Week Four: The New Weird

      

      After roughly 200 years after the rise of the Gothic genre, new stories have become strained. “Classic” horror has been done hundreds of times and it takes a lot more elements are needed to keep audience attention. There needs to be another layer of cleverness to capture an audience or make them feel scared. This has lead to some truly unique piece of literature because to stand out from the body of existing work, there must be a hook.

            This week, I looked at some of Three Moments of an Explosion’s short stories. Personally, I did not find them to be particularly terrifying, but rather just fascinating to read. Most the the stories have interesting concepts and open endings that let he reader infer whatever they please from the stories. Sometimes that can be even more terrifying than clearly explained stories.

            In “The Condition of New Death”, the story embodies the fear of the unknown and change. It involves a concept that people find unpleasant that is hard to understand, such as death, and adds a new supernatural element to it. This acts as a sort of exploration into how people react to change and ends on a dark hint of how humans must overcome it. This leaves the reader on a threatened note that may cause the reader to remember the story long after they read it, and carry it with them through their day which is the goal of most horror literature.

            In another story, The 9^th Technique, where the main character messes with magic that goes wrong. This story’s theme explores the idea of magic that should not be touched or magic that is misused. It is written is a confusing manor that is hard to understand, but it ends with the magic chrysalis growing endlessly and never hatching. I kind of think of this as embodying the fear of how ignoring one’s problems can lead them to consume you.

Week Three: J-Horror

I think the important thing to note about J-horror is how Japanese culture affects the storytelling. The basis for many of these supernatural horror stories from Japan come from years of island tradition. Japan history has always been very fascinating to me. It’s very different from Western culture, and I like to appreciate the history of an island across the sea.

Traditional Japanese mythology and lore is filled with many reflections on nature and the forces that drive it. Unlike western story’s themes of man vs man plot, traditional Japanese stories have a more man vs nature. They enemies and Yokai (demons) are not meant to be defeated, but survived. The antagonists are sometimes never explained or understood and this is accepted because sometimes nature cannot be explained. This is reflected in many J-horror stories.

Looking at one the movies from class, Pulse (Kairo), this unexplained enemy is also never really explained. They appear to be cyber ghosts, but the movie contradicts itself in other ways. The ending still baffles me a little. It really makes me question what do the black human stains mean? Did the main character disappear into sludge as well? Or was he the clearly aged man captaining the boat? But the fact that the movie never bothers to tell you if definitive of it’s heritage.

Another interesting J-horror is the famous The Ring. The Ring has been quoted many times to be the best Japanese horror film ever created, and personally I enjoyed it very much. It has many ties to traditional Japanese folklore, such as the idea that water stands for death. Traditionally, women’s hair is only worn down in death, which makes the hairy figure of Sadako even more frightening. The idea of a ghost woman in white is also a famous figure in Japanese mythology, a yūrei.  Sadako has become a sort of pop icon to the Japanese and the film has had great success. With over seven sequel/prequels, The Ring is the staple of the J-horror genre and is known to most people in the East and West.

Week Two: Interview with a Vampire

What is it that lead to the modern romanticizing of vampires and the overflow of vampire teen romance novels on the market? Personally, I have gone through my Twilight phase and I have never lost my love of supernatural storytelling.

I think to understand the idea of the Vampire novel; one has to look at where the idea of Vampires came from. The first idea of the “vampire” was said to have been created when people dug up current graves, rigor mortis had set in cause the dead bodies to expunge blood out of various orifices in the human body. These dead bodies also had bloated bellies from the digestive gases in the stomach. People found this incredibly scary and thought these bodies were attacking people and drinking their blood. Thus, this fear of the dead not being how they were left gave birth to the idea of hideous undead evil.

Vampires were brought to the main stream literary world with the 1897 book Dracula by Bram Stoker (and subsequent movie adaptations), despite it not being popular in his lifetime.

In the modern day, we understand the decaying process a lot better, and this fear of the decaying dead bodies has shifted onto zombies, rather than vampires. So where does this leave the vampire story?

Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire was one of the great looks in changing the concept of the vampire in popular culture. Instead of evil undead, it shifted the ideals of vampirism to the idea of eternal life and an unquenchable desire. These concepts are extremely relatable and mankind has been seeking ways to prolong life for centuries. Instead of the reanimated dead, Rice portrays vampires more like super humans with a fault of feasting on blood.

 The main character, Louis, was a refreshing and relatable character that emphasized his humanity in his feelings of guilt. Louis is the embodiment of how a long life would not necessarily be a good thing, which can clearly be seen in the ending of the story with him attacking the interviewer about not understanding this. I think that is what is so fascinating about vampire stories and this story in particular. They explore this concept of something we want versus how it would actually affect us.