Most horror anime isn’t really horror, even when it scares us

Every Halloween, anime fans are given list after list of horror anime to watch over the holidays. And year after year, the lists are filled with shows that, in my opinion, are not really horror. Sure, there are shows that involve tons of violence and blood, or rampant demons / vampires / monstrous activity, and some of the favorite titles deal with the darkest parts of the human psyche and include tense plots. So what constitutes “horror”? In the simplest terms, genre entries are meant to provoke fear. Whether you as a viewer are personally scared or not is subjective, but true horror anime shares a direct lineage with the history of chilling tactics. Since genuine scares are in short supply, anime series that really fit the bill become more worthy of celebration.

The soul of horror has been part of animation since the dawn of the medium, at least in the West. From Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies, particularly “The Skeleton Dance”, and the works of the Fleischer brothers such as Swing You Sinners and White as snow, Animation opened the world of cinema to ghostly images, even if it was in the service of a fun musical number with dancing ghouls. In Japan, however, the creators set an identifiable tone of terror in the 1960s with shows like Adventure Boy Shadar and GeGeGe no Kitarō, though the focus was on fighting monsters and ghosts to save the world instead of scaring the audience. During the 1980s, a stronger perception of horror anime took shape, with the rise of OVAs (essentially direct-to-video anime) ushering in a decade of extreme violence, gore, sex, and the grotesque. were common in shows like Wicked City, Vampire Hunter D and of course, Akira.

These anime used violence and blood to shock audiences, but were more interested in emotions than scares. Sure, Tetsuo turns into a giant blob in Akira It’s pure Cronenberg-style body horror, but the movie isn’t meant to be as scary as it is simply thrilling. While Cronenberg focused on the horrible and traumatic ways our bodies could transform to deepen our collective fears of our frail crumbling bodies, Katsuhiro Otomo’s seminal anime points to a more tame but fascinating story of puberty and male violence.

Image: Funimation

In fact, most anime movies and shows grouped into the horror genre are more like thrillers, where the focus is on surprises that keep audiences intrigued and excited for what’s to come. Other It is a great anime with the plot of a Final Destination movie, big murders, and an intriguing plot full of shocking twists, but it looks more like a gory mystery than a horror show, aiming to provide a fun puzzle to solve. regarding who will die next. What it is not about is to upset the audience in such a way that they fear the public. Next death scene, something that the popular Higurashi when they cry succeeds in. Then there is an acclaimed trio: Boogiepop Phantom, Serial Experiments Lain, and Agent of paranoia, that prioritize the atmosphere, the creepy visuals and the feeling that reality is not what it seems. The series is all about paranoia and existentialism, resulting in anime shows closest to horror, even if their plots don’t follow any explicit horror tropes.

The animation may be scary, but time has suggested that there are obstacles; It seems significantly more difficult to make the audience feel a pang of fear when looking at 2D drawings than with real humans, but it can and has been done. Take, for example, the animated movie Monstrous house, a 3D animated movie aimed at children that still offers plenty of scares, a spooky atmosphere, and characters you fear, all without the need for violence and blood. Then there are R-rated animated horror movies like the Train to Busan cleave Seoul Station and Resident Evil: Degeneration, which use zombie horror tropes to make you worry about what happens to the characters and freak out just as much as they do when they meet their inevitable deaths.

Image: FilmRise

Surprisingly, the anime has become closer to the authentic horror tone of the shōnen genre. Since the 1980s, action horror anime has embraced horror tropes and used them to make violence hit harder, such as Evil man and the aforementioned Vampire Hunter D. In the 90s, the anime shōnen as Yuyu Hakusho and the super popular Bleach was inspired by horror movies and shows like GeGeGe no Kitarō to create action-focused series that are still intertwined with supernatural elements. Death Note and Monster, in the meantime, took a psychological suspense approach, giving us dark stories of murders and serial killers and presenting them to a wide and widespread audience.

The last five years have seen a shōnen anime trend that takes that idea further by embracing horror tropes to put characters in terrifying situations that ultimately accentuate the subgenre’s sense of optimism. Attack on Titan Not only did it become one of the most popular anime shows ever, it broke into the mainstream by competing with The Walking Dead for one of the gloomiest and most gruesome shows in recent years. It is a show set in a cruel world with violence, blood and constant fear for the characters, who can die at any second, all while presenting a classic story of a boy who learns to embrace his powers. Even more recently we have Murderer of demons and Jujutsu Kaisen, possibly the two biggest shōnen anime at the moment, both adapted from the manga published in the prestigious and long-running magazine Shōnen Jump, which also published big hits like One Piece, My Hero Academia and Naruto and Hunter X Hunter.

Image: MAP

Murderer of demons and Jujutsu Kaisen They have all the makings of a winning shōnen anime: personable protagonists with incredible power, a story of perseverance and determination, as well as a group of supporting characters who support the hero and help him learn the value of friendship in facing adversity. However, what makes them unique is how they basically take that winning formula and place it in a seemingly impossible horror scenario where hope always has to fight harder to exist, where power levels are not just toys, they have a cost. Where characters can face horrific fates, injuries don’t heal instantly but leave bloody marks, and the villains are genuinely creepy and menacing. Take the third episode of Jujutsu Kaisen, which essentially unfolds as a haunted house story, employing spooky noise tropes and things that move on their own before unleashing a menacing spirit in our main characters, before getting their ass kicked with their cool powers and growing.

Before I lost my way The promised neverland It married perfectly to a shōnen story of children who came together to save the day from the monsters and turned it into a creepy and harrowing horror story. Season 1 employs framing to keep characters at a distance, and contrast between computer-generated environments and 2D characters to give the story a strange sense that something is wrong and accentuate the monstrous forms of the villains of the game. program as well as orphans. vigilant.

As for the more traditional “horror anime”, all is not lost. An adaptation of the horror comedy Mieruko-chan is currently airing, and cleverly uses horror tropes to create a hilarious anime with scary visuals about a ghost whisperer. Next year, the highly anticipated adaptation of Junji Ito’s classic Uzumaki The horror manga should play as a mix between the body and cosmic horror, as it narrates a city plagued by a curse involving spirals. Meanwhile, horror has become an integral part of what makes anime as exciting as it is popular, even if these shows aren’t exactly embalmed in the substance of horror.