Tura Satana Taught Me to Find Power in My Asian Identity

This is The Curse, a column by Miyako Pleines about the poetry and persuasion of horror films.

When I think of Tura Satana, I think of her menacing, wearing a pink dress with symmetrical cutouts exposing both sides of her body, giving the impression that the missing fabric has been removed by teeth instead of cut. She lounges in this pink dress throughout most of the 1968 sci-fi horror film The Astro-Zombies, and when she reclines on a couch and takes a drag from her cigarette, the slit up the side reveals her entire thigh. The dress is the color of crushed cherry blossoms, and its high, boxy collar almost makes it feel like a vampy version of the cheongsam. When I look at her, this nearly six-foot-tall, generously busted, multiracial Asian woman, I can’t help but feel proud.

It’s an odd emotion to feel, especially since her appearance is designed to play up Hollywood’s stereotype of “the exotic Asian.” And yet it’s hard for me, a biracial Asian woman myself, to take offense. Maybe it’s the fact that Satana’s life story is one so full of the details you would only expect to find in the grittiest of revenge stories that she seems almost mythical, or maybe it’s simply that when she glides across the screen—draped in all of that pink—to seductively puff a cigarette immediately before putting it out on a man’s face, she is undeniably in control. The part of me that grew up as a Japanese American girl longs to take one of her elegant hands and beg her to guide me to her God.

Born in 1938 in Hokkaido, Japan, to a Japanese and Filipino father and a Native American and Scotch-Irish mother, Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi grew up to make a name for herself as an exotic dancer and B-list movie star. She began dancing in nightclubs when she was only fifteen years old and initially performed under the stage name “Galatea,” an allusion to the statue in Greek mythology that Pygmalion sculpted and fell in love with. Eventually, she became known as “Miss Japan Beautiful” and was famous for the performance of her “tassel act,” a lively routine that blended dance with martial arts and acrobatics. She posed nude for comedian and photographer Harold Lloyd and went on to star in various films and TV shows, often portraying strippers and dancers.

She is most famous for The Astro-Zombies (directed by Ted V. Mikels) and the 1965 exploitation film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (directed by Russ Meyer, a man famous for his love of sex and large breasts). The first time I saw her on-screen, she was unlike any actor I had ever seen before, so much so that I had to pause the movie to look her up. When I realized she was part Japanese, I gasped, pleased to add another name to my very short list of Japanese American actresses. She is unmistakably beautiful, in an almost-unapproachable way. On-screen, her thick winged eyeliner and long dark hair pulled up into a bouffant can give her a severe appearance, and I would later come to recognize that—in almost everything she’s in—when she looks toward the camera, it’s with a glare.

In The Astro-Zombies, she plays the leader of an unnamed international spy agency that is determined to get its hands on a new form of “thought-wave transmission,” which will allow them to control dead bodies. There is more than a hint of anti-Asian sentiment here, and the choice to cast her as the villain of this film is nothing short of deliberate, but she wears the role well, prowling around seductively in campy evening gowns while carrying a tiny pistol in one hand and a cigarette in the other. In one of my favorite moments, Satana, wearing that infamous pink dress, stands in tall black stilettos with one foot planted on the diving board of a swimming pool and kills a man with just a few quick shots from her gun that she fires miraculously from her hip. She is equal parts gorgeous and terrifying as she glances at the dead body before turning and stalking away, and this is what I find so enticing about her. It cannot be denied that her body and her ethnicity are being exploited on-screen, but she possesses a magnetic, powerful confidence suggesting that no matter how many close-ups on her plunging neckline, she is the one in charge. If you are looking at her, it’s because she’s letting you.

The Astro-Zombies is an almost-unwatchable film. But Satana dazzles, and oftentimes she seems to be the only actor in the entire movie who understands their assignment. The movie is frequently labeled as a horror film, making Satana one of the first truly menacing 1960s female horror villains at a time when they were few. She possesses traits of the classic femme fatale, beautiful and lethal, but is unafraid to get her hands dirty: She fights her way through the movie, refusing to let anyone tell her no.

Tura Satana became her own sort of Final Girl.

