#the classic either very similar or very different twins trope | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thenightling · 5 years

Text

NOPE BOOK TAG!

Tag creator (A BookTube Book) - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQt_…

1. NOPE Ending: A book ending that made you go NOPE either in denial, rage or simply because the ending was crappy.

This is a tough one. I rarely hate how literature ends. I’ll name a few comics and then move on the literature.

Novels: The Man who fell to Earth by Walter Tevis (Love this novel but hate the ending.) The Dresden Files: Changes The Frankenstein Papers by Fred Saberhagen (He writes Dracula so well but his Frankenstein Monster... Spoilers, he’s a f--king alien with amnesia. That’s the twist. He just THOUGHT he was created by Victor Frankenstein. It’s so... Stupid. The Last vampire by Whitley Strieber. Lilith’s Dream by Whitley Strieber On my Honor

Lolita. WHY is this a classic?!?

______________________________

Comics: The Sandman: The Kindly Ones. I know it’s a classic but out of all of the original Sandman this is the one I liked the least, loved the rest. The Dreaming (1990s to early 2000s version). It’s just... awful. Madman & Monster (written by Steve Niles and published by IDW). I hate the ending but like the premise.

Nineteen eighty-four by George Orwell. Great novel, just very depressing.

Manga:

Return to Labyrinth. The author (Jake T. Forbes) just wanted his cake and eat it too. He establishes that Jareth is Sarah’s true love but at the same time decides that they can’t be together “For reasons” and has Toby give a “I learned something today” speech that lasts several pages to justify it. No, if it’s true love, they’re supposed to be together. Don’t try to placate both the shippers and the fans who want them to not be a couple, you won’t appease anyone if you try to appease both.

Wolf’s Rain: It’s just so sad. Why!??

_______________________

2. NOPE Protagonist: The main character you dislike and drives you crazy.

Novels: Miriam from The Hunger, The Last Vampire, and Lilith’s Dream by Whitley Strieber.

The Vampire Armand from Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles. He’s too much of a Sadist. I don’t understand the appeal. Lolita. WHY is this a classic?!

Comics:

Echo from The Dreaming (Late 90s / early 2000s version)

Riri Williams, the current writing of the Captain Marvel comics, actually pretty much all of Marvel at the moment... _______________________________________________

3. NOPE Series: A series that turned out to be one huge pile of NOPE after you’ve invested all of that time and energy on it, or a series you gave up on because it wasn’t worth it anymore.

Novels:

The Hunger book series by Whitley Strieber

Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, most everything after Tale of The Body Thief and Tale of the Body Thief wasn’t that good... The Dresden Files. I don’t know, my interest just kind of waned and also I came across a few unpleasant fans who legitimately believe women and men “talk differently” and “use different language” when speaking and told me a woman can’t write male characters and visa versa. Mary Shelley begs to differ! Comics: The current Sandman Universe comics...

Morbius: The Living Vampire (1990s run)

Manga:

_________________________________

4. NOPE Popular pairing: A ship you don’t support.

I don’t really hate many pairings...

Oh, wait. Lolita. Do I really need to explain? Comics: Joker and Harley Quinn (original versions as created for Batman The Animated series.) Cain and Abel and their sister-wives in The Dreaming (late 90s to early 2000s comics). That was just... Oh, my God. Was that just to be edgy!? For God’s sake, Abel’s fraternal twin sister was Cain’s wife and locked in attic!? WTF?!? Lucien and Nuala (also in The Dreaming late 90s and early 2000s version). Essentially “Hey, the people we’re in love with are dead. Why don’t we hook up?” “Okay! You’re good enough. Let’s settle on each other.”

Does Caitlin R. Kiernan have any concept of love, at all? Steve and Bucky. Not because it’s a bad ship or because it’s gay but because the fans who support it are so rabid and if you suggest it’s not canon they immediately assume you’re a homophobe and send you hate.

SwanQueen (Emma Swan and The Evil Queen in Once Upon a Time) similar reasons as above. ____________________________

5. NOPE. Plot twist: A plot twist you didn’t see coming or didn’t like.

The Frankenstein Papers by Fred Saberhagen.

(He writes Dracula so well but his Frankenstein Monster... Spoilers, he’s a f--king alien with amnesia. That’s the twist. He just THOUGHT he was created by Victor Frankenstein. It’s so... Stupid. _______________________________

6. NOPE. Protagonist action/decision: A character decision that made you shake your head NOPE.

Faust and his hornness for FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Gretchen and almost everything he did because of that horniness.

7. NOPE. Genre: A genre you will never read.

I don’t think there’s a genre I’d never read. But I’m not a big fan of young adult romances or bodice rippers and torture porn. I’m not into errotica or graphic violence even though I adore Gothic Horror.

8. Nope format:

Umm.... I prefer hardcover to paperback but I don’t avoid any particular format. I do hate when the new Barnes and Nobel classics call things like Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, Mary Shelley, and Bram Stoker “Gothic fantasy” written across the cover. It perpetuates the idea that horror is lowbrow and it angers me that we refuse to consider good quality horror to be horror anymore.

Anne Rice’s Prince Lestat (when I read it with wet hands and the dust jacket off) the color on the cover started to turn my fingers dark blue. I never want that to happen again.

9. NOPE. Trope: A trope that makes you go NOPE.

Long lost child that the protagonist didn’t know they had because the mother (or in rare cases someone else) thought it would be best the child never know they are related to the protagonist because their life is too dangerous / cursed / ect... I hate when parental rights are stomped on for plot, and especially when “it’s okay because it’s the mother who did it and the mother just wants whats best for the child.”

10. NOPE. Recommendation: A book recommendation that is constantly hyped and pushed at you that you simply refuse to read.

I’ve never refused to read a recommendation but I have later thought “Why did you think I’d like this?!”

Twilight “Because you love vampires.” Oh, and Frankenstein’s Monster: A Novel by Susan Heyboer O’keefe. Just because he looks like the version from the Shelley novel doesn’t mean he acted like it. That as awful.

______________________________

11. NOPE. Cliche/pet peeve: A cliche or writing pet peeve that always makes you roll your eyes.

Wasn’t this already number 9? I thought we covered this with tropes. Many tropes are cliches. Oh, well...

Oh, and “He’s blue collar so we’re going to use him as the serrogate racist / bigot now even though he wasn’t before.” (Cough) Merv Pumpkinhead in the new version of The Dreaming. (Cough.)

12. NOPE. Love interest:

I thought we established this with the ship conversation?

I don’t feel like re-writing it, just re-read that one. Same answers apply. I guess I can add The Corinthian from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. You know if it ever gets a film or TV series adaptation someone somewhere will find him attractive and start making errotic art and fan fiction about him...

13. NOPE. Book: A book that shouldn’t have existed that made you say NOPE.

The Dreaming Late 90s early 2000s version. I don’t really like saying any book shouldn’t exist. But there are some that are really awful sequels or insults to an established lore because of how subpar they are. ___________________________________

14. NOPE. Villain: A scary villain/antagonist you would hate to cross and would make you run in the opposite direction.

The Corinthian from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and pretty much any antagonist created by George R. R. Martin.

15. NOPE. Death: A character death that still haunts you.

Morpheus in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

And even Abel’s death even though he comes back later.

___________________________

16. NOPE. Author: An author you had a bad experience reading and have decided to quit.

Anne Rice. She doesn’t even remotely write the way she used to . It feels vapid now. And i have trouble reconciling myself that the angry bird aliens from Brevena and the Replimoids exist in the same universe as Interview with the Vampire.

Also she’s been very cruel and unprofessional in her behavior to those who have criticized her work and “I didn’t know I was sicking people on anyone” shared negative reviews with direct links to pages on her Facebook over the years. it got nasty. She even dug up one of my old reviews for Blood Canticle that I wrote FIFTEEN years ago!

And to a lesser extent, J. K. Rowling. Her views of Americans and especially “Nomaj” (linguistically) just makes me cringe internally. Americans are the more old fashioned with language, not hipster (i.e Elevator vs. Lift, Cellular phone vs. Mobile). Not to mention cloistered religious-style orders (like Catholicism) use the same terms from country to country. This is also true with Wicca. Linguistically the American terms in Fantastic Beasts do NOT make sense.

