Fans of Japanese horror films appear to be related to those mysterious people who like to get out of their cars to inspect roadkill, or those who watch bypass surgery on public television—except that they are devotees of a much darker and weirder phenomenon. Grady Hendrix, a thirty-one-year-old former receptionist of conservative appearance, for example, doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would enjoy watching a man bite through his arm while masturbating inside a burlap sack, but he is. Hendrix, who lives in Spanish Harlem, imports the most repellent, vile movies from Asia as a hobby, and the depth of his demented knowledge is impressive. If you wanted to see, say, a naked man suspended from hooks so that his skin stretches, while someone pours boiling oil all over him and sticks needles through his cheeks, well, he knows just the movie for you.
For the past three years, Hendrix has helped put together the New York Asian Film Festival, which screens the latest “J-horror” sensations (as well as more conventional fare) at Anthology Film Archives, in the East Village. This year, he really wanted to show Takashi Miike’s “Gozu,” in which a gangster turns into a woman and then gives birth to a fully grown male during intercourse, but Miike has already acquired a legitimate U.S. distributor. Instead, Hendrix had to settle for “Marronnier,” directed by Hideyuki Kobayashi, which is about a shut-in puppeteer who turns women into dolls that kill people. (The movie played twice in San Francisco, and a good portion of the audience walked out each time.) Hendrix isn’t worried about its New York reception, however, because, he says, “the people in San Francisco are generally weak-willed sissies.”
Hendrix, like many film buffs in New York, can trace his passion to Kim’s Video, a store whose employees are notoriously smug about their esoteric tastes. He fell under the influence of a Kim’s clerk named Barry Long, who told him about the Music Palace, a theatre in Chinatown that showed Asian films. Hendrix, who was then a student at New York University, went downtown, bought a six-dollar ticket for a double feature, and entered a strange world. “You’d look around and there’d be a family of nine behind you eating lunch and arguing over who gets the last dim sum,” he says. “There’d be people sitting next to you working their way through their second pack of cigarettes. There was the cat man, who had nine cats tied to him on strings. And then there’d be the guy who sits in the balcony holding his hat and moaning whenever anything exciting happens onscreen.”
Undaunted, Hendrix became a Music Palace regular, and after many years of happy patronage he began to hear rumors that the theatre was going to close. He and a few other “honkies,” as he puts it—a Serbian computer specialist, a Chase Manhattan vice-president, a d.j., and a former union organizer—who frequented the Music Palace tried to raise money to save it. “We were worried that only the standard Chinese art flicks would make it over here,” Hendrix says. “It’s, like, ‘Oh my God, I live in China and I’m a woman and it sucks. Oh my God, it’s so hard to be alive.’ Or those movies where people ride around in the backs of trucks for half the film just staring while someone plays guitar music.”
When the Music Palace eventually closed, Hendrix and his friends each put up a thousand dollars and started the Asian Film Festival. The first year, 2000, was a modest success, but everything changed during year two, when Hendrix screened a Korean film called “The Isle” for members of the press. The movie contains what Hendrix calls “a moment of extreme fishhook penetration,” and it was shortly after this part of the film that a critic emerged into the lobby, made a high-pitched gurgling noise, and passed out on the floor. Hendrix checked to see that the man was O.K. and then called the Post. The story was reprinted in other newspapers, and soon “The Isle” acquired a reputation as the most dangerous movie around.
The whiff of scandal that year brought larger, unsuspecting audiences to the screenings. Hendrix watched people being carried from the theatre by their friends; others claimed they’d seen things that weren’t actually in the movies, such as a dog whose head is chopped off by a bear trap. The festival’s success has had its downside: J-horror has become more and more mainstream, with several big-budget Hollywood remakes scheduled to open this year, which may well spell the end of Hendrix’s film series, since he will no longer be able to wrest festival rights from the studios. He decided to splurge this time. “We teeter on the edge of financial ruin,” he says. “So, like any good, self-destructing alcoholic, we want to go out in a blaze of glory.”
