I created this work with the idea of keeping the visuals polished and beautiful, without overly emphasizing its dark worldview. I feel it was one of the more daring works among my own projects. I also paid close attention to the aspect ratio, and to create a greater sense of immersion, I adjusted it so that no black bars appear when viewed on a smartphone.

A collection of video works produced by Imahara Denki in 2017

“Feel free to do anything as long as it’s not obscene.” With that request, I made sure the world of the music and the poem, its mood, and its forms would become as strange and disjointed as possible. The references I drew on were works that feel feverish and nightmarish to watch, such as Stephen King’s The Devil Truck, Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, and Ken Russell’s Gothic. Above all, I wanted to express the absurdity of a gigantic thing racing at full speed, and the image of something that crosses some kind of limit or is mixed together until it turns into an uncanny form. If you trace the history of Gothic, from the Christian view of life and death to the monsters like gargoyles placed on church Gothic architecture, there is a sense of life and death repeating like summer and winter. I am always drawn to the coexistence of ambivalent things. The zombie in the passenger seat is always embodying the ambivalent state of life and death. Though dead, he wears a T-shirt that says “flesh and blood,” or gets an IV drip, as if he refuses to accept death. The method is my usual collage, but it is difficult to create something without straying from the world I have set up. The shape of the truck, on which I put special emphasis, also has to maintain a certain level of consistency from the front, the diagonal, and the side in order to connect properly. A lack of consistency is in a sense an inherent quality of collage, but this nauseating lack of balance was the most exciting and enjoyable part of my recent work.