@sorry-for-the-chocolate @thesaramonster @zal001 @missghostlymoonshadow @kaimaciel @endlessemptynight @deathlyendless @vagaryhexxx @thegreatvampirekiller @unnecessaryhorns @sweatyeddieandaliengoo

#Nope book #Nope book tag

6 notes · View notes

recentanimenews · 5 years

Text

Heeding the Call: Cthulhu and Japan

Depending on your interests, the name Cthulhu may stir feelings of some strange familiarity, or an excited, nearly existential sense of horror to come. Despite the fiction that birthed much of the “Cthulhu Mythos” being moderately popular, the cosmic horrors introduced by H.P. Lovecraft have morphed into a life of their own thanks to the work of his protege, August Derleth, leaving future generations to encounter the unknowable in various forms spanning video games, tv shows, movies, and perhaps the most popular forms, table-top roleplaying and board game experiences. Perhaps less well known, though, is the fact that the Cthulhu Mythos is exceedingly popular in Japan, and has a wide and exciting history of adaptations, works, and impact upon many of the genres we love in Japan to this day. Today, we’ll be taking a look and exploring that history!

The history of Cthulhu in Japan is a bit more diverse than you might initially think, and isn’t as unified as it might seem! The first bits of spreading horror came from translations of H.P. Lovecraft’s original works into Japanese in the 1940s, appearing in the horror publication Hakaba (or Graveyard) Magazine, translated by Nishio Tadashi. These early translations would prove vastly popular, and over the years ended up leading to numerous Japanese adaptations and inspirations based on Lovecraft’s original works.

Anime and manga fans are likely somewhat familiar with Kaoru Kurimoto, creator of Guin Saga, Hideyuki Kikuchi, creator of Vampire Hunter D, fan favorite horror author Junji Ito, and legendary mangaka Shigeru Mizuki, who all claimed Lovecraft as a direct influence on their works at some point. That existential, cosmic, unknowable horror is certainly present in Ito’s works like Uzumaki, and Mizuki’s interest in folklore and yokai make an attraction to the Cthulu Mythos a lot more understandable. Mizuki actually drew an adaptation of the classic story The Dunwich Horror under the title Chitei no Ashioto, simply moving the story and characters to Mizuki’s beloved setting of rural Japan.

Perhaps one of the most influential Lovecraft inspired creators in anime though is Chiaki J. Konaka, likely best known to many for his work on series like Serial Experiments Lain, Digimon Tamers, and Big O, as well as other series like Armitage III (which takes its name from a Lovecraft character!), RaXephon and Texnolyze among many others. Konaka’s career extends into the Tokusatsu side of things as well, having worked on numerous Ultraman series ranging from Tiga, Gaia, Max, and more, as well as many other series. Konaka worked in references to the Cthulhu Mythos into many of his projects, and even wrote his own short fiction; one of them, Terror Rate, was even published in English, and was even a guest of honor at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival in 2018!

Much of the spread and popularity of Cthulhu fiction in Japan is owed to a few people, one of the most notable being Ken Asamatsu. Asamatsu has spent much of his career translating and spreading Lovecraft’s works in Japan, running fanzines and other publications in order to spread his love of the existential dread universe. While Asamatsu has worked on a few manga himself, he isn’t exactly an anime or manga creator, but without his input and dedication, it is unlikely that these works would ever be as popular as they are today!

Existential, creeping, unknowable horror translates well to other mediums as well, so it should come as little surprise that video games share various callbacks and influences from the Cthulhu Mythos as well. Atlus’s Shin Megami Tensei series and its many spin-offs feature numerous callbacks to Cthulhu Mythos characters and creatures, with some of the most obvious being Nyarlathotep’s direct role in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona and Persona 2. Many of the other titles reference things like the Necronomicon, with that same text being the initial persona of Persona 5’s Futaba Sakura.

Aside from Shin Megami Tensei, there are less obvious, but somewhat hard to miss, references to many of the tropes and unique style of horror in the Cthulhu Mythos in From Software’s Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, and most directly Bloodborne games. Demon’s Souls in particular draws heavily on the existential, unknowable horror that is descending upon the kingdom of Boletaria and the secrets behind its true collapse, and the Dark Souls games similarly feature somewhat Lovecraftian ideas and monsters. Of the three, Bloodborne is the most direct with its inspirations, with characters routinely discussing the fact that seeing more of the truth may drive one mad, cosmic entities controlling, mutating, and destroying humanity, fish people (a staple of Lovecraft’s works), and humongous, tentacle-faced monsters (here known as Amygdala).

Ironically, however, there is actually another reason for the popularity of Cthulhu Mythos in Japanese media that helped spread its flavorful influence amongst various genres, and it actually has little to do with Lovecraft’s actual writings themselves. Instead, many Japanese fans encounter Lovecraft’s elder gods through the table-top role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, first published in Japan 1986, and the explosion in popularity was not only a staggering success, but it continues to this day! Although many Western fans might assume that TTRPG games like Dungeons and Dragons are popular in Japan due to some of their influences in fantasy anime, Call of Cthulhu reigns supreme as the most popular TTRPG in Japan, and its popularity likely helped introduce many Japanese to the TTRPG genre in the first place!

Call of Cthulhu is, essentially, a group mystery adventure game, and that seems to have really hit big with Japanese audiences far and wide, because the game has remained in print since its initial introduction in the nineties, and has fans of all ages and genders playing in groups, to the point that some places will find their rooms for group meetings rented out to play games of Call of Cthulhu! Recently, the game even got some favorable air time in an NHK news segment, talking about the game itself and the fun that can be had with it! With this popularity came the growth of a somewhat unique phenomenon: Replays, essentially narrative, semi-novelized versions of Call of Cthulhu campaigns collected and printed for other people to read, similar to today’s popular “actual play” podcasts and videos such as Critical Role or The Adventure Zone. Even today, Call of Cthulhu replays are extremely popular, with new versions being printed all the time, sometimes even adorned with amazing, cute anime styled art and other interesting little design choices, like semi-doujinshi level works featuring Touhou characters, and more! These Replays became so popular that they soon spread to other types of TTRPGs, and are the inspiration behind anime such as Record of Lodoss War, Slayers, and many others!

If one were to search Cthulhu on Amazon.jp, you’d actually find that most of the results are these colorful and interesting Replay books, almost more so than you’d even find the original novels and stories by Lovecraft himself! There are many other fascinating fan inspired books about the Cthulhu Mythos, including a personal favorite of Cthulhu monsters arranged in a book similar to those of Kaiju and Tokusatsu stylings (even featuring a cartoon Lovecraft on the cover doing the famous Ultraman pose). There are other small Cthulhu publications in Japanese, include a manga anthology called Zone of Cthulhu and numerous adaptations, and Gou Tanabe’s versions are even being translated into English, with The Hound and Other Stories already available, and At the Mountains of Madness coming later this year.

Of course the Cthulhu love isn’t limited to just print media; many anime have featured some nods and callbacks to the mythos, such as in the visual novel and anime of the same name Demonbane, which is even set in Lovecraft’s beloved Arkham. Main character Kuro Daijuji works with Al Azif, the living personification of the Necronomicon, to defeat the nefarious Black Lodge (a very probable nod to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks here). As mentioned above, numerous works by Chiaki J. Konaka draw from the Cthulhu Mythos, but Digimon Tamers might be the most surprising, with callbacks to Miskatonic University and Shaggai, as well as a computer AI that seems to have more in common with the Great Old Ones than it does Skynet! Another example is a fairly popular series, Bungo Stray Dogs, where one of the characters... is actually named Lovecraft! But that's not all! His "The Great Old Ones" ability is a reference to Cthulhu's origins. Probably one of the most famous examples is Nyaruko: Another Crawling Chaos, where the monsters of Lovecraft’s works are revealed to actually be aliens, but still very weird! The anime is a comedy featuring numerous Mythos characters repurposed or slightly renamed, such as Nyarlathotep as Nyaruko, the Yellow King Hastur, and more. The series of novels proved popular enough to spawn 3 anime seasons and other spin offs, proving that even if you take the horror out of the Mythos, people will still find it entertaining and… cute?

Speaking of cute, this brings us to a few interesting final tidbits about the Cthulhu Mythos and Japan. Aside from the direct popularity, the language change and differences have led to a few running gags in Japan about the series, one of which has to do with the somewhat infamous Cthulhu cultist chant, “Ia Ia Cthulhu Ftaghn,” with “Ia Ia” being pronounced very similar to the Japanese expression “iya iya”, which has a few various uses in casual Japanese, either meaning something similar to “um” or “no” depending on how and where it is used. The second comes from the fact that Japanese, being a syllabic language, actually has an easier time pronouncing the supposedly “unpronouncable” names of the Cthulu Mythos creatures, with Cthulhu being translated as クトゥルフ, or “Kutourufu”, which is not only a lot easier to actually say, but sounds oddly cute for the sinister elder god!

