rmsephy (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} rmsephy) wrote,@ 2008-10-29 18:27:00 |
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This journal sucks and is now about horror
I'm thinking of sending in a horror manga for the next Tokyopop contest, so I was trying to figure out what it was that makes a work of art scary.
For the most part, there seems to be two types of scariness. I'm going to call them the horror of "chance" and the horror of "causality". The horror of chance is the weaker of the two, and something which I think is overused in the horror genre. Basically, it's the kind of worrying induced by not knowing what's going to happen next. Such as walking down a hallway and having a zombie suddenly jump out at you out of nowhere. Sure, it works in a pinch, but it's not good to base a horror story entirely on chance. For one, having zombies jump out from behind a corner doesn't work as well in a manga as it does in some other media, like video games or movies.
The horror of causality is the exact opposite. A while ago I read a short story about a creature that looks like a woman normally but becomes a vampiress on the night of the full moon. Basically, after the full moon the woman goes into the city and seduces a young man into coming back to her castle. For each night afterwards, the vampiress would grant whatever desires the young man had (you don't need a vivid imagination to guess what went on), with the only condition being that he had to stay in the castle during the morning (at which time she had to stay in her coffin). And go it goes for a month. The young man does end up staying in the castle, even though he sometimes thinks about leaving and finds a few clues scattered about the castle, which he doesn't think enough of. And then the night of the full moon comes and the vampiress kills him.
You can interpret the story any way you like, be it about female empowerment blah blah blah. I did in fact find the story on a fetish board so it's bound to have that sort of stuff, but I'm not writing about that. As the night of the full moon approached, the thoughts that the young man had about leaving grew stronger, but the "means" that the vampiress employed to make him stay became more extreme as well. And this whole time the reader knows what the vampiress is up to, and for the most part they know what would happen to the young man if he didn't leave and they're more or less hoping that he would. And then the full moon comes and you get this sick feeling in your stomach when you know it's too late.
That's the horror of causality. That sick feeling you have when you realize you'd made a mistake, you know you'll be punished for it, and it's too late to go back and fix it. In a horror game, this might be when you hide yourself in a closet, but when the big bad comes into the room you realize that the hem of your skirt is sticking out of the cracks. And I'm saying skirt here because chances are, if you're playing a horror game, you're playing as a female protagonist. Most games punish the player immediately for each mistake. A good horror game draws the player into subtle traps and then lets the realization slowly come to him. This kind of horror is something that any form of art can create, be it a short story or a manga.
I'm thinking of sending in a horror manga for the next Tokyopop contest, so I was trying to figure out what it was that makes a work of art scary.
For the most part, there seems to be two types of scariness. I'm going to call them the horror of "chance" and the horror of "causality". The horror of chance is the weaker of the two, and something which I think is overused in the horror genre. Basically, it's the kind of worrying induced by not knowing what's going to happen next. Such as walking down a hallway and having a zombie suddenly jump out at you out of nowhere. Sure, it works in a pinch, but it's not good to base a horror story entirely on chance. For one, having zombies jump out from behind a corner doesn't work as well in a manga as it does in some other media, like video games or movies.
The horror of causality is the exact opposite. A while ago I read a short story about a creature that looks like a woman normally but becomes a vampiress on the night of the full moon. Basically, after the full moon the woman goes into the city and seduces a young man into coming back to her castle. For each night afterwards, the vampiress would grant whatever desires the young man had (you don't need a vivid imagination to guess what went on), with the only condition being that he had to stay in the castle during the morning (at which time she had to stay in her coffin). And go it goes for a month. The young man does end up staying in the castle, even though he sometimes thinks about leaving and finds a few clues scattered about the castle, which he doesn't think enough of. And then the night of the full moon comes and the vampiress kills him.
You can interpret the story any way you like, be it about female empowerment blah blah blah. I did in fact find the story on a fetish board so it's bound to have that sort of stuff, but I'm not writing about that. As the night of the full moon approached, the thoughts that the young man had about leaving grew stronger, but the "means" that the vampiress employed to make him stay became more extreme as well. And this whole time the reader knows what the vampiress is up to, and for the most part they know what would happen to the young man if he didn't leave and they're more or less hoping that he would. And then the full moon comes and you get this sick feeling in your stomach when you know it's too late.
That's the horror of causality. That sick feeling you have when you realize you'd made a mistake, you know you'll be punished for it, and it's too late to go back and fix it. In a horror game, this might be when you hide yourself in a closet, but when the big bad comes into the room you realize that the hem of your skirt is sticking out of the cracks. And I'm saying skirt here because chances are, if you're playing a horror game, you're playing as a female protagonist. Most games punish the player immediately for each mistake. A good horror game draws the player into subtle traps and then lets the realization slowly come to him. This kind of horror is something that any form of art can create, be it a short story or a manga.
