A man drives to work one morning and hits a stranger on the road. He and his girlfriend panic and dump the body. Days later, a metal shard erupts through his cheek while he shaves, and it will not stop growing.

TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (1989) follows that salaryman, played by Tomorowo Taguchi, as his body slowly fuses with scrap metal, wire, and machinery, transforming him into something no longer human. The man he ran over was a "metal fetishist" obsessed with embedding steel into his own flesh, and his death curses the man who killed him with the same fate.

Shinya Tsukamoto wrote, directed, shot, edited, and produced the film, and also plays the fetishist himself. He shot it on 16mm over a year and a half of weekends, using stop-motion effects and a small cast willing to endure grueling physical demands, including actress Kei Fujiwara, who plays the girlfriend.

The result runs just 67 minutes and became a cornerstone of Japanese cyberpunk cinema, an unforgettable vision of clattering machinery, black and white grain, and bodies pushed past their limits.