Cthulhu mania seems as popular as ever both outside and inside of Japan, with new games, movies, comics, and more drawing inspiration from the titles. Although Lovecraft’s own works are less popular than when the fascination started, the current passion for his ideas stems from the attractive allure of the unknown, the potential darkness lingering in shadows and dark pools of water. Whatever the reason people flock to the Cthulhu Mythos, it seems like we can look forward to numerous adaptations, inspirations, and callbacks for years to come… until perhaps even Cthulhu awakens! Until then, it’s best to keep your wits about you and stock up on your esoteric lore… You never know where the elder gods might pop up next during your next anime, manga, or video game binge!

Have any secret and mysterious ancient Cthulhu influences we didn’t mention? Know of any other influences on Japan you’d like us to cover? Let us know in the comments!

----

Nicole is a features and a social video script writer for Crunchyroll. Known for punching dudes in Yakuza games on her Twitch channel while professing her love for Majima. She also has a blog, Figuratively Speaking. Follow her on Twitter: @ellyberries

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

2 notes · View notes

merryfortune · 6 years

Note

Thanks for your Spectre HC you just posted, I love reading people's thoughts on him! Do you have any other thoughts about his character?

I have a lot of thoughts, actually. here are my other Spectre metas that you might be interested in (earth ignis!Spectre) and (water ignis!Spectre)

And I’ve also got a lot of unpublished fics involving him. Some of these are unpublished because its not the right time (stupid rare pair week being in December and not now) and others are unpublished because they’re unfinished (more earth ignis!Spectre and some naughty stuff)

my main philosophy with characterising Spectre, and I admittedly have a lot to perfect, comes from reading Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro and that is, Spectre is the inverse of the titular character. He is Neuro, if Neuro was a masochist.

also, i’m a huge revspec shipper so revspec is implied below frequently, I am also intrigued by polyamorous shipping with him and all the lost kids because i feel like its inevitable (like in a5 with the yu-boys and b-girls, its a similar sort of thing. lost kids squad need to bond ok).

but i do dislike some ships involving him (him and pl.aymaker as well as him and sou.lburner but the former is slightly bettered by a threesome solution involving revolver) and then I loathe some ships involving him (him and bl.ue an.gel)

So here is like the comprehensive list of things I think about him either in general or in tandem with other characters

fluffy/general

The best art tropes are when he’s portrayed with long hair (like waist length) or with earrings (specifically Ryoken’s)

he is a huge green thumb; his room is just overflowing with plants. that being said, it is rather messy because he absolutely can’t prune to the level that is needed

he likes classical musical and instrumental covers of heavy metal music best

of the lost children, i think he was the eldest. looking at how yusaku and takeru are portrayed as children, spectre looks closer to how ryoken was portrayed. so i think he was 8 at the time of the incident; not to mention, when he first appeared, I thought he was 20+

loves androgynous fashion and is open to dressing femininely but chooses not to because he’s worried it looks unprofessional

he makes the best teas and cakes. he also cooks a lot and is very good at it. he’s very, very domestic in general.

i love… precocious kid Spectre and dumb childhood friends to lovers tropes like “I’m going to be the one who marries you when we grow up” and pinkie promises type thing (though, if spectre broke a pinkie promise, i’m certain he’d break his pinkie finger too)

he’s also quite affectionate due to being touch starved which is really at odds with the fact that he hates people and he wants to maintain a level of professionalism with the one person he does (or had a history of) want to be affectionate with

spectre has a photographic memory and remembers every single detail of every single day, however, he is (more or less) lying about remembering those things from infancy; those’re coping daydreams. they did happen/similar things happened but he’s dreamt up most the details

angsty

He needs a therapist really, really badly and I’m of the hopeful belief that he will eventually get the opportunity to work through his issues in a professional environment

he often wonders how different his life may have been had he been born either a) a girl or b) a more ‘attractive’ child.

Dr Kogami would not approve of Spectre having romantic feelings for his son

Spectre had so many mixed feelings about the death of Dr Kogami

the Kogami family situation is so fucked from this perspective because Ryoken is so loyal and his father is Like That

I think there was at least one couple who attempted to get to know Spectre; maybe he was the most physically similar child to them or they were intrigued by how intelligent he was and he probably scarred them for life.

other

Spectre doesn’t wear a mask. All the other members of Hanoi wear masks but Spectre doesn’t. I still don’t quite know what to make of this but it does, I think, speak to how low he might perceive himself since he is so subservient to The Cause

I really hope he gets a re-design. I think, other than Ryoken, he is probably the most pressing character who needs a redemption arc. after all, he is a Lost Child. but also because he has a kinda boring design?? like, it isn’t as eye catching as the others, you know?

related to the one above, I think that if any character gets a more permanent death, especially of the lost kids, it’s Spectre with his head closest to the chopping block unless he gets redeemed - unless death is redeeming but fingers crossed he’s still alive by the final episode otherwise I might go into some hardcore denial

also ya girl is a dumbass because she incorrectly thought that Spectre and Go’s orphanage was the same one but no, they’re different places altogether lol

his English VA is spot the fuck on. I really, really enjoy his dubbed voice

I am certain that Spectre will recruit his Ignis and he won’t kill it. I think his Ignis is Earth but I kind of really want it to be Aqua too purely because mixed gender Ignis/Origin pairs intrigue me and the fact that the silhouette of the girl from the lost incident is shown having twin tails ending up with Earth is hilarious

I hope we get more Spectre backstory because its one of my favourites in all of yugioh tbh because it’s just so balls to the walls with W H A T

i’d love to write more gen fic of him but he just pushes the right effing buttons for me so nsfw under the cut jsyk

smutty

bondage, collars & leashes, tentacles, dendrophilia, body worship (if he’s doing it to someone else), sadism/masochism play: all things he absolutely enjoys.

he’s probably down to try anything so long as it’s like hygienic or whatever

has accidentally (or not so accidentally) called his s/o mummy during sex

he is a VERSE. stop erasing his identity people. this man is a switch and proud

he’s one of those people who doesn’t talk about sex but you can absolutely tell from a mile or a million away what he is high key into and that is rather far from ‘vanilla’

his biggest kink is being loved and appreciated and making his s/o feel the same though, lbr

revspec smut fics i wanna write

bonus category because i wanna talk about the kinky things i wanna write involving him

dungeons and dragons inspired au where he’s a dryad and instead of having conventional genitalia, he has a flower Ryoken can penetrate but there are also tentacles and a lot of nectar which kinda acts like nice tasting cum and aphrodisiacs are a Thing too

post-canon or mundane au fic where he and rev more or less get married, Spectre brings the wedding bouquet into the bedroom and either a) puts on a ‘show’ for Ryoken involving it or b) Spectre takes it up the ass from Ryoken whilst masturbating/humping it

another dnd/fantasy world au with dragon!Revolver and human sacrifice!Spectre. you can probably tell where that’s going. Spectre gets devoured in ways he hadn’t expected :eyes:

ok this fic won’t ever happen but it still came to me in a dark, dark time: post canon fic where he and rev have outdoor sex in the presence of Spectre’s tree mother;

either a fic where ryoken threesomes with irl!spectre and vrains!spectre or spectre foursomes with irl!ryoken, s1!revolver, and s2!revolver because I’m a slut for surreal sex like that

i feel like i’m forgetting something bUT YEAH

#yugioh vrains #vrains #yugioh #spectre (vrains)#dendrophile husband #random asks #he's such a freudian character #i love him #and the interpretation i have of him #is good projection fodder; i won't lie #i hope you wanted everything because that's what you got #the only thing you didn't get were the plots of fics i wanna write involving spectre #nightspacek

10 notes · View notes

gavinhalm · 14 years

Text

“WARNING: Click_Here”-- Classic Horror Film as Interactive Screen.

"You were tricked by your own imagination, Mrs. Rand" - Dr. Maxwell in I Walked with a Zombie

"The brain is the screen. I don't believe that linguistics and psychoanalysis offer a great deal to the cinema. On the contrary, the biology of the brain–molecular biology–does." - Gilles Deleuze, "From Philosophy to Cinema" in Cahiers du cinema 320

"If a film, which is already both the dream of its maker and the dream of its audience, can present itself as the dream of one of its characters, can it, finally, appear to dream itself?" - Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Goddard, and First-Person Film.

"Something bizarre about the cinema struck me: its unexpected ability to show not only behavior, but spiritual life...Spiritual life isn't dream or fantasy–which were always the cinema's dead ends...Spiritual life is the movement of the mind." - Gilles Deleuze, "From Philosophy to Cinema" in Cahiers du cinema 320

In Bruce Kawin's influential 1978 book, Mindscreen: Bergman, Goddard, and First- Person Film, the author makes the argument that first-person narrative film can be thought of as reflecting (or, standing in as a kind of synecdoche for) the mind of both the viewer and the filmmaker, something he terms the "Mindscreen".

