Logan Moreno
Naoyuki Tomomatsu’s Ballads (1993) lingers in obscurity, as if its very circulation were shaped by the same quiet damage that defines the film itself. What is almost immediately striking about Ballads is how it folds J-horror’s fascination with bodies under pressure and the pinku subgenre’s obsession with desire-turned-dangerous into something emotionally fragile. The erotic scenes are soaked in grief and humiliation, so sex never settles into anything like pleasure. Tomomatsu treats discomfort as his expressive language, and that discomfort lets him get close to the feelings of marginalisation at the film’s center. Grief and anger saturate the sound and image, giving the grain, noise, and erratic pacing a force that makes feelings tangible and hard to shake.
Underneath the apparent chaos of Ballads, Tomomatsu builds a careful emotional and formal logic. Fragmented concert footage, recurring snuff tapes, and flashes of nearly illegible body horror mirror the protagonist’s interior state, showing what it feels like to live as a gay man in a world that refuses to acknowledge your pain and relishes your humiliation. Akihiko Yamamoto, still mourning Hiroshi, the lover he lost in a motorcycle accident, works in a video store that quietly pushes uncensored hardcore pornography under the counter. His grief is written into his body. He walks with a cane, carries visible scars, and those scars are pointed out and handled by his boss during sex, with his injuries turned into convenient proof of weakness and sexual availability. In the early stretches of Ballads, Yamamoto moves like someone whose whole body has learned to expect injury, with grief and subordination folded into his posture and the way he occupies space.
Hiroshi’s memory enters as a counter-image to this life of submission, a passionate and complicated intimacy that Yamamoto can only access in flashback. Hiroshi arrives with an energy that cuts through the sickly atmosphere of Yamamoto’s present, all warm colors, blonde highlights, and the feeling of a remembered freedom. He looks at Yamamoto with intensity rather than pity, and the way he touches and speaks carries a restrained affection that does not let Yamamoto forget the world’s violence but also refuses to let that violence define the whole relationship. Their intimacy is tender and genuine, but it is also impatient, edged with irritation and pressure from the world outside them, with Hiroshi’s frustrated and defiant nature standing in sharp contrast to the withdrawn, aching identity we come to associate with Yamamoto in the present. Ballads presents their love as already saturated with damage, full of affects that never quite reach catharsis, and Hiroshi’s defiance becomes one of the film’s most important emotional pressures because it shows Yamamoto a way of being he cannot yet inhabit.
The emotional identity of Yamamoto shifts in Ballads‘ most powerful moment of pure horror, when he discovers a grotesque snuff tape that appears to show Hiroshi’s death, stripped of the power and pride he remembers him with. Rather than turn this revelation into a weak gesture at closure or healing, Tomomatsu uses it to tighten the film around rage. The wounded openness that once defined Yamamoto closes off. His face hardens. His body stops signalling availability. The physical ailments that marked him as diminished are rebuked as he throws away his cane, moves with a new and volatile assurance, and begins to look more like Hiroshi, taking on elements of his style and his way of carrying himself. The defiance that once caused friction in their relationship has now been taken fully inside Yamamoto, no longer something directed at him but something he directs outward and back at those who used him, degraded him, and treated his grief as an opportunity. This is also the point where the film’s formal world begins to fracture around him. The snuff-film grain grows more oppressive, the concert noise and nightmare imagery bleed together more aggressively, and the body horror that gathers in the final half hour feels less like genre decoration than the external shape of emotions that can no longer be contained by ordinary presentation.
This is what Harry Benshoff (in Monsters in the Closet) identifies in queer horror more broadly: the capacity to turn formal excess into an expression of marginalized interiority, using the monstrous as a way of registering feelings and identities that cannot be spoken openly. The ugliness of Ballads is the means by which Yamamoto’s anger becomes perceptible as something more than a mood. Queer subjects build themselves out of damage, assembling personas from grief, shame, and inherited rage into something capable of acting back on the world. Yamamoto’s shift into a harder, more dangerous presence feels like that kind of assembly. He isn’t healed. He is reconstituted through fury, and the film refuses to frame that as either pathology or triumph.
Working within a genre that mainstream culture has largely been happy to overlook, Tomomatsu uses its extremity to think through marginalised experience with emotional precision. The focus on bodies that cannot be contained gives him room to explore what happens when a queer subject refuses the script of quiet suffering and instead allows anger to shape how he appears in the world. Yamamoto’s rage carries the accumulated social violence he has absorbed, and it carries the defiant energy that once made Hiroshi uneasy with submission. It is also performance, an appearance he crafts through his own reference to Hiroshi’s style and presence, and it becomes the condition that finally allows him to act back on the structures that have been acting on him. What returns is not only rage but the subordinated identity itself, now armed with the clarity of its own exploitation.
In Ballads, queer anger moves beyond psychology and settles into the film’s environment, into sound, surface, and rhythm, until the whole work feels warped by the weight of what it is trying to hold. There is horror in this, not just in the explicit tapes or the more spectacular body imagery, but in the quieter realization of what it costs a person to be formed this way, through sustained humiliation, grief, and the slow cost of surviving without recognition. Alongside that horror there is something far rarer in any form of cinema: a vision of suppressed queer fury, fully inhabited, as the condition for a different kind of selfhood. Ballads imagines Yamamoto’s anger as so transformative that the film itself has to change shape around it, its form buckling to accommodate a queer subject who finally refuses to move through the world as if his own diminishment were inevitable.
Works Cited
Benshoff, Harry. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester University Press, 1997.
Logan Moreno is a graduate student currently pursuing a Master’s in International Affairs at Texas A&M University and working in policy research at the Asia Centre in Bangkok, where his work focuses on human rights, security, and development in Southeast Asia. His broader academic interests explore the intersections of space policy, maritime rights, and security in regional and global contexts. Alongside his policy work, Logan writes out of a longstanding love of horror cinema. His research interests and criticism engage queer theory, Asian media, and the politics of visibility, with particular attention to how film renders surveillance, desire, and social control across transnational contexts.
