Forum - View topicANNCast - Boils and Ghouls
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Hunter Sopko
 Posts: 259 |
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Thats the opening to the Haunted Mansion... Yeesh, people... Anyway, last time I got unnerved by anime was during Ghost Hound. In an episode just past the middle, the psychologist is listening to the audio tapes the main character made, spoiler[and you just start hearing background noise, building in pulsing intensity until suddenly, it's the voice of the main character's dead sister.] For being, in the end, so disappointingly average, Ghost Hound really used sound effectively throughout and it was really one of the highlights of the show. Higurashi... I think the first 4 episodes are one of, if not the best, thriller/horror examples in anime. The show just never reaches that same level of intensity again and eventually devolves into plot stupid. Kakurenbo is fun. I really hope that live action version gets off the ground. It would be amazing. I haven't watched horror movies in recent years, but I was REALLY into them in middle school/early high school. That's when I saw all the 70's and 80's stuff. My favorites honestly ended up being the schlocky horror/comedy kind of stuff, like the House movies. The only horror movies I've seen recently (which wasn't honestly that recent) were 1408 (Fantastic, effective buildup! But not a great payoff. Once the real bad **** starts happening to him in the room, it just goes downhill.), and The Mist, which was AMAZING. Glad to hear the love for it on the show. Thomas Jane (I just want my kids back!) is great in it, and the end is utterly amazing. |
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Charred Knight
 Posts: 3085 |
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I am sorry but I haven't been to Disneyland in more than 20 years, and most of my memories of it can be summed up with "get me off Space Mountain" |
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gartholamundi
 Posts: 316 Location: Gainesville, FL |
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On the Lovecraft front, I don't even know if I should mention it, this book disturbed me so much. But Fred Chappell's Dagon has a descent into madness that is informed by modern psychology (and sexual power and subversion) and is a wicked, disgusting, freak-out of a ride ... partly because it is so often under-stated (the disgust it conjures up is not similar to say Beserk by a long shot), and the build-up had me really creeping out. Lovecraft ... man. I love that whole mythos. Freakin brilliant. I just watched Cat Soup for the first time today. (it was really cool to see Justin Sevakis in the credits.) Its got creepy moments, and grotesque moments, and is definitely nightmarish from start to finish. but, there's no prolonged or sustained tension, and probably is meant to be more of a dark ride of the imagination rather than western horror. but there again i'm not sure, even with j-horror being what it is, that east and west horror translates (or equates?). j-horror has creepiness down though and i do think there are plenty of anime moments that are creepy. what i haven't seen in 2D is sustained tension or fear over a long period of time, though. speaking of creepy and nightmarish rides of the imagination, i thought the circus segment of NeoTokyo was pretty brilliant. |
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Takeyo
 Posts: 736 |
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As Zac helpfully pointed out two pages ago. But hey, it's not like it's a requirement to read an entire thread before posting. . . . 
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doctordoom85
 Posts: 2093 |
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Serial Experiments Lain DEFINITELY has quite a few scary moments. It has its own High Octane Nightmare Fuel page on TvTropes after all. My 2nd personal favorite is Lain's family ignoring her questions, Lain turns away then back, and the family is just silently staring at her. CREEPY. The biggest one is the stranger watching her by the telephone line. Remember, Lain is just a small, presumably not physically strong teenage girl. Having that stranger just watch her and watch her sent a massive chill down my bone. Of course, that's the ironic thing, even if Lain isn't "horror", I would definitely consider it scarier than some "horror" anime (or "horror" films, for that matter).