This idea is driven precisely home in his quote above, which is clamped, if you will, between the twin pincers of another great thinker of the cinema, Gilles Deleuze. Here, we find a shocking thesis: Can a film possess that most human of qualities (thought)? Can a film, in fact, be a sleeping being of sorts?

What is so intriguing about Kawin's quote is not so much its fantastical, psychological metaphysics, but that it could reflect another possible thesis (when coupled with the material-spiritual thinking of Deleuze): that of film becoming an interactive screen. What is meant here is that, if we squeeze out the idea of the dream (and, by default, the whole clinical-psychological apparatus of the dreaming subject) between the two clamps of 1) molecular biology of the brain, and 2) the (Bergsonian) "movement" of the mind executing the procedures of “thinking”, we can start to view the screen as a site not of dreaming, or of "being", but as a space of interaction where the viewer's perception and consciousness moves in-and-out to interface with the formal systems given in a film.

Perhaps the easiest way to go about describing this "interactivity" of the cinematic screen (1) is to talk about "fantasy" in film, or the "fantastic"; that genre of film which, in the third quote above, Deleuze seems to say is a cinematic "dead end". Though the philosopher has a point in the sense that film can not actually materialize the fantastic, films can present formal constructs that hint at things of a fantastical nature, and therefore it is these "things" (the formal constructs) that become the interactive elements within a film.

And, this is precisely why most, if not all, of the "fantastical" or "fantasy" movies of the last decade (ones utilizing the technologies of 3D modeling, animation and 3D theatre projection) simply fall flat in just about every intellectual regard. They are just not interactive enough; everything is provided to the viewer with regards to his/her imagination through the wild, video game-like whirl of 3D animation. So much so, that there is nothing left to imagine. The viewer is, in effect, left in an intellectual/experiential desert akin, perhaps, to the space Robert Duvall's THX-1138 character is trapped in: a seemingly infinite "Ganz Field" of empty white light (2).

One of the best ways to go about finding these formal interactive points that allow for a true movement of the mind (and spirit), is to go back to the classics of horror and/or fantasy from the days long before the onslaught of computer generated "fantasy" took over the cineplex. For our present purposes, two excellent, WWII-era (3) films by the director Jacques Tourneur will do splendidly: Cat People of 1942, and I Walked with a Zombie, 1943.

Cat People

There are numerous liminal moments and clever points in Cat People that allow (indeed, insist upon) interaction by the audience. These points of interaction are not just "clever" in a facile sense either, but act as perfectly set positionings that allow the viewer to interact with the screen at moments where "fantasy" couples with the real.

Perhaps the most significant interactive trope Tourneur uses in Cat People is the play between light and shadow. This takes place throughout the film in moments where a plant will obscure part of the image with its darkness; where sectors of space and character are illuminated by a street lamp; where shadows are moving across walls in enclosed spaces; when reflected light off of water in an indoor pool creates a kinematic field of brightness and equal threads of darker; and, in this same scene, when we think that the female lead has transformed into a panther, there appear cat-like shadows along a wall (only to have her appear quite like a normal woman when she flicks on the light). †

All of these luminous/spatial moments are points of filmic interaction that allow the viewer to penetrate the given-real, and enter into (indeed, create) the imaginative-mythological space of fear and horror. That is, each of these moments where light and shadow jostle against themselves in the perceptual field is a moment where the viewer's mind must construct the fantasy of the film. There is no need to show obvious transformation through "clever" special effects. And this is, not so incidentally, why such interactive media as comic books seem arguably superior in artistic effect to the omnipresent, present-day “effects” films, which try to replicate the comic book’s level of authentic fantasy.

There are also more subtle points of interaction in this film as well (hidden interfaces within the interface), such as the very early scene inside the female lead's apartment when the two main characters are sitting together in the darkness, the woman humming as she looks out a window, and to the right of her outline is the dark shape of a statute. It is the figure of a rider on a horse holding up an impaled cat on his sword. This interactive point will open up for the viewer the whole mytho-fantastic architecture that this film hangs upon; everything else in the film referring back to this root_menu of light, shadow and suggestiveness.

It should also be mentioned that sound plays an enormous role in interfacing with the viewer in this movie as well. Instances such as when the main female lead is following her female nemesis down a dark and intermittently lit street, about to (we think) transform into a black cougar and attack. It is in the very moment when we expect the cat to pounce that a bus screeches before fully entering the frame, therefore allowing the sound to rewrite itself in the viewer’s mind as a cat’s scream. This invisible cougar takes auditory shape elsewhere in various other instances in the movie, such as the previously mentioned pool scene and other interstitial moments where we expect a given, visual transformation, but are left to construct the fantasy ourselves.

I Walked with a Zombie

Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie also creates, but in a radically different way and not to the same numerical degree, a set of interactive sites for the viewer to interface with the fantastic.

The director's second movie, hot on the heels of Cat People, is an instance where the horror is, instead, "given" to the viewer in the body of the (un)dead wife (a somewhat similar situation to that more well-known master of horror, Hitchcock, in his film Psycho, which was created nearly two decades later), and, not surprisingly, her body acts in a similar fashion to the statue of the horse and impaled cat in the previous film--Both these "objects", or ritual-like bodies, are conduits to the mythical worlds that lay outside the visual-given. In this case, the wife's body acts as an interactive node in which to engage the fear of the Voodoo religion.

And, though we see a vast array of quasi-empirical movements within the ritualistic displays put on by the island's locals, these movements (the use of dolls, the (un)dead Voodoo highwayman/guard) always reflect back to the (un)dead wife's body, creating a self-referential network of cause-and-effect that is negatively reflective of the "rationality" of the characters that are living.

The systemic network between the (un)dead wife's body, the Voodoo mechanisms of ritual, and the rationality of the character's existence (especially in the figure of the nurse) is an infinite feed-back loop whose elements counteract and play with one another: is this whole situation a creation of the nurse's imagination? Or, is it, indeed, a mystical, fantastical space of religious and spiritual events?

This is quite different to the situation in Cat People, where the viewer is decoding a number of interactive points of reference within light, shadow and sound, always moving towards some sort of conclusiveness. Here, we just don't know what's going to happen. And, though Tourneur gives us the towering physical body of the (un)dead wife in which to interface with the film, we never do.

That is not to say that I Walked with a Zombie is without sets of horror film tropes similarly used in his earlier film. There are a number of occasions when, for instance, light and shadow work in a like fashion to Cat People, such as the early scene when the nurse first "meets" the (un)dead wife in the stairwell. Here, the different volumes of light and shadow work to create a similar set of references between the shadowed "irrational" and the lit "rational" spheres of existence (not the least of which is the change in appearance on the (un)dead wife's face from one of hallowed decay to normalcy as perceived by the nurse). But, these effects fall away (become dead "links", if you will) when the overriding network established in the (ritual) body of the (un)dead wife comes online in the viewer's mind. And, this feedback loop, as I previously labeled it, de-centers the narrative thrust of the whole movie, makes it fall back into itself, and ends up crashing the whole system of the plot (4), the viewer never making his/her way out of the vortex and back into linearity.

Perhaps this is the most "horrific" act in the film...Take away the story from reality/life and what is left? Nothing but the nihilism that the first brother displayed on the boat, towards the nurse, early on in the film. That is, there is no "beauty". What could be more horrific or fantastic?

These two classics of fantasy/horror are, in each of their own very unique ways, a veritable interactive web (site) of symbols and tropes, both visual and auditory, geared to make the user/viewer interact with the screen's interfaciality and create, within the space of their own mind, all the fantasy a viewer could want. All without the use of a single key-fame, composited image, computational algorithm, or animatronic beast. These two films are, in the end, a testament to the imaginations of both the filmmaker and the audience itself.

NOTES:

1. By using the phrase, "cinematic screen", I mean to keep it particular from the interactive screen of the computer, which is a more literal kind of interactive space. But, some of the descriptive figures of speech utilized to describe computer interaction will be useful in elucidating my general thesis.

2. In all fairness, it should be noted that I am being playfully ironic with the reader here, for what happens in a Ganz Field (a space of complete visual isolation, uniformity, or emptiness) is that the mind tries to construct that which it cannot see. In short, the mind starts to hallucinate. A kind of empty grey Ganz Field is also the "home" screen a user first sees when s/he boots up or initializes a 3D-modeling computer program.

