The Oh, Hello there. This is Alistair Stewart of Sudapod, the Weekly Horror Fiction

podcast and you are listening to the Faculty of Horror. Hi everyone and welcome back to the Faculty of Horror Podcasting from the Harvard Halls of Academia.

I'm Alex West with Andrea Subisati.

And welcome back to a brand new semester. We are back from our

break. We took August off as we always do and thank you for bearing with us and we are

back. We've got a ton of bags with a ton of weapons in them. You're all going to get one, and then we're all going to fucking rumble.

Today we are going to talk about Battle Royale, a very notorious film, a very nefarious film, a very early example. A very

film, film, a very early example of a trend of extreme horror cinema coming out of Japan

and just a fantastic film that stands up to the test of time. If you guys re-watched it like we did

to prepare for this episode, you know that it holds up beautifully and is just as

enjoyable and just as shocking and frightening as when it first came out.

Yeah, it's definitely a terrific example of extremity in film.

And I think you can look at Battle Royale as the beginning of what they call Asian extremity and around the same time you had

audition by Takache Mique and a lot of other great films that have kind of subsequently

followed it and it's also a different trend than what we see in J horror. So whereas Jhar are dealt with

ghosts, creepy things, dark-haired women coming at you, this is about the pure brutality of human against human.

So let's dive right in.

Battle Royale came out in 2000.

It was directed by Kinci Fukasaku,

and it was based on the 1999 novel by Koshun Takami.

And Koshun Takami was actually a journalist.

This was his first book, this was his only published book actually.

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