Unearthed Films has revealed it will be releasing Bakemono on September 22, 2026, giving Roos’ gruesome little monster movie a proper physical-media home, and if you’re wondering whether the practical-effects stuff is just marketing language slapped onto the release because horror fans like seeing the words “no CGI” – it really isn’t.
A Cheap Tokyo Apartment Is About to Become a Very Bad Place to Stay
Different guests arrive at the same cheap Tokyo rental apartment at different points in time, each with their own reasons for being there and none of them aware that something absolutely horrible is waiting for them, and this film also doesn’t follow these people in a conventional beginning-to-end progression either, because Roos deliberately chops the timeline up, gradually revealing how the different characters and incidents connect.
The approach has been compared to Memento and Pulp Fiction, although this version replaces hitmen and memory games with a shapeshifting monster and an increasingly impressive amount of blood.
The Japanese title is fairly straightforward too – bakemono means monster or creature, with the word relating to something that changes or transforms, which becomes particularly appropriate once the film starts showing exactly what Roos’ creature is capable of.
This Monster Was Built, Not Rendered
This is really where Bakemono separates itself from a lot of modern creature horror, because Roos has been very open about his influences, particularly John Carpenter’s The Thing, along with The Blob, Aliens and The Fly, and he has also cited Japanese anime such as The Guyver and Wicked City as major influences on his love of Japanese genre cinema.
The film contains no CGI, with Roos handling the practical effects himself, which meant transformations, tentacles, mutations and the various unpleasant things that happen to the film’s large cast all had to be created the old-fashioned way, and the production eventually involved more than 40 actors, while Roos also took on the roles of writer, director, producer, cinematographer and editor.
It also explains why the film ended up spending more than 80 days in production, and Roos even financed the project himself, and shot it on a RED Epic Dragon, the same camera system that had been used on considerably larger productions including Gone Girl, 10 Cloverfield Lane and The Martian.
For an independently produced Japanese creature feature, that’s quite an impressive combination of ambition and sheer stubbornness.
It originally premiered at Another Hole in the Head Film Festival in San Francisco on December 9, 2023, where it immediately found the sort of audience you would expect for an experimental, practical-effects-heavy monster movie, and subsequently picked up a surprisingly healthy collection of festival awards.
Among them were Best Creature Feature at Another Hole in the Head, Best Practical Effects at A Night of Horror, Best Beast at the Bay of Blood Film Festival, Best Foreign Origin Feature at the Bare Bones Film Festival and Best Genre Production at Japan Film Fest Hamburg, and it also won Best Special Effects at the Atlanta Horror Film Festival.
Trailer
The Blu-ray Includes a Decent Collection of Extras
The September release includes:
- Making The Practical FX: Bringing A Gruesome Monster To Life
- The Dark Side Of Tokyo: The Meaning Behind The Film
- Principal Photography
- Bakemono Unleashed: Reactions And Surprises
- Festival Q&A In Germany
The practical-effects featurette is obviously the one I’m most interested in, considering how much of the film’s identity is tied to the physical creature work, getting a look at how Roos actually created everything should be considerably more interesting than another generic behind-the-scenes promotional reel.
The Tokyo featurette could also be worth a look, particularly because the location and the film’s ideas about the darker side of the city are tied together.
So, if you’re the sort of horror fan who would rather watch an ambitious independent filmmaker spend 80 days physically making a disgusting monster than sit through another anonymous CGI creature feature, this may be one you will want to check out.
Keep an eye on Unearthed Films for pre orders.
More Asian horror movie news.
- Kathmandu Horror Film Fest Returns to Kathmandu for Three Days of Horror, Fantasy and Folklore
- Visitor Q Gets a New Limited Edition Blu-ray from Radiance Films This October
- The Haunted Cop Shop Gets a 2K Blu-ray Restoration From 88 Films This September
- Cyclops Gets Its First-Ever North American Blu-ray Release from Visual Vengeance
- Confessions Of A Shaman Becomes Thailand’s Second Biggest Film of 2026 to Date
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