3. What is so interesting to ponder is the extent to which this kind of horror that was so popular in the U.S. at this time in world history (if not the origins, then, at the very least, the paradigmatic example of which would be Hitchcock's 1940 classic, Rebecca). That is, the success of this film (and it was very successful) was certainly due to the unseen, un-seeable nature of the horror. Which is not at all that different from the "invisible" horror that was infecting Europe and existing as a distant, "non-material" abstraction to U.S. citizens.

4. A meta-mise-en-scène, descriptive of this whole situation, and more evidence for the utter collapse of narrative structure in this film, is the point near the end of the movie when the "drunk" brother grabs an arrow out of the body of the St. Sebastian figurehead/fountain and hunts down his brother's (un)dead wife and "kills" her. Aside from the obvious logical twist of whether there was anybody/anything to kill, what complicates, extends, collapses and ironically twists this scene (and the whole narrative) is that, according to legend, the arrows shot at the Saint did not kill him (he was, instead, found alive)...and, if one wants to proceed in the opposite direction, one could admit that the figurehead is not the body of St. Sebastian and therefore could not be killed anyway. Which brings us back to the materiality of the (un)dead wife's body; is it "alive" or is it "dead", and will (or did) that arrow in his hand actually kill her?...ad infinitum, back and forth, round and round we go...

† Or, at a much later point in the film, where the main male character is working with a female co-worker/friend late at night, and she gets up to answer the office phone on an architectural light-table. The light from this table flushes her face and upper body, while much of the rest of the office is enclosed in darkness, enveloping her, a foreshadowing of the horror to come...

#film #horror #horrorfilm #filmhistory

0 notes

captainbobbin · 7 years

Text

Final Dissertation -

A STUDY ON THE GENRE OF BODY HORROR, FOCUSING ON THE CULTURAL INFLUENCES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

Word Count - 8396.

Its a long essay, its under the read more!

INTRODUCTION

“Horror entwines spectacle and reality in an indeterminate scene of effects and affects that, further, engage and repulse audiences in the staging of often overwhelming and unbearable images.” (Bottling, 2011)

For as long as people have spoken, stories have been told and as long as stories have been told so have cautionary tales. Horror is a genre that has dates back to first being documented in the 18th century and as our ability to tell and show stories have developed, so has the genre of horror as a whole.

The Oxford dictionary describes the genre of horror as one that is concerned with arousing feelings of horror…. fear, shock, or disgust, (Oxford Living Dictionary, 2017), while author Rick Worland states that horror ‘achieves its greatest impact when it exposes or flaunts cultural taboos’ and ‘aims foremost to scare us’. The genre of horror ‘evokes deeper, more personal psychological fears in the starkest terms’, despite other genres, with examples of ‘a war story, disaster movie, or crime drama’, also invoking powerful emotions to affect the audience. (Worland, 2007, p.3-7). If any form of media, whether it be film, animation, short story, or prose, that intends to frighten or unnerve its audience can be classed as a part or in a way a family member of the horror genre. J. A. Cuddon described horror stories as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length... which shocks or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing". (Cuddon, 1992, p.11)

Many horror films focus on mythical beings such as ghosts, monsters, vampires, cryptids and beings from mythological backgrounds, and the overall genre of horror can branch into many subgenres, such as Found Footage, ESP/Psychic Horror, Psychological horror, Sci-Fi Horror and even Comedy-Horror, but this dissertation will focus on Body Horror. Body Horror is a subgenre of the horror genre - while horror as a whole can contain aspects of gore, monsters, mutation and such, Body Horror focuses on the human body forcibly being mutated, mutilated and manipulated to grotesque proportions to unnerve the audience and, specifically, to make them uncomfortable. Many forms of body horror film utilize both visual and computerized special effects to ensure the audience remains disgusted and intrigued.

The adaptation of ‘the primal scene, the scene of birth’ is one of the key aspects in sci-fi horror, and while this is true in the genre of sci-fi, it is also true for the subgenre of body horror; the tissue is being formed, or reformed, created from either nothing or from something familiar, fleshy, obscure but altogether something human, but not entirely (Creed, p.17). A rapid expansion of flesh or slow mutation of cells is the central part of any body-horror film, and the theme of being reborn or made into something new is a constant cliché of these films.

In the Western world, perhaps the most prominent and important filmmaker in the subgenre of body horror is David Cronenberg, director of cult classic body horrors The Fly (1986), Videodrome (1983), Dead Ringers (1988), and Shivers (1975). His usage of repulsive physical effects and the device of building tension throughout his films has concreted his status as one of the greatest body horror auteurs. Meanwhile one of the most popular and prominent body-horror movies from the east is Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988), an animated movie that gained a cult status and mass following due to its creative style and graphic content. Written by Otomo and Izo Hashimoto, the film is based on Otomo's manga of the same name which was originally a series in Shonen Jump Magazine. The film focuses mainly on the first half of the story in the manga, with an alternate ending, yet is famed for its intriguing imagery and fluid animation style. Akira went on to inspire multiple significant films, including other body horror flicks such as Tetsuo: The Iron Man.

The first chapter of this dissertation will show and explore cultural between the east and west and the ways in which film and animation shows the themes of the body and the mutation of such within the genre of horror. The inspiration for horror movies often stem from cultural fears, experiences and influences and so the first chapter will define the specific fears that divide the East and West and how films have adapted and become microcosms of individual societies.

The second chapter will outline the aspects of Cronenbergs works that highlight the popular tropes of the genre and explore what makes his films so poignant and effective within the overall genre of horror, and what specifically makes his works focus on the body.

The final chapter will explore the film Akira, specifically, one of the strongest contenders of the title of most influential movies of our generation, animated or otherwise, and the techniques used to push this feature film from an animation adaption film into a body-horror classic.

CHAPTER 1:

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AND INFLUENCES BETWEEN THE HORROR FILMS OF JAPAN AND AMERICA

“There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don't understand. Internal is the human heart.”

- John Carpenter, (2011)

“I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film."

- David Cronenberg (1997)

While West and East, specifically the U.S and Japan, separately have different views on horror, individual areas have their own views.

Wetmore describes horror as a genre that “concerns the fears and anxieties of the society that produced it,” (Wetmore, 2008, p48), meaning that a society creates film, books, and all kinds of media as a microcosm of the issues surrounding the creating society. For example, a society fearful of starvation may create a piece of media about a character struggling to survive in a desert. Thus we need to examine cultural differences between the U.S and Japan in relation to the genre of horror in order to understand how they produce and show differences in body horror.

Eastern parts of Asia often use folklore and religious traditions for tales, including creatures with the ability to transform; most famously the Japanese kitsune or Chinese huli jing that are traditionally wise and compassionate, whereas the Korea foxes in folklore are traditionally malevolent and cunning, going as far as to devouring human organs to achieve power and become human itself (Perise and Martin, 2013, p35).

Korean horror film focuses on the wonhon, a 'cliché of Asian horror films' (Perise and Martin, 2013, p23). The wonhon is a female spirit, trapped within our realm that aims to seek revenge on the typically masculine figures that wronged her in life. This trend was prominent in the 1960s, when 'film uses the female body as a metaphor for a nation that suffers from repressive expectations about gender, sexuality and the family' (ib33). Her appearance is based on purity and confliction; a white gown to symbolise ‘the chastity of a widow’ and a link between the realms of living and dead while having bedraggled, uncontrollable long hair which signifies a rejection of Confucian customs as well as adding to the sinister overall look of the spirit. During the time period of the 1960s in general, Korean cinema was heavily informed by its traditional views of socially acceptable behaviour; purity and having an untainted body were the ultimate conditions of marriage, while infertility, jealousy, adultery and corruptibility were ‘fatal attributes’. Utmost purity and righteousness was quintessential in Korean horror tales, and while the body may not be a paramount aspect of this subgenre of horror, the underlying feeling of purity versus impurity still makes the body an important part of this cliché (Perise and Martin, 2013, p24). The wonhon is very similar to the Japanese trend of angered spirits called kaidan, which is further discussed later in this dissertation.

Many American films, like European horror films, are able to be traced back to folklore, short stories from the times of Gothic fiction, true stories of crimes and witness reports of supernatural beings and occurrences. Some examples, including the works of Edgar Allan Poe, have been re-imagined and shown in different mediums since their first publications. Some examples of these adaptions include readings from famous horror stars (Christopher Lee, Vincent Price and James Earl Jones being the most prominent examples of readings of The Raven), film and television adaptations and even a comic book form. This may possibly show that despite the original source materials and texts being over a century old, American audiences still appreciate the slow build of tension. Some examples of 'true' stories being adapted into popular film include The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974), which is very roughly based on the Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein, The Girl Next Door (Wilson, 2007), which is loosely inspired by the death of Sylvia Likens, Wes Cravens The Hills Have Eyes (1977) which is instilled by the legend of Alexander 'Sawney' Bean, and David Cronenbergs Dead Ringers (1988), a film influenced by the discovery of the dead and decomposing bodies of 45-year-old twin gynaecologists.

