Both films are about a body invaded and rebuilt by machinery, filmed as physical horror rather than as metaphor, and Cronenberg's is the earlier of the two by six years. What Tsukamoto's film shares is the central image: metal entering flesh and the flesh accepting it, photographed close, wet and practical. Cronenberg opens an organic slot in a man's abdomen and feeds a videocassette into it; Tsukamoto drives scrap through skin until the character is more machine than man. Tetsuo's own register is different, shot in high-contrast monochrome at stop-motion speed, but the body-horror line it is working in is the one Videodrome had drawn.