Her presence in Mikels’s sci-fi horror abomination occurred a few years prior to the ’70s, a decade in which the slasher film really began to rise, with movies like A Bay of Blood (1971), Black Christmas (1974), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and the infamous Halloween (1978). These movies would give rise to the trope of the Final Girl, an oft-utilized and beloved trait in which a female victim is subjected to unrelenting terror before managing to escape from or kill her pursuant. The term was popularized by Carol J. Clover in her famous essay, “Her Body, Himself,” which seeks to show how the main female character in slasher films can become her own hero. The trope is often lauded as being “feminist” because it provides the woman with the strength needed to save herself from a killer (usually male).

Like many horror fans, I am drawn to the Final Girl plotline—I become invested in these women and their survival. But sometimes I tire of aligning myself with someone who is essentially a victim before she triumphs, of identifying with the women destined to go through hell before they can be saved or even believed. We love the Final Girl because we know women are strong, and we love to see that power portrayed on-screen. And yet, in our celebration of her, we often forget that the reason her strength is needed is because another character wants to kill her. At times, I’d like a woman to be the one in pursuit.

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Satana and her family moved to the United States in 1942, a time when Japanese Americans were viewed with suspicion by many in America. After spending a few years incarcerated with her father and brother at Manzanar, a Japanese American concentration camp, she and her family moved to Chicago.

There, when she was only ten years old, she survived a gang rape that transformed her entire life. She was sent to reform school by a judge who Satana later claimed had been paid off by the rapists and their families. The judge purportedly stated that she had “enticed” the men into committing their heinous crime. Her father began teaching her martial arts, a skill that would serve her well throughout her career, in the hope she would be able to protect herself.

In an interview with Michael Musto for a 1996 issue of Village Voice (later quoted in Louis Paul’s book, Tales from the Cult Film Trenches), Satana describes seeking vengeance on all of her rapists: “It took me twelve years to get even with them, but I got them all.” She details how she took “pieces of skin off with [her] nails,” “kicked [one man] in the face and in the crotch,” and hung another up by his genitals so they now speak “in a very high voice.” She became her own sort of Final Girl.

The image of her as a violent, vengeance-driven woman can be seen on-screen in her portrayal of Varla, the buxom leader of a gang of go-go dancing, drag-racing women in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! This is the role and the image for which she is best known, though I have a soft spot for Satana of The Astro-Zombies, hellbent on chasing her dream of mind control. In the latter, Satana embodies the violence, but her purpose remains unclouded by the presence of male desire.

There are a handful of other examples in the horror genre in which women are responsible for the violence that unfolds: Annie Wilkes famously holds novelist Paul Sheldon hostage in Misery, and the killer at the end of Friday the 13th is shockingly revealed to be not Jason, but his mother Pamela. Films like Teeth and Knock Knock, the 2015 remake of the ’70s film Death Game, hinge on the concept of men behaving badly and getting punished by women for it, and in films like the Swedish Let the Right One In, the female horror villain, Eli, straddles a fine line between demanding sympathy from her only friend, Oskar, for her vampiric ways and scaring the shit out of him. These films allow the woman to be the source of fear, yet they all seem to revolve around her relationship to a man, suggesting that a woman can only seek domination in order to avoid being controlled and not because she wants power.

This is why I love Satana in The Astro-Zombies: Her character is not driven by her desire for revenge, but for power and control—an aspiration that seems a thousand times better than getting even, because she doesn’t have to be wronged first to want it.

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All-too-typical stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans—and in my case, Japanese Americans—are that we are hardworking, self-disciplined, docile, and polite. Japanese Americans have been subject to Model Minority Myth rhetoric since we first began coming to America. There are many things it gets wrong, but what I come back to time and time again is the insidious idea that because some Asian Americans have managed to find success in this country, it must mean that we are no longer harmed by racism—that the trait of “docility” with which we are consistently labeled is one we willingly exemplify and are proud of, not a by-product of decades of racially motivated intimidation.