Valerie Wee describes American cinema as historically seen as an 'extension of photography’, as 'a new way of taking pictures', where photography was a way of capturing and representing lifelike familiarities (a trend which body-horror frequently embraces, the sensation of mixing familiar and too familiar to create discomfort), and so classic Hollywood cinema, leading from silent films, embraced this, creating a protagonist that focuses on getting to a singular goal with a cause-and-effect style of storytelling to create a 'neat narrative closure'. Around the 1960s and continuing into the 70s, movies began to embrace a more ambiguous feel, open endings where hints of humanities fallings linger in the distance or its efforts to eradicate a creature of evil endures, possibly unlikeable protagonists to challenge audiences and minimal plot developments; this shift may be a reflection of 'cultural paranoia' and It possibly could also be inferred as part of a larger affinity with Western cinemas habit of implementing foreign films' ethos as 'the New American Cinema movement' begins towards the 1970s. (Wee, 2011, p53)

However many American horror films can be traced to European and Japanese cinema, adaptations and tweaks on Eastern and European stories and films are surprisingly prominent in mainstream media. Some may argue that America homogenizes cultures into part of its own; as a society it frequently takes desirable sections of other cultures and adapts it to shape to fit into their way of thinking. Historically this idea is hard to argue with; taking the land from Native Americans, introducing slavery and the adaptation of cultural aspects that non-American born immigrants bring to the country as examples of ways the USA has taken aspects of alternate nations.

Examples of the homogenization of Eastern cinema by include The Ring, adapted from the Japanese horror Ringu (1998), The Grudge (2004) which was adapted from Ju-on (2002), and even several American remakes of Gojira (1954), turning it into the famous Godzilla along with several reboots and sequels over time.

This leads into films from Japan specifically. 'Often based on kabuki stage pieces,' (Newman,1996), Japanese horror is an important cultural presence with the genre and its global significance is far-reaching. Japanese horror movies generally fell into two dominant genres: ghost stories or 'kaidan', "dominated by the onryou (avenging spirit) motif", and the disaster movie” (McRoy, 2008, 6), populated by monstrosities named ‘kaiju’ intent on destroying Tokyo and other large cities within Japan. When considering Japanese Horror movies, or J-Horror as it is often referred to, a western audience often imagines movies such as Ringu and Ju-on, due to their identifiability and very Eastern style – ‘The revenge of the female ghost is a cliché of Asian horror films. (With a) female ghost in a white gown with long black hair’. (Perise and Martin, 2013, 23). This is a parallel to Korea’s wonhon. The kaidan is a ‘flexible trope’ in Japanese horror, but typically a female entity focused on exacting revenge on a living person after being wronged. The popularity of the kaidan may be the result of the emergence of more and more women becoming single parents and active members of Japans workforce as Japan has become more industrialised. (McRoy, 2008, 11) Cinema is an outlet for people; we produce media content that represent our needs and fears and so we create movies that mirror the society and culture of the nation that produces them. Japan was aware of women changing roles within society and so used this as fuel to create a new branch in the horror medium.

Nevertheless the monster movies became famous with the creation of Gojira in 1954, nine years after the nuclear bombings on Japan.

In 1945, the USA dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two bombings, which killed at least 129,000 people, remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history. The destruction and devastation of the fallout clearly impacted Eastern culture, shown through the medium of film; Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Lucky Dragon No. 5 (1959), and, most famously, Gojira (1954) are just three examples of Japanese films showing the devastating effects of nuclear fallout in one form or another. Gojira is a prominent film in film history, Asian or otherwise, which arguably can be due to the destructive undertones. The Kaiju is awoken by H-bomb tests in the beginning of the movie, its footprint is monitored for intense radioactivity and newscasters repeatedly call Gojiras ability to breath radioactive fiery breath a 'sea of flames', recalling Nagasaki and Hiroshima. (Brothers, 2011) Gojira is a metaphor for the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs, annihilating all structure within Tokyo and having no regard for human life. McRoy describes the relationship between the bombings and the creation of the kaiju as a “devastating incident followed by decades of exposure to US military exercises and atomic tests in the Pacific, these mutated monstrosities aquatic and aerial assaults seem only appropriate,” and Susan J. Napier describes Japanese stories as “often reveal(ing) a much bleaker world view that such western fantasies as star trek or even Terminator". (Napier, 2005, 90, McRoy, 2008, 7)

This leads into one of the catalysts for the body horror genre; causing horrific mutations, monstrous entities and graphic imagery is nuclear fallout and radiation. The Toxic Avenger (and its sequels) is one of the most prolific examples of radioactive interference in the body horror genre, but there are others including The Incredible Melting Man (1977), the Fallout video game series (1997-present) and Spontaneous Combustion (1990).

Tropes of radiation and nuclear activity continue throughout Japan’s history, from small nods to more direct referencing. For example, the popular Mega-Man (1987 - present) franchise of Japanese video games has Dr Wily as its main antagonist, a character who creates machines of destruction and whose appearance is based on Albert Einstein; Einstein’s theories led to discovery and creation and nuclear energy and then weaponry and so it can be argued that he, through association, lead to the Japan bombings and can be seen as a villainous character.

Akira itself can be seen as a metaphor for the bombings, though not an entirely subtle one; the manga and animated movie, (the movie opening with an enormous, all-consuming blast of energy,) are both set in a post-apocalyptic futuristic Neo-Tokyo where the central characters are parentless adolescents fighting for a purpose. Tetsuo, while a member of the gang, is still a low member of the pecking order and feels like he cannot achieve anything purposeful as he has limited potential and a lack of education and structure besides that of the films prominent street gangs. Tetsuo could be a metaphor for children of the bombings struggling to survive in the fallout post-war.

In the manga, the vaporizing of 1980s Tokyo by the first psychic bomb spurred reconstruction and urban development; by the twenty-first century, Neo-Tokyo has been rebuilt on a vaster scale around the Akira bomb crater, a massive urban sprawl circling an empty center (just as the Tokyo destroyed with firebombs in 1945 had emerged from its ashes on a vaster scale by 1983, and just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reconstructed after the atomic bombs). Thus Akira inexorably links nuclear destruction and economic reconstruction.

- Lamarre, 2008, 136

Tetsuo’s eventual mutation into a fleshy, grotesque mass may also be a representation of the effects of nuclear fallout. While radiation sickness does not tend to induce growths or mutations shown in popular media form and instead cause illnesses including infertility, blood disorders, tissue damage from heat and a heightened rate of cancer, the rapid and graphic explosion of Tetsuo’s flesh in the final scenes of Akira may be an exaggerated representation of the gratuitous devastation nuclear destruction has caused. While “his monstrous transformation occurs because of his rampant desire” in the manga and film, he Tetsuo may be a representation of the trauma that occurs when ‘rampant desire’ from hostile countries cause. (Miller, 2008, 145-166)

However, East and West view nuclear powers and its attributes extremely differently from a cultural perspective.

The U.S has different views on nuclear activity in cinema compared to Japan, however, particularly the horror film. It appears that the United States did not receive any negative back-lash from the bombings, and so while Japan sees nuclear devices as weapons that devastate and decimate innocent lives, America used them as a pre-emptive liberator, a means of keeping an enemy away and glorifying their military might. The USA didn’t experience any of the nuclear fallout or destruction from the bombings on Japan, only a sense of superiority; hence their viewpoint of nuclear radiation is one of positivity rather than desolation.

The aforementioned Toxic Avenger is a prime example of nuclear energy (radioactive waste in this case) mutating and transforming the protagonist into a super-human character. Famous comic-book and film characters originating from U.S sources often have nuclear energy and/or radiation as a positive part of their back-story and reinforce of identity; the Hulk, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Fantastic Four, Spider-man, the Battletoads, Superman and many of the X-men characters are revered as popular and famous heroes to an American audience and feature nuclear radiation, and many of these characters have multiple back stories, reincarnations and reimaginings to keep them appealing to a younger audience in a possible attempt to reinforce the idea to children and impressionable Americans that nuclear involvement and radioactivity has multiple benefits. This is a clear example of America homogenising the history of nuclear power into positive stories and culture. Winkler describes a ‘wave of enthusiasm’ rippling through the United States after the Hiroshima bombing that was only ‘periodically’ tainted by discomfort at the thought of the destructive potential of the bombs. While this may be due to the fact officials and policymakers chose only to release specific information and highlighted the positive aspects concerning nuclear weaponry, Americans believed the bombs' role was one of benefit to the U.S., especially as President Truman reinforced the idea that the atomic blast was one that ‘had to be used to end the unnecessary slaughter on both sides.’. Winkler confirms this in saying that despite the ‘carnage’ caused by the bombs dropping, it was ‘justified in the end’ when comparing the lives of Americans saved. (Winkler, 1993, 25-27)

To some extent, some may argue that David Cronenberg's character Seth Brundle from The Fly mutates through radiation. However, in this instance the radiation acts as a double-edged sword; Brundle experiences superhuman strength, agility and feelings of euphoria, but this quickly descends into feelings of addiction and rapid deterioration. Perhaps this is a nod by Cronenberg to show that he does recognise how negative radiation impacts on individuals and is a way of de-glorifying the stigma of nuclear activity.

