One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
A pair of scissors; a tongue. Hong Kong filmmaker Herman Yau begins his cult classic Ebola Syndrome (1996) with a gesture reminiscent of the slice across the retina that notoriously opens Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist masterpiece Un chien andalou (1929). Whereas Buñuel and Dalí’s gesture was an assault on the visual order of bourgeois normativity, Yau’s unsettling slash strikes at something more corporeal and indefinable: taste. Both aesthetic and somatic taste is the primary focus of Ebola Syndrome, and the film is as much about the unpleasant sights Yau serves his audience as it is about the nasty ingredients the film’s protagonist, the repugnant chef Kai Sun (Anthony Wong), serves to his customers, such as snot, sperm, urine, human flesh, and the Ebola virus just to name a few. Bad taste is as much of a mark of moral repugnancy as it is an aesthetic qualifier and Ebola Syndrome, by staging most of its gross-out horror via the mouth and foregrounding the experience of consumption, embodies and tests the audience’s resolve for taking in the unsavory and impermissible on screen.
Horror films may be no stranger to playing with and indulging in bad taste—especially those, like Ebola Syndrome, that belong to Hong Kong’s infamously boundary-pushing Category III film rating level—but Yau goes beyond most by refusing to take a clear perspective on the action. Unlike Yau’s earlier Category III masterpiece, The Untold Story (1993), which played on our identification with a killer in order to produce an indictment, as in the films of Fritz Lang, of society as filled with brutal killers, Ebola Syndrome is without an apparent moral, sociological, or even psychological perspective. While Kai might derive hedonistic pleasure from his vile actions, it’s almost impossible to tell whether or not Yau enjoys Kai’s abhorrent behavior and, vicariously, whether we are meant to enjoy it or condone it as well. Viruses unsettle your stomach and change your appetite; Ebola Syndrome too wreaks havoc on our sense of taste, severing our cultural palate and resisting any attempt to determine whether it’s good or bad taste. Like Un chien andalou, whose slice across the eye represented a move beyond traditional, rationalistic ways of seeing and understanding, Yau’s cut across the tongue is a move beyond moralistic judgments of taste and decency.