Abbas Kiarostami once wished that his audience would fall asleep in the theatre during his films. Unfortunately, I was never among his audiences, but recently I had that pleasure with two other films: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Loft (2006), and the late David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). Funnily enough, both are horror films. I am by no means suggesting that they are dull; no one would deny that both are first-rate horror films. Yet I believe I drifted to sleep precisely because of how strangely evasive they were. Their atmospheres, suspended between detachment and dread, did not provoke fear. It was not a matter of being disturbed, but of being gently egressed from my own consciousness and drawn into the (), the nameless space that was nevertheless indifferent to me dreaming in it, that the ‘demon’ was traversing.

I suppose ()—the space traversed by Lynchian and Kurosawa’s ‘demon’—is far from Mark Fisher’s ‘the grotesque’. By ‘demon’, I refer not to any fixed character, but to the spectral agent or force that unsettles each film’s diegesis, whether it be the elusive Mystery Man in Lynch’s film, whose presence dislocates time and identity, or the mummy in Kurosawa’s, whose appearances seem less like a haunting than quiet emissions from some ambient elsewhere. ‘The grotesque’ denotes a stratigraphy, a traumatic site so haunted by its manifold past as to be ‘collaged from between worlds, generating an “ontological struggle.”’ [1] Mark Fisher notes the postcapitalist aesthetics of ‘the grotesque’, of how places, particularly urban ones, are stained by spatial and historical processes and ‘intense moments of time’. [2] ‘The grotesque’ as a spatial construct is attuned to the ‘alien from within’ cliché common to many horrors, but () is quite the opposite; it is too light, too ‘non-originary’ for even the most distorted or codified ‘detritus’ to reside. The ‘demon’ simply glides through it, leaving behind some disturbance or ‘almost nothing’, and vanishes into thin air with it.

Film scholar Chika Kinoshita remarks on the setting of Loft as devoid of the urban–rural spatial opposition usually seen in the Western horror genre. [3] Time disorientation, a usual source of horror, is also cancelled and replaced with a suspensive and ‘untimely’ manner of action. The heroine, young female novelist Reiko, ‘writes on her computer, smokes, drinks water, walks inside her house with her shoes on (blatantly defying the Japanese custom), falls asleep in her daytime dress, and never cooks nor eats’, [4] while the thousand-year-old mummy wakes up from the testbed in the next-door university facility without any meaningful repercussions. What happens in the () happens in any space by any being, or, in non-space by non-being. It does not need a ‘skeleton in the closet’ to be localised or made sense of. Rather, the () is a space even indifferent to its own amnesia, an ontic without ontology. A sign, a word, or even just a silent gaze would be more than enough to bring it into being. Just as in Pulse (2001), another horror classic by Kurosawa: ‘just need to find any abandoned room and use red tape to outline a square around the door’, [5] and the ‘demon’ is welcomed.

Yet, in the (), the question of ‘what happens’ is suspended as much as the () per se; the ‘demon’s presence is exactly this suspension. The moment of ‘demon’s presence in Lost Highway, is the phrase ‘Dick Laurent is dead’, which loops the beginning and ending of the film. Slavoj Žižek points out that the phrase ‘Dick Laurent is dead’ is a ‘signifying chain... which resonates as a Real that insists and always returns—a kind of basic formula that suspends and cuts across time’. [6] Yet this Real, in its suspension of time, might not necessarily be ‘the impossibility of the hero encountering himself’ [7] as Žižek claims. The presence of ‘demon’, ironically, points (as in the film, literally transmitted via an electronic doorbell) back to the minimalist living room, the () where the space before the TV set, eerily too spacious yet diminished by the nonchalance of the carpet.

The ‘demon’ rarely moves beyond the phonics of the words; the ‘happening’ of the signifying chain, chains only its own signifying suspension. The ‘demon’ traversing the () is an aporetic formation between immanence and nothingness. It is de facto there (and everywhere), without recourse to cause and effect. And yet it occurs as if nothing has happened. In this sense, compared to the ontological struggles in Fisher’s places of ‘the grotesque’, Loft and Lost Highway host another war, the ‘Haiku War’ revered by the formal military strategist Richard Elster in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega: ‘…a war in three lines. Bare everything to plain sight… See what’s there and then be prepared to watch it disappear.’ [8]

And now it is time for me—awake—to fight another ‘Haiku War’. This time, it is about AKA Dr Lecter, a lecture performance that forms part of my thesis project on murder urbanism, which considers the relationship between murder cases and the East Asian urban landscape. Indeed, the central question falls into the aporetic formation of the ‘Haiku War’. A murder either occurs where there is a ‘singularity’ irretrievable to a ‘relationship’ (immanence) or does not happen at all (nothingness). After all, as Rei Terada’s puzzling comment on the original ‘AKA’, Masao Adachi’s masterpiece A.K.A. Serial Killer, from which I stole the name, states: ‘Asking how landscape matters sounds like a category mistake, like asking how the night is political.’ [9] As I wandered around Tokyo filming for the project, I came to realise: ‘Why not both and none?’ Forget about Kant, ‘category mistake’ per se could usurp the transcendental, like the demon traversing the () while I was sleeping. The fukei (‘view’ or ‘landscape’ in Japanese) of killing is right in front of me, with my vigilance subtracted nevertheless. In other words, I am the first one killed by the fukei, with no stain left, as if nothing had happened.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Callum Sutherland, “Mark Fisher and Reimagining Postcapitalist Geographies,” Dialogues in Human Geography 13, no. 1 (February 9, 2023): 109, https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231156021.

[2] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), 191.

[3] Chika Kinoshita, “The Mummy Complex: Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Loft and J-Horror,” in Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, ed. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano and Jinhee Choi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 118–19.

[4] Chika Kinoshita, “The Mummy Complex: Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Loft and J-Horror,” 119.

[5] Chika Kinoshita, “The Space of Appropriators,” trans. gansen, Yuriika 35, no. 10 (July 2003), special issue on Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Chinese translation posted by DeepFocus on Douban, accessed April 17, 2025, https://www.douban.com/note/862899773/. English translation my own.

[6] Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 21.

[7] Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 21.

[8] Don DeLillo, Point Omega (London: Picador, 2011), 37.

[9] Rei Terada, “Repletion: Masao Adachi’s Totality,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 24, no. 2 (2016): 35.