It’s very possible that while the nuclear bombings, as the most gratuitous and devastating attack in Japanese history, led into inspiring a series of horror movies, terrorism of the U.S has also had an impact on cinema. The infamous attack of 9/11could be seen to perpetuate a series of American horror films revolving around themes of gory ‘torture and imprisonment’ such as the Saw series (2004-present), The Purge series (2013-2016), Hostel (2005) and The Human Centipede (2009), where audiences view characters subjected to ‘physical’ and ‘psychological torture’. US cinema reflects the fear or terrorism, especially in films showing depictions of claustrophobia, faceless malevolent entities and the feeling of being trapped to reflect the effect 9/11 had. This is not to mention the slew of 'dystopian future' set films, video games and novels that contain corrupt or non-existent governmental societies, a possible vision of fear from a society that wants security and sustainability.

“After 9/11, nihilism, despair, random violence and death, combined with tropes and images generated by the terrorist attacks began to assume far greater prominence in horror cinema,” States Wetmore (Wetmore 2008, 72-82). He goes on to describe that typically in American disaster, action and horror movies that New York is seen as “‘ground zero’, a term usually associated with nuclear destruction.” While the 9/11 attacks did not destroy the entirety of New York the way the bombings destroyed entire cities in Japan, the imagery of destruction of the 11th of September is all-too familiar – ‘deserted streets, and conversely larger crowds fleeing, combined with grey ash, dust and debris covering everything and everyone’ was the overriding image of New York as a destroyed city flooded with catastrophic ruin. ‘Ground Zero’ is a term used to specify ‘the heart of an attack’ and the heart of New York was truly shaken by these attacks. While previously Los Angeles was the ‘preferred’ city to face destruction in cinematography, this changed rapidly after the turning of the millennium - New York had always been a familiar setting within film, including horror, Wetmore states that ‘9/11 made it the site of horror’, which is a very concrete statement when regarding the films produced since. (2012, ps.3 and 24)

Even Gojira made its way to New York, when the 2014 remake was released; while the main introductory setting of the film is Janjira, Japan, (a possible homage to the original source material), we also have scenes of San Francisco, California where civilians are evacuated, the Golden Gate Bridge is decimated and the threat of a nuclear warhead violently detonating hangs over the city. It could be argued that this is the USA reshaping and familiarising the trauma of the nuclear blasts of Japan with America; perhaps the shift from New York to San Francisco was to avoid the reality of the destruction of a famous landmark reminiscent of the 9/11 attacks being all-too familiar.

Post-9/11 United States and post-bombed Japan are both in periods of cultural adaptation and transition, coping with the emotional, sociological and psychological trauma that both events caused the nations by using cinema as an emotional outlet and a way of coming to terms with “the irrational, the horrific, the uncanny, and the issues with which we are most concerned in the post-industrial era: family, the economy, identity, terrorism, etc.” (Wetmore 2008, 73) American adaptations of Japanese (and other cultures) horror films monopolize on the familiarity and creativity of the original idea but adjust the narrative, techniques and style of the original concept to best represent American ideals and fulfil the sociological needs of the post-9/11 USA audience.

Wee describes how J-horror shifts slowly away from its traditional views of genre; the movies involving kaidan ghost maidens motivated by vengeance, anger and a need to punish their wrong-doers in life slowly amalgamated into movies such as Toshiharu Ikeda's Evil Dead Trap (1988), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), Red Room (1999), House (1977) and Jigoku (1960). These films shift from the 'familiar, iconic images and conventions' that originate from the tropes and settings from theatrical stage performances and classical influences from contemporary Japan and instead embracing the more Western tropes of gore, entrapment and confined spaces. It may be that while American film is adapting aspects of Asian film and J-Horror into a conglomeration of culture, perhaps in its own way, J-Horror is slowly doing the same through adapting aspects of Western-centric movies rather than full on adapting entire films -

(Ringu) also reveals the influence of the Hollywood horror tradition, perhaps most clearly in the visual and narrative borrowings in the film's opening sequence and in the inclusion of narrative developments that privilege the female survivor and the enduring power of the monster.

- Wee, 2013, 97

- while McRoy iterates that J-Horror of the 1980s ‘was painted in bright streaks of red, spurting from gashing wounds and blood-spouting intestinal spillings’ that was an extreme contrast to the movies that took over in the 1990s where horror was more subdued yet ominous with ’young women simply standing there with hair hanging over their face.’ This may be a metaphor for the transition in radioactive presence in society (McRoy, 2008, 9).

Nuclear activity in a military sense has diminished over time. The ‘gashing wounds’ and ‘spillings’ McRoy describes above could signify the outright casualties of the World War II bombings, of the heavily wounded and permanently disfigured survivors and ‘bright streaks of red’ a visceral reminder of the death and destruction overall. The 1990s ‘young women’ could possibly be a representation of innocent lives ruined by the devastation of the attacks, but their anger is now subdued, dulled by time. (Wee, 2011, 59). The horror of the nuclear attacks is still there, still fresh, but subtle and perhaps not as prominent as it once was. A dull buzz that is still a part of day-to-day life, but no longer an open wound, but instead a fading scar.

CHAPTER 2:

THE WORKS OF DAVID CRONENBERG AND HOW THEY HAVE INFLUENCED AND IMPACTED THE GENRE OF BODY HORROR

“The redundancy of flesh, he thinks, the helplessness of meat, how can we conjure spirit from a bone?” ― Ian McGuire, The North Water

David Cronenbergs films are some of the most widespread and symbolic in the genre of body horror.

Hawker calls Cronenberg a 'body artist', a 'visceral and cerebral filmmaker' who can utilize the body 'in all its sticky, treacherous, terrifying complexity, with its vulnerabilities, drives and tendency towards transformation'. She goes on to call The Fly ' a soulful yet grotesque vision' and states that Cronenberg creates 'provocative challenges to the status quo' to intice and shock his audience. (Hawker, 2017)

One of the aspects that ensured the popularity and timelessness of his work is the usage of physical and practical effects in lieu of special and computer generated effects.

Some of the earliest examples of horror movies using practical effects include The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Frankenstein (1931), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and Gojira (1954), where make-up, crude stop-frame animatronics and foam suits were essential in creating deformed monsters and on-screen beasts. As time went on, however, practical effects advanced alongside horror movies - as the 1970s emerged The Exorcist (1973) and Alien (1979) became two classic films that feature incredibly impressive physical effects that are unparalleled to this day. Special make-up effect artist Dick Smith, known as “The Godfather of Makeup”, achieved masterful effects by overlapping foam latex to ensure actors to have a full range of facial expressions and created Reagan's (Linda Blair's) neon green projectile vomit by creating a system of tubes that fitted into her prosthetic cheeks. Stan Winston learnt his craft from Smith and directed Alien, where sheep and cow innards were used to replicate human organs in the infamous chest-burster scene while the alien spawn was a puppet. The use of fake blood and puppetry using hosing was a concept entirely unknown to the cast and so the hysterical response of actress Veronica Cartwright was entirely honest. (Barnes, 2014)

Some modern day horrors, while still having computer-generated effects present, incorporate practical effects as an homage to the classics of the past and to emulate the too-close-to-real-life feel that many (such as animator and illustrator Nick Criscuolo) argue CG cannot quite give. Criscuolo explains that 'practical effects have the advantage in being made from real things' and so one of the only downfalls with using practical effects is using the correct materials, explaining that the effects can look false if used by 'the wrong thing pretending to be something else' while acknowledging that while computer-generated animation and effects in film can look very polished and perfect, it has to 'not only does it have to look realistic, it also has to look as though it belongs in the scene' which can be where computer generated effects can seem subpar to well-made practical effects (Criscuolo, 2012)

Todd Masters, who also learnt his trade from the aforementioned Smith, worked on the physical effects of Slither (Directed by James Gunn, 2006), a body horror revolving around an average man becoming infected and then controlled by an alien parasite that slowly and gorily transmorphs him into a fleshy puddle of tentacles and gooey appendages' in a style incredibly reminiscent of the work of Chris Walas, the effects supervisor on Cronenbergs The Fly and Naked Lunch (1991).

