Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a prolific Japanese filmmaker, who like Takashi Miike, cut his teeth making many direct-to-video and Yakuza films. His initial success was in horror, but he has always worked in a variety of genres. He embraces the limitations of working within genre, and says that the existence of classics that were created in genre or under the studio system means that it can be done again. Kurosawa's films often examine the way our society isolates individuals from one another.