Dundead Halloween: Audition

Part of Dundead Halloween 2026, a selection of films and events celebrating horror, cult and weird cinema at the spookiest time of year. See all five films with a Dundead Halloween Pass (excludes Phantom event) or book individual tickets. Priority booking is available for DCA Members now (make sure you are logged in to book), with passes and tickets on general sale from Mon 7 September at 10:00. 

One of the most notorious films to come out of the late-90s/early-2000s J-horror wave, Audition is an audaciously entertaining, extremely grisly, pitch-black satire with real bite. It can be a difficult film to talk about in many ways, one of the key issues being that for a good portion of its runtime you may be wondering how Audition fits with Dundead at all. But be patient, and you will be rewarded.

Ultra-prolific pulp-auteur Takashi Miike (128 director credits on IMDB and counting!) flexes a directorial command of his material that calls to mind one of the masters of tension and release, Alfred Hitchcock. But while Hitchcock thrived on the power of suggestion in the edit, Miike confronts violence head-on. 

The film follows an ageing widower, who, along with a film producer friend, starts holding auditions to find himself a new partner. 

Audition prompted disgust and delight from audiences in near equal measure on its release. There were reports of fainting and walk-outs, while Quentin Tarantino would later pronounce the film “a true masterpiece if there ever was one”.

This is at the more extreme end of films we have screened at Dundead over the last few years, and there has been passionate vocalising both for and against its presentation of some of its themes. There is a very real discussion around whether the film falls into the very traps that it is seemingly trying to critique, especially around the framing of the film’s female lead, unforgettably played by Eihi Shiina. But we hope that you find that the film is a complex watch; richly rewarding, genuinely disturbing and still transgressive over a quarter of a century later.