Over the years, he became a familiar face on the international festival trail, regularly turning up at The New York Asian Film Festival, Fantastic Fest in Austin, Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival, Texas Frightmare in Dallas and Monsterpalooza in Pasadena. More recently, he had also been teaching film classes and art workshops around Tokyo, while hosting gallery events for his own work and that of his students.
Tributes began appearing soon after news of his death broke. Actress Eihi Shiina, one of Nishimura’s frequent collaborators, said, “Horror has lost a real visionary, and I have lost a friend.”
“I am devastated by the sudden loss of my great friend Yoshihiro Nishimura, who, only two weeks ago, was on a live Zoom call with us following the screening of our film ‘Geisha War,’” Girls and Corpses’ Robert Rhine said in a statement on Instagram. “It had been a dream of mine to work with Nishimura and I flew to Kyoto last October (with our lead actor Costas Mandylor) to film at Hikone Studios.”
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Rhine added another tribute that captured the scale of the loss felt across the genre world. “Nishimura was a brilliant filmmaker and true artist who inspired many filmmakers, such as Quentin Tarantino. It is a great loss for the indie horror community and Nishimura’s fans around the world.”
At the time of his death, Nishimura had recently completed what will now stand as his final feature, Geisha War, which has already screened publicly. Rhine said he intends to continue that work and secure wider distribution for the film in the director’s memory.
“I will be finalizing ‘Geisha War’ in Nishimura’s memory and we will find [a] great distributor for this amazing film, Nishimura’s last, to show to the world,” Rhine said. “My deepest condolences to his wife, Haruka, and daughter Kika.”
Nishimura leaves behind a body of work that was impossible to mistake for anybody else’s. His films were grotesque, funny, excessive and often genuinely visionary, and they helped define a corner of Japanese horror that refused to play by anybody else’s rules.