For most of my life, I know that I have been the “good girl.” As a child, I rarely broke the rules, and when I did I was so riddled with guilt that I would immediately confess to my mother, begging for forgiveness before she even had a chance to punish me. In school, I never received detention, always turned in my homework on time, and continuously operated under the belief that as long as I never fell out of line, nothing bad would ever happen to me. I was recently explaining to my husband how many of my daily anxieties are about unexplainable, terrible things happening—as if, at any moment, I might find myself in a Kafkaesque situation, being held accountable for a crime I did not commit. He gently suggested that this fear was perhaps passed down to me as the granddaughter of people who were incarcerated at Manzanar and Heart Mountain.

Perhaps I do possess a deep gulf of distrust as a result of this generational trauma, a fear that one day, all that I know will be wrenched away from me without cause. Each time I find myself apologizing to a stranger in a grocery store for “getting in their way,” or obsessively and unnecessarily checking and rechecking my bank account to make sure I’ve paid all of my bills on time, I’m reminded that my perceived obedient, respectful attitude could be a defense mechanism, one traceable through the bodies of each of my ancestors unjustly penned in by barbed wire.

This image of the meek, unassertive Asian is one that Tura Satana walks right up to, looks straight in the eye, and eviscerates. Her roles hum with an audacious sexuality as enticing as it is intimidating. To watch her dance is to be hypnotized—there is also something deeply bewitching about it, almost as if she could dance right out of her body and into yours. In the opening scene of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Satana dances so violently that it’s hard to imagine how anyone would be seduced by her. But when she bows herself into an immaculate backbend, you can’t help but stare in awe. She is in full command of her femininity, seemingly aware of all the ways her body can make people want her while also remaining ostensibly removed from men’s leers. It’s as if their lust is none of her business. She is subject to no one, least of all a man, and her willingness to allow her body to be objectified in this way for her own purposes almost makes me believe that she is reclaiming an Asian-woman stereotype and reinventing it as her own.

Incarceration at Manzanar affected my grandparents for the rest of their lives. Perhaps, for Tura Satana, freedom was found in the roles she assumed on-screen.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! takes place almost entirely in the desert, an environment Satana was deeply familiar with, having spent the early years of her life incarcerated at Manzanar—just like my grandfather. I have no way of knowing whether their paths ever crossed, but the fact that they were both there at the same time makes me feel closer to her. I often think about how incarceration affected my grandparents for the rest of their lives. After his release, my grandfather learned how to fly model airplanes, perhaps finding the kind of freedom that he had been deprived of by gliding planes over fields of corn. My grandmother found her autonomy in the earth, choosing to cultivate and tend to a robust garden for her entire life. Perhaps, for Tura Satana, freedom was found in the roles she assumed on-screen.

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Satana had a fascinating life off-screen as well, in many ways challenging the limits imposed on what an Asian woman of her time could be. She was allegedly in relationships with Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. In Chicago, she worked as a burlesque dancer and also acted as an informant for the FBI, providing information on the plans of Mafia regulars who frequented the nightclubs where she danced. Later in life, she did everything from nursing to working as a dispatcher for the LAPD. In the ’80s, in a twist of fate that Varla would most likely sneer at, she broke her back in a car accident and would need years to recover.

In an interview with artist and writer Mariko Tamaki, Satana once said, “I learned to be tough because of what life kept handing me. I could either go down for the count, or I could get up and kick ass.” This reminds me of a scene toward the end of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! when one of the men on the ranch asks Varla, “What do you want?” Without skipping a beat, she looks him straight in the eye, grins, and says, “Everything.”

Right before Varla and her gang infiltrate the desert ranch they will go on to rob and destroy, there is a moment when Varla drives her car up to one side of a barbed-wire fence. She gets out of her car, approaches the fence, and snips through the barrier with ease. She whips the fallen remnants of the fence off to the side before climbing back into her car and driving onto the white men’s property—through the gap she created for herself.

Every time I watch this scene, I am reminded of her time at Manzanar. She was a young girl then, not even ten years old, but I imagine even then she must have felt the desire to push against her constraints. As I watch her victoriously cutting through that barbed wire, for a moment she is no longer Varla, just Tura, finally able to break her way through. She makes me believe that I do possess power as an Asian American woman and reminds me to desire everything for myself.

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