Can you elaborate on this? On the face of your comment, I think you might just be unaware of a lot of films that have been made in the US. The article mentioned the American David Lynch's Eraserhead as an influence of these works. David Cronenberg is also undoubtedly a huge influence here as well (I know he's Canadian, but he largely works in the American movie industry).
It's not like Tetsuo: The Iron Man was a huge financial or mainstream success. Most of these movies were mostly relegated to the grindhouse, and American has more than its share of grindhouse film makers (ala John Waters). Also consider that The Fly was as big a financial success as Akira.
Basically, what I'm saying is that I don't think Japanese artists & audiences are very different from their American counterparts in this regard. It is not distinctly Japanese or American to dream up horrific stuff, but rather, it's human to hold up a mirror to an, at times, horrific existence.
Is it just something like "rule of cool" in that they just pick whatever seems 'fucked-up-cool' or is it a culture of going for intellectual hard topics? Are japanese writers just hardcore about philosophy and 'deep reality' topics in general?(again I could be talking crap because I don't haven't even played all the games, but geopolical perspectives in Metal Gear Solid also pretty original and based in actual dry research instead of the charicatures we mostly get from western industry).
If anyone is familiar plz help :P
It is common for US horror movies to be "based on a true story", featuring serial killers that could be real life criminals. It is scary because it is not just a story, it is real life, and you are not safe.
Japanese stories are more into the supernatural. They don't try to scare you by making things look as real as possible, instead they mess with your mind, trying to make you accept things that obviously fictive as genuinely threatening.
This is just a general trend of course, the west also has its fair share of ghost stories too, and Japan has its deranged killers.
My guess is that culture, in particular religion has something to do with it. The Japanese have a rich supernatural world to tap into, full of ghosts and spirits. Westerners essentially wiped that off in favor of an almighty god, where evil come from human with corrupted souls rather than from supernatural entities.
During WWII, the Japanese were absolutely brutal and persistent. Having your constitution rewritten to forbid a society like that from having a military could lead to some… extremely creative outlets in art.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_9_of_the_Japanese_Co...