Asian Horror
There are a couple things I want to talk about; The Enigma of Amigara Fault and Parasyte, the anime/manga series. I've read Enigma multiple times and I've watched Parasyte through once, both I enjoy very much though I like Parasyte better.
Enigma was very unique to me when I first read it, mainly because I had never read anything like it, but also because I realized how different the idea was. It doesn't seem too terribly scary while you're reading it, after all it's just a bunch of human-shaped holes in a rock face, right? If anything it mostly just comes across as creepy, but it becomes scarier when some of the characters realize there are holes shaped exactly like then, meaning those holes are theirs. It gets worse when the people start going into the holes and can't seem to stop themselves, like the holes are calling to them and the call is inescapable.
This story gets to us because it taps into that innate fear we all have of something we don't understand but that we can't escape. This comes in different forms for everyone; recently in politics it seems this fearsome enigma that many people don't understand and are scared of beyond belief to the point they simply deny its existence is the idea of facts, haha, but that's a little off topic and counts as my minuscule rant for the day. In all seriousness though, this does actually apply to what I'm talking about, just in a slightly different sense. In Enigma, the holes cannot be explained and their mere existence has taken hold of the world by its ear. The main characters all give in once they find their holes and promptly get into them, no matter how hard they fight to avoid it or how scared they are. When it first shows the workers on the other side of the fault, they find what they think are the other ends of the holes, but they're confused because they're no longer human shaped, and this is when the reader makes the connection that as the people go through the long passageways inside the holes they're going to be deformed and turned into terrifying stretched out forms of themselves, the stuff of nightmares basically.
Moving on to Parasyte, this is one of my favorite anime. If you've never watched it I recommend that you do, it's fun, but again if you don't mind gore and violence, which is definitely one of the reasons I love it. Similar to Enigma, it kind of dapples in the idea of something unknown and hard to escape. If you're unfamiliar with it, long story short it's about these aliens that come to Earth and take over a large portion of the human population and become integrated, but it's scary for multiple reasons.
One reason the invasion of the parasites is terrifying is because no one seems to know about it for a long time; the parasites take over people and consume them but replace them in their image, so you could be friends with one of them and not even know it's not your human friend anymore, which is pretty scary. Not only this, but they are also capable of transforming their bodies into nearly indestructible forms and can weaponize themselves, not only this but they can move so fast the human eye can't even track the movements, so they're quite intimidating both physically and how they can seamlessly form themselves into society. The main character is almost taken over by one of these parasites while he's sleeping but he successfully blocks it from traveling up his arm into his brain by tying his arm off, keeping the creature in his forearm. When he wakes up he thinks it was just a dream but quickly realizes it's for real when he looks down and his hand has a face and is talking to him. A bunch of stuff obviously happens after that, but imagine if that happened to you and you then had a permanent parasite sitting on your arm that's eaten your hand and is your new arm, this thing being your new companion and it gets you into a lot of trouble; that's pretty scary.
Both of these stories are really different but they do share a few similarities I mentioned, and they do both succeed in being horrifying.
Enigma was very unique to me when I first read it, mainly because I had never read anything like it, but also because I realized how different the idea was. It doesn't seem too terribly scary while you're reading it, after all it's just a bunch of human-shaped holes in a rock face, right? If anything it mostly just comes across as creepy, but it becomes scarier when some of the characters realize there are holes shaped exactly like then, meaning those holes are theirs. It gets worse when the people start going into the holes and can't seem to stop themselves, like the holes are calling to them and the call is inescapable.
This story gets to us because it taps into that innate fear we all have of something we don't understand but that we can't escape. This comes in different forms for everyone; recently in politics it seems this fearsome enigma that many people don't understand and are scared of beyond belief to the point they simply deny its existence is the idea of facts, haha, but that's a little off topic and counts as my minuscule rant for the day. In all seriousness though, this does actually apply to what I'm talking about, just in a slightly different sense. In Enigma, the holes cannot be explained and their mere existence has taken hold of the world by its ear. The main characters all give in once they find their holes and promptly get into them, no matter how hard they fight to avoid it or how scared they are. When it first shows the workers on the other side of the fault, they find what they think are the other ends of the holes, but they're confused because they're no longer human shaped, and this is when the reader makes the connection that as the people go through the long passageways inside the holes they're going to be deformed and turned into terrifying stretched out forms of themselves, the stuff of nightmares basically.
Moving on to Parasyte, this is one of my favorite anime. If you've never watched it I recommend that you do, it's fun, but again if you don't mind gore and violence, which is definitely one of the reasons I love it. Similar to Enigma, it kind of dapples in the idea of something unknown and hard to escape. If you're unfamiliar with it, long story short it's about these aliens that come to Earth and take over a large portion of the human population and become integrated, but it's scary for multiple reasons.
One reason the invasion of the parasites is terrifying is because no one seems to know about it for a long time; the parasites take over people and consume them but replace them in their image, so you could be friends with one of them and not even know it's not your human friend anymore, which is pretty scary. Not only this, but they are also capable of transforming their bodies into nearly indestructible forms and can weaponize themselves, not only this but they can move so fast the human eye can't even track the movements, so they're quite intimidating both physically and how they can seamlessly form themselves into society. The main character is almost taken over by one of these parasites while he's sleeping but he successfully blocks it from traveling up his arm into his brain by tying his arm off, keeping the creature in his forearm. When he wakes up he thinks it was just a dream but quickly realizes it's for real when he looks down and his hand has a face and is talking to him. A bunch of stuff obviously happens after that, but imagine if that happened to you and you then had a permanent parasite sitting on your arm that's eaten your hand and is your new arm, this thing being your new companion and it gets you into a lot of trouble; that's pretty scary.
Both of these stories are really different but they do share a few similarities I mentioned, and they do both succeed in being horrifying.
I've read Enigma of Amigara Fault before but not for this class. I was absolutely fascinated by it as it's story was so different from anything I had read before, and from your post it seems you had a similar experience. I think it seemed very unique, at least to me, based on the fact that the story is compelled by a form of fate. This isn't a focus of modern American films/ literature since fate isn't as widely believed in as it was in places like ancient Greece. This makes it seem like people wouldn't feel the weight of a force pushing people on a specific path. I believe the fact that there is a physical element (the rock wall) that is tied to this ominous pull to walk into the human shaped holes, that's harder to blow off. In the story, the intangible idea of fate is grounded in the tangible world.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, if you look at the choice the characters do make to go in the holes, it slowly changes them into monsters. But I'm not fully sure of where this thought leads.
I love Parasyte! I've watched the entire series, but have yet to read the manga. Keeping with the Japanese theme of horror, it kinda leaves some things unresolved in the end, just letting things go back to being balanced out. If you haven't read or watched it yet, I highly recommend Tokyo Ghoul. It is my favorite anime and also falls under the horror genre.
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