive relationship between the women forced into it — Miike's strips a similar scenario of all traces of romance, pleasure, or sentimentality. It almost amends that award-winning hit the way Kudoh's character amends her story, like a curdled rejoinder to the fantasies of Geisha.

The centerpiece of the episode is the scene where Komomo, framed for stealing the madam's prized ring, is methodically tortured with sewing needles. It's brutally sadistic, a downright medieval ordeal nearly impossible to watch or stomach. It also connects the story to Miike's greatest film, Audition, which built to a similarly grueling scene of unfathomable physical torment. In a way, the purpose of the agony has been inverted: Whereas Audition presented the needle-centric torture as a woman's revenge on a world that's used and abused her — concentrating her fury on a single unlucky sexist — "Imprint" presents the torture as the most extreme, exaggerated form of that abuse. As such, it lacks even the faint catharsis of Audition's infamous ending. It's horror in the deepest sense.

In a lot of ways, "Imprint" plays like an even-more-unsparing B-side to Miike's earlier masterpiece. It builds on the feminist sympathies of Audition, down to the implication and indictment of a seemingly "innocent" romantic partner. Though he rides in to save Komomo from her horrible life, Christopher is no white knight. He's much too late, after all. And as the episode later reveals, his belated rescue mission is tainted by a dark transgression from his past — the murder of his little sister, who he tellingly compares to Komomo at one point. The disfigured woman, whose very features tell a harsher truth than he would like to hear, isn't just pulling back layers of comforting fantasy, until only the stark, awful reality remains. She's also stripping Christopher bare, and forcing him to confront his own role in the cruel system of power that destroyed Komomo.

"Imprint" is undeniably about the horrors the world inflicts on women. Whether that justifies the horrors it inflicts on the audience is a matter of some debate. Is it possible to condemn violent misogyny while depicting it in such lurid, grisly detail for minutes on end? Miike's empathy and his ruthless appetite for pressing buttons are not mutually exclusive, but they do create some intense friction at times. When "Imprint" played at a horror-movie marathon in Chicago a few years ago, there were walkouts. One can't help but wonder if that's the very reaction he's often seeking at his most antagonistically extreme.

But "Imprint" isn't an artless provocation. It's been made with care and craft and intelligence. Unlike a lot of the other Masters of Horror episodes, it doesn't feel hampered by its budgetary restrictions. Quite to the contrary, there's a dreamlike elegance to some of its imagery, even when what that imagery is depicting is revolting. It's the one episode of the season that wasn't filmed in Vancouver, and working beyond the oversight of the show's production apparatus only seems to have benefited the results. "Imprint" requires no made-for-TV asterisk. It's about as cinematic as all of Miike's work.

Make no mistake, there are other good episodes of Masters of Horror. John Carpenter's first one for the series, "Cigarette Burns," is a creepy cinephiliac noir with a great premise. And Larry Cohen's "Pick Me Up" is diabolically entertaining — a blackly comic battle royale between competing serial killers. But there's no match for the scarring power of "Imprint." Or, for that matter, its sheer lunacy. The story's final twist, its last shocking revelation, is wild enough to support a whole feature. In fact, it basically did — Miike beat a certain recent, cultishly received multiplex horror movie to the punch by 15-plus years.

Maybe there's one more layer of lies that "Imprint" tore back. Masters of Horror positioned itself as an answer to the restrictions of Hollywood and network TV. It said that premium cable was the place for audiences to go for uncensored entertainment — and a place where storytellers could plumb the dark depths of their imagination without mitigation or interference. By putting that claim to the test, by pushing the content limits of a supposedly limitless medium, Miike established that the limits still existed. No TV show could truly go uncensored with him behind the camera.

Masters of Horror is streaming on Tubi.

A.A. Dowd is a writer and editor who lives in Chicago.