Also wow, other people have seen Betterman? Nice. It definitely had some creepy moments. Of course, you may be focusing on trying to understand what the hell was going on (the show worked better for me after I had taken some college science courses, so I actually understood a bit of what they were talking about). Funny story about Ghost Hunt, I bought Part 1 right before Halloween night, and me and my friends marathoned it that Halloween night. When the doll begins rolling toward the camera in the doll arc, a loud slam came from the garage just as the doll hit the camera and my friend's dog came racing into the room. We all jumped to say the least (turned out a shelf had collapsed). And I don't see why one wouldn't think some couldn't be scared by certain arcs. Possessed dolls, a dark labyrinth, you don't even need the best execution to make that creepy to certain people. Some people get more afraid of specific elements than others. Creepy or ghost children are probably my biggest fear. Higurashi/When They Cry is probably the scariest anime I've seen. Mainly because (at least earlier on, and ignoring the spoiler["resets"], it's "realistic". No monsters, no ghosts, just the fear and paranoia that someone you know may be trying to kill you, someone is following you but you can't see them, you want to prove that you're being targeted but can't get any evidence, and ARE you really being targeted...... Personally, I don't think manga works to make me scared compared to anime personally. Most of horror novels, for example, fail to scare me in the slightest. I love Stephen King, but for his characters and stories (which are quite good, even in his "horror" novels), not for being scared, as I think the only time I've ever been unnerved by King is ONE scene in The Shining (which I can't even recall specifically). The only books to unnerve me have been House of Leaves (the ONLY book I will argue is unfilmable) and certain works of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, and often most of those use your visual imagination to scare you (something manga will often fail to deliver, since you're seeing the picture of what they want you to see). I feel moving visuals are just more effective to me. I know this may get me flamed, but I think the film that executed Lovecraft's "the greatest fear is the fear of the unknown" argument is Blair Witch Project. You don't see the genuine threat, but the evidence of its existence and the continuing build of the tension and stress the characters are feeling really horrified me. Even the moments where it's just the characters are arguing has me at the edge of my seat. Also, for me disgusting is different from scary. When I find something disgusting, I'm usually feeling repulsed, not "OMG, this could happen to me!". It's why I feel the majority of the "horror" American films from this past decade are not scary in the slightest. Vampires aren't scary?! "insert Twilight jab here" Mentioning the best 70's horror films without listing Halloween?! BLASPHEMY, I say! The original Black Christmas is pretty good as well. |
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Quark
 Posts: 710 Location: British Columbia, Canada |
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I agree. Halloween is one of those movies that will always make me nervous. I watched it with the Rifftrax once, and I was still feeling on edge after, even though they were making fun of it. You're right about Stephen King horror not usually being scary. For me though, there are two exceptions. The Stand was creepy because well...it feels like it could happen. That some super virus created by the government gets loose and kills off the majority of the population. The way he wrote the complete breakdown of society was fantastic. The other Stephen King book that freaked me out was Salem's Lot. The part where the vampire kid is floating in front of the window, scratching on it, and begging to be let in *shudder* The blinds on my window were closed that night. Again, you're right about modern American horror focusing more on the gross stuff than on actually being scary. However, if you know where to look, you can find some good ones once in a while. Two recent American horror movies I saw that were pretty good were House of the Devil, and the Last Exorcism. House of the Devil was particularly cool, because it looked just like an 80's horror movie. It had me on the edge of my seat, just waiting for something awful to happen. Generally though, I tend to stick with foreign horror. French horror movies are becoming the new trend, I think. Check out Inside, and Martyrs. Oh, and as for vampire movies, in addition to Let the Right One In, the Korean vampire movie Thirst is really interesting too. |
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Jeikobu
 Posts: 154 |
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[Mod Edit: This site is not a religious soapbox and this has nothing to really do with the discussion of the medium in this podcast. - Keonyn]
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LostPhrack
Posts: 40 Location: Mass. |
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I loooooove that series! It was actually the first DVD I ever bought too. Their handling of vampires in it are fantastic. Not terribly sexy, physically a threat and often a step or two ahead of the group after them. The third episode about spoiler[the breeding experiments] was terrifying and the scene with spoiler[Idris Elba trapped in the warehouse with the ticking clock] was wonderfully tense. Anime wise I really enjoyed Kakurenbo and thought the Blood: The Last Vampire anime was a decent monster flick. I'm only five episodes into Ghost Hound but I really love the tone of it so far. Creepy in a way that tales of alien abductions, Mothman and other modern myths are. |
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Hunter Sopko
Posts: 259 |
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I totally missed the third page. Musta been a careless click while going through the topic (clicked the numbers instead of next page). Noticed that after I posted, but... eh. Didn't really care enough to fix it. It still deserves to be said anyway. |
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Animehermit
 Posts: 964 Location: The Argama |
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and what does that have to do with the subject of the podcast? please do keep your religious beliefs out of the discussion. the last thing this thread needs is for some troll coming in telling everyone how evil Halloween is. also can we get a mod to remove the post? this is clearly soapboxing, albeit indirectly. |
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Helociraptor
 Posts: 44 |
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I found season 1 more entertaining than really scary, but it was creepy in a good way. Season 2 sadly dispelled all the paranoia and mystery with a rather silly story. That keeps it from being a favourite of mine. But yeah, Higurashi is definitely worth a look.
