Based on a selection of stories by Edogawa Rampo , a celebrated pulp novelist who took his pseudonym from the Japanese pronunciation of " Edgar Allan Poe , " " Horrors of Malformed Men " is less a lucidly plotted film than an exercise in streaming subconsciousness : a dreamlike outpouring of transgressive imagery that opens in a prison for topless madwomen and concludes with an explosion of optical effects that sends ( none too plausibly ) severed heads and body parts sailing through a purplish sky .