Tentacle Rape

is a type of pornography most commonly found in Japan which integrates traditional pornography with elements of bestiality and a fantasy, horror, or science-fiction theme. It is found in some horror or hentai titles, with tentacled creatures (usually fictional monsters) having sexual intercourse, predominantly with females, or to lesser extent, males. Tentacle erotica can be consensual but mostly contains elements of rape.

The genre is popular in Japan to the point of it reaching the status of parody. In the 21st century, Japanese films of this genre have become recognized in the United States and Europe, although it remains a small, fetish-oriented part of the adult film industry. While most tentacle erotica is animated, there are also a few live-action films that depict it.

History

Some of the earliest examples of tentacle erotica were woodblock prints depicting women being violated by octopuses, such as Kitao Shigemasa's ''Programme of Erotic Noh Plays'' (1781) and Shunshō Katsukawa's ''Lust of Many Women on One Thousand Nights'' (1786).

Among the most famous of the early instances is an illustration from the 1814 Hokusai book , known as ''The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife''. It is an example of shunga (Japanese erotic woodblock art) and has been reworked by a number of artists, such as Masami Teraoka, who brought the image up to date with his 2001 work "Sarah and Octopus/Seventh Heaven", part of his ''Waves and Plagues'' collection.

A scholarly paper by Danielle Talerico showed that although western audiences often interpret Hokusai's famous design as rape, Japanese audiences of the Edo period would have viewed it as consensual. They would have recognized the print as depicting the legend of the female abalone diver Tamatori. In the story, Tamatori steals a jewel from the Dragon King. As she runs away, she's pursued by the Dragon King and his sea-life minions, including octopuses. The dialogue in the illustration shows the diver and two octopuses expressing mutual enjoyment.

This type of pornography was heavily censored in Japan after World War II, when the Allies imposed a number of reforms onto the Japanese government, including censorship laws (see censorship in Japan). Thus, the legal proscriptions against pornography date back to the Meiji period.

Presently, "obscenity" is still prohibited. How this term is interpreted, however, has not remained constant. While exposed genitalia (and, until recently, pubic hair) are illegal, the diversity of permissible sexual acts is now wide compared with other liberal democracies.

Leaders within the tentacle porn industry have stated that much of their work was initially directed at circumventing this policy. According to the mangaka Toshio Maeda:

Culture

Animation

The earliest animated form of tentacle erotica was in the 1985 anime hentai OVA ''Dream Hunter Rem'', though the scene in question was excised when the OVA was re-released in a non-hentai form. The first purely non-hentai anime portraying a tentacle assault would be 1986 anime OVA '' Guyver: Out of Control'', where a female Chronos soldier named Valcuria is enshrouded by the second (damaged) Guyver unit that surrounds her in tentacle form and assaults her.

Numerous animated tentacle erotica films followed the next couple decades. Popular titles like 1986's '' Urotsukidoji'', 1992's ''La Blue Girl'' and 1995's ''Demon Beast Resurrection'' became common sights in large video store chains in the United States and elsewhere. The volume of films in this genre has slowed since the peak years in the 1990s but continue to be produced to the present day.

Manga

While manga has often featured stories of heroes being attacked by monsters with tentacles since its early period, the earliest examples of tentacle erotica in manga belong to "real life" erotic comedy manga magazines, which predate ''ero-gekiga''. Multiple scenes were found in the issue of ''Weekly Manga Q'' of March 12, 1968, where several creatures with tentacles attack women. An early example belonged to Osamu Tezuka's sci-fi story ''The Returnees'' (1973), where a scene depicts a woman being assaulted and impregnated by a space creature.

Toshio Maeda's ''Urotsukidōji'' was a pioneer in the tentacle rape genre with its mix of sex, ''bishōjo'' and tentacles. Maeda's depiction of tentacles was more creature-like and possessed at will, imitating male genitalia. However, six years prior to ''Urotsukidōji'' in 1976, Maeda created his first tentacle work in an experimental short story called ''SEX Tearing'', which is considered the origin for ''Urotsukidōji'' as well as the earliest work depicting sex between women and tentacles.
In 1989, Maeda's manga '' Demon Beast Invasion'' created what could be considered the modern Japanese paradigm of tentacle porn, in which the elements of sexual assault are emphasized. Maeda explained that he invented the practice to get around strict Japanese censorship regulations, which prohibit the depiction of the penis but did not prohibit showing sexual penetration by a tentacle or similar appendages.

Live action

The use of sexualized tentacles in live action films, while much rarer, started in American B-movie horror films and has since migrated to Japan. B-movie producer Roger Corman used the concept of tentacle rape in a brief scene in his 1970 film ''The Dunwich Horror'', a film adaptation of the H. P. Lovecraft short story of the same name. ''Vice'' magazine identifies this as "perhaps cinema history's first tentacle-rape scene".

A decade later, Corman would again use tentacle rape while producing ''Galaxy of Terror'', released in 1980. Arguably the most notorious example of tentacle rape to date, Corman directed a scene in which actress Taaffe O'Connell, playing an astronaut on a future space mission, is captured, raped, and killed by a giant, tentacled worm. The film borrows the concept of the "id monster" from the 1950s film ''Forbidden Planet'', with the worm being a manifestation of O'Connell's character's fears. The scene was graphic enough that the film's director, B. D. Clark, refused to helm it, and O'Connell refused to do the full nudity required by Corman, so Corman directed the scene himself and used a body double for some of the more graphic shots. Initially given an X-rating by the Motion Picture Association of America, small cuts were made to the scene which changed the film's rating to "R".

Sam Raimi's '' The Evil Dead'' includes a scene where actress Ellen Sandweiss' character is attacked by the possessed woods she walks through. The evil spirit inhabiting the woods uses tree limbs and branches to ensnare, strip, and rape her, possessing her through the sexual act in a way reminiscent to that in which tentacles are depicted in other pieces of media. The scene was repeated in a shorter version in the sequel, ''Evil Dead II'', released in 1987. Another film, about the life of artist Katsushika Hokusai, was the Japanese made 1981 film '' Edo Porn'', which featured the '' Dream of the Fisherman's Wife'' painting in a live action depiction. In the film '' Possession'' a woman copulates with a tentacled creature, although the tentacles themselves are never explicitly shown to penetrate her.

The popularity of these films has led to the subsequent production of numerous live action tentacle films in Japan from the 1990s to the present day. The theme rarely appears in adult American cinema and art; one example is American artist Zak Smith, who painted several works featuring octopuses and porn stars in various stages of intercourse. In 2016, Amat Escalante directed the art house film '' The Untamed'', which depicts a live-action scene between the female protagonist and a tentacled space alien.

See also

* Censorship in Japan
* Monster erotica
* Pornography in Japan

References

External links

Manga Artist Interview Series
Part I, Sake-Drenched Postcards—interview with Toshio Maeda.

{{Film genres

Fictional octopuses
Hentai
Japanese pornography
Japanese sex terms
Rape in fiction
Sexuality in Japan
Zoophilia in culture