Agreed. While I didn't like Blair Witch Project in particular (mostly due to plot holes and behaviour stretching the imagination a bit too far), not showing a monster or threat is - in my opinion - more effective than having some creature jump at the camera. Monsters generally fail to scare me in the slighest: a monster is something tangible, physical that can be fought, killed or evaded. That's why most horror anime or movies fail for me, neither monsters nor blood and guts are really scary. The first Alien movie is somewhat an exception; it managed to sustain a threatening atmosphere quite effectively. A good example for a more subtle and psychological kind of horror (which I prefer) is a novel by Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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Whilst the second segment of this film was perhaps somewhat nightmarish, I found the circus sequences to be too playful to be unsettling. Some degree of dissonance may have been intended between the monstrous images and the upbeat soundtrack, though such a possibility does little to alter my impression that the circus scenes are only representative of a child's ultimately harmless interest in the modestly grotesque.
This apples to me also, perhaps ignoring the quaint exception of the "supernatural" episode of Mahoromatic. The End of Evangelion leaves one so highly disturbed, if not by what is shown than by what is immediately implicit. spoiler[Nobody wants to "be" everyone else! Even though it is only on a temporary basis, how sickening is must be for every person to lose — or effectively to share — their individuality and their haecceity of person.] Localised violence and miscellaneous horror can be tolerated, though the sheer scale of this film's scope augments its bizarreness to the extent that enduring it became a feat — one that is not without its lingering consequences. |
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nightjuan
 Posts: 1473 |
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Just felt that commenting on this was appropriate, particularly in light of a different discussion going on elsewhere.
It is rather silly, when we consider some of the more blatantly cheesy aspects of its resolution, but for me the second season has the benefit of actually tying together a number of events that would otherwise be nothing more than a series of creepy paranoid murders. It gives them a greater scope and a sense of thematic purpose, in a way, that they would otherwise lack. At the expense of eventually removing all of the mystery, yes, but not for a gratuitous reason. You could argue including elements of horror was ultimately nothing more than the means to an end. I see both series as two complementary halves of a whole rather than two unrelated pieces living in their own isolated worlds. It's got a fairly unique and interesting idea that, I believe, makes up for a number of unfortunate flaws in its execution. Naturally, I suppose not everyone will feel this way. Granted, the author himself isn't unaware of how silly the whole thing looks in retrospect...to the point he's been making some implicitly self-deprecating jabs at Higurashi in his latest work, which isn't above including a lot of silliness but also happens to be far more ambitious. |
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doctordoom85
Posts: 2093 |
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I dunno, I'm just having trouble seeing Higurashi as silly or cheesy. Teenagers and pre-teens getting killed in insanely gruesome ways, and that's not even covering all the mental trauma all the characters go through.......yeah, I don't care if the comedy afterwards is Seinfeld-level, I just don't feel like laughing during those parts.
Maybe Season 2 will change all that (sadly, not licensed, so I'm eagerly awaiting Yen Press' release of the manga to get to the arcs that weren't covered in Season 1), but Season 1 already had 2 Answer arcs, and I didn't see anything that ruined the concept yet. Heck, "Eye-Opening" and "Atonement" actually made things MORE disturbing IMHO. spoiler[Seeing Shion snap that hard and go that far over the line] and spoiler[Keiichi realizing he killed his two best friends who turned out to be innocent] really doesn't make things lighter, at least not yet. Not to mention, I've heard "Dear you bond / Kizuna" (I avoided looking at the lyrics, as I knew it contained Season 2 spoilers), and one cannot deny that is made of pure win. |
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nightjuan
Posts: 1473 |
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The second season still has a number of psychologically disturbing events and some murders, but it does take an even more decisive turn towards answering questions instead of asking them. That alone represents a change in tone, because not all the answers are as dark as you would have previously imagined. I thought that the central conflict, once it actually became clear, still had rather tragic and somber implications, but it's definitely a lot less mysterious and more than a bit goofy in execution. Can't really say anything more than that here. You could argue that the horror genre is at its best when it's making the victims fear the unknown and at its worst after the illusion has been dispelled but, then again, the underlying point of Higurashi isn't about scaring the audience. |
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