Misogynous violent fantasy or the spearhead of the “Golden Age of Anime”? Either way, Urotsukidoji – Legend of the Overfiend is something very special. Starting on November 28, 2024, you can form your own opinion in selected cinemas.
A group of teenagers film a girl of about the same age having sex. What sounds like any sequence from an 80s erotic film looks quite different in Hideki Takayama’s Urotsukidoji – Legend of the Overfiend.
Because the adolescent in the horror film is not a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, nor is she a non-binary person, no, she is not even a human being. Instead, she prefers to have fun with a strange tentacle monster that lustfully wraps itself around her body. Welcome to the world of Urotsukidoji!
Godzilla meets Dragonball, American Pie and Ach jodel mir noch einen: The plot of Urotsukidoji
The film tells the story of the ancient legend of the god-like Chojins. He is said to be reborn every 3000 years and to unite our world with that of human beasts and demons to create a realm of harmony.
But since he is currently stuck in the body of a teenager from Tokyo, the movie not only features giant kaiju-like monsters and anime-typical light beam duels (keyword: Kamehame Ha), but also things that are more commonly found in high school movies films: nerds, bullies, first love, first sexual experiences and chronic horniness of all characters – although in the case of Urotsukidoji this really applies to ALL characters, human or not.
Thanks to censorship, tentacles play a special role
This prohibited the creator of the original, mangaka Toshio Maeda, who still specializes in erotic and pornographic works today, from drawing male genitalia. So he came up with the idea of painting tentacles instead of penises (via Glamour ). Whether consciously or unconsciously, Maeda became one of the most famous representatives of contemporary tentacle erotica – a pornographic sub-genre that contains sex and tentacles in some form.
Watch the trailer here:
The origins of the genre go back to Katsushika Hokusai’s painting The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife from 1814, as can be read at Celebrate Hentai. Although this very special form of bizarre eroticism was reason enough to object, it was probably not enough for director Takayama. So he enriched Maeda’s original story with a large amount of sex, violence and rape scenes. In the anime, the demons peel out of their human costumes in a particularly bloody way, guts fall loudly to the ground and young women and teenage girls are repeatedly penetrated by several tentacles at the same time.
In Japan, where there is a long tradition of combining eroticism, pornography and the grotesque, such images are perceived differently than they are outside the Land of the Rising Sun. In the film, there is also a certain form of homoeroticism, for example when a male teenager licks up the sperm of another. And in the human-beast Megumi Amano, a female character appears who is both sexually self-confident and self-determined. This is worth mentioning. Nevertheless, Urotsukidoji is full of rape fantasies and objectification of young women and teenage girls. What and how you think about this is up to each viewer to decide for themselves.