It could be incredibly plausible that Gunn took inspiration from Cronenbergs work, particularly The Fly; both films feature the main character, (Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle and Michael Rooker as Grant Grant) mutating slowly over each passing scene into a non-human, or rather part-human, entity as Brundles DNA is replaced with that of the titular Flys and Grant being slowly eaten from the inside out by the sentient extraterrestrial within him. Both characters start their mutation with feelings of positivity: increased appetite, sexual vigour and athletic capabilities. However as time passes their flesh starts to reflect the decline of their humanity as growths form over their bodies and their skin decays rapidly after initially appearing sallow or inflamed. Both characters tear themselves away from the female lead (Geena Davis as Veronica and Elizabeth Banks as Starla in The Fly and Slither respectively) in favour of an alternate woman in order to instil the same rush of positivity into the alternate female. This is shown as Brundle (or Brundlefly) has a sexual encounter with Tawny (Joy Boushel) and then proceeds to try and force her into undergoing the same transformation as him before being stopped by Veronica and Grant lures in Brenda (played by Brenda James) with the intent to have sex with her, only to forcibly impregnate her with alien parasites which cause her to mutate also. Eventually both protagonists-turned-antagonists mutate beyond their control and become more alien entity than human.

The usage of practical effects in both of these movies have concreted their statuses of cult-classics; the usage of foam and latex reminiscent of flesh and muscle and food substances for bodily fluids (Brundleflys vomit consisted of honey, egg and milk) have aided in giving these movies (and other cinematic pieces using practical effects) a timeless quality, in comparison to using digitally animated effects that arguably can look dated and less believable as time passes.

A good example of CG having less impact than practical effects is the body horror film The Lawnmower Man (Brett Leonard, 1992). While Stephen Kings The Lawnmower man is a body horror revolving around the usage of technology to manipulate the brain and body (and so the usage of computer generated effects are entirely justified and make sense), it follows similar trends to Cronenbergs The Fly, as Slither does. Jobe (Jeff Fahey) undergoes experimental treatment by using computer-generated virtual reality to become more intelligent and the movie follows the pattern that Cronenbergs The Fly lays out perfectly; Jobes experimentation is initially successful and he becomes more intellectual and experiences sensations of increased confidence, athletic capability and becoming sexually active. However, as time passes his abilities become more aggressive and he becomes obsessed with using virtual reality to increase his grasp on his newfound telekinetic and pyrokinetic powers, similar to Brundles obsession with his own developing mutations.

The original The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958) used practical effects. A small animatronic figure with a moving head and arm was used for actors Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall, spider-webbing was creating from superglue being strung from pieces of wood and a mask made of latex sponge pieces, beads and metallic framework created the head of the titular Fly (Biodrowski, 2007). It is an interesting point of discussion that in the original The Fly, it is only the head of Andre Delambre (David Hedison credited as Al Hedison) that is altered, possibly due to technological and restrictions of the time period, whereas Cronenberg alters the entirety of Goldblums body in his remake. It could be argued that this is a sign of the audience developing to expect more from horror movies, to want to see more visceral action rather than the more subtle horrors history has given them.

While The Fly, as one of Cronenbergs most prolific pieces, has been the main portion of this discussion so far, it is notable that Cronenbergs other works follow a familiar method.

Dead Ringers, Cronenbergs 1988 film about twin gynaecologists, shows throughout the theme of the body being something whole and human despite its flaws, eating and being sexually active as normal and natural occurrences, and while a mutation doesn't occur to manipulate the protagonists outlook drugs do alter the mindset of Beverly, played by Jeremy Irons. Beverly has nightmares of his body being physically conjoined to that of his identical twin, Elliot (played also by Irons). The connection is a fleshy grown extending from twin navels, and is severed by a bite by their bed mate Claire (Geneviève Bujold) which results in Beverly to wake up screaming, frantic, before taking more prescription drugs. ' Shaw explains that the 'dream is an obvious embodiment of Beverly's fears of being separated from Elliot', and goes on to explain that if we follow the Freudian theory that dreams are expressions of desire that there is a possibility that subconsciously Beverley wishes to be forcibly separated from his brother. (Shaw, 1996)

As Beverly continues to take more mind-altering drugs, more visions of bodily harm appear to the point where Beverly has metallic gynaecological tools created to inspect women's bodies that he deems 'mutated', claiming that "the patients are getting strange. They look alright on the outside, but their insides...they're deformed." showing how altered his view of reality is. As his reliance on drugs grow and his brothers attempts to sober Beverly fail, we see this movie become more of a psychological horror with body horror elements rather than a body horror with psychological elements.

As both twins become drugged and despondent, however, they attempt to 'separate' themselves using the aforementioned gynaecological tools in a scene that cements Dead Ringers firmly in the body horror genre. Beverly traces his hand over Elliots stomach before carving into it with the sharpest of the tools, claiming that "separation can be a terrifying thing." We see Elliot die before Beverly plunges the tool in further with a resounding 'squish', the entire scene more subtle and playing on the viewers senses and fears rather than outright gore (initially).

Despite the scenes almost spontaneous nature, the clinical feel created by Beverly's preparation and medical tools plays on needle and doctor phobias, separate Dead Ringers from The Fly, which has a more monstrous out-of-control feeling

As Beverly awakes sometime later, confused and disconsolate, he repeated Elliots nickname continuously while refusing to look at the almost autopsied body of his brother that lays prominent in the background. Beverly redresses, the act seeming sinister and a juxtaposition to the procedure just witnessed, and yet the aforementioned clinical feel withstands, as perhaps Beverly is given a moment of clarity enough to control his body in a 'normal' way. He attempts to all Claire, who asks "Who is this?” which has been an overarching theme throughout Dead Ringers; the concept of unknowing whether the twins who they say they are, or even if Beverly knows who he is anymore. He walks back to his brother in a zombie-like state, catatonic, as panning shots of the bloodied needles and tools are shown. His confused and vacant mind leads him to lay against his brother’s body and the pair are reunited in death. (Cronenberg, 1988)

It is a credit to Cronenberg in that despite following similar methods of the mind and body declining together, the physical and mental aspects connected just as the twins in Dead Ringers are, that in each of his films there is a unique spin on what triggers the initial downfall of his characters. The decline of mind and body and connected entities together is a theme throughout Cronenbergs work that has extended to be a part in almost all pieces of the body-horror genre; it is hard to name a piece of fiction in the genre that does not follow the ideology of the mind and body being connected as that as one deteriorates, mutates or is manipulated, the other follows in some form.

CHAPTER 3:

AKIRA AND TETSUO; AKIRAS INFLUENCE AND TECHNOLOGICAL IMPACT IN COMPARISON TO FLESH

“Japanese medical people are traditionally very strange and creepily poetic.”

― David Cronenberg, Consumed

"I see technology as being an extension of the human body."

- David Cronenberg, Cronenberg on Cronenberg

Katsuhiro Otomos Akira was released in 1988 as an adaption of the popular series published in Weekly Young Jump Magazine under the same name that ran from 1982 to 1990. While the film differs greatly from its original source material in terms of character development and its ending point, the theme of the body mutating is prevalent in both the manga and animated movie. Napier describes anime as a genre that often focuses on the process of bodily change, ‘from cyborgs to superheroes on the positive side, and from mutants to monsters on the negative,’ (Napier, 2005, 37)

Akira revolutionised the way the world viewed eastern animation and became known as the cinematic adaptation that inspired visual effects and animation in many films. Some films influenced by Akira and its content include the Dragonball Z series (1989) with the characters ‘powering-up’ by yelling and manipulating the landscape around them, The Matrix (1999) with Neo dodging bullets and using his mind as a weapon, Parasyte (2014) which is a series revolving around body-snatching creature that mutate the body into fleshy weapons and even television series Stranger Things (2016), a series involving a young child learning to control telekinetic abilities. Marvels release of Akira even became the first Japanese manga to be translated into English and released in the west and is widely renowned as the film that caused manga and anime to become popular in the west. (Christmas, 2015)

Akira is animated on ones (meaning it is animated at 24 frames per second, rather than the standard 12 frames per second. This leads to the final animation being incredibly fluid,) and utilizes the entirety of the characters faces, techniques rarely used in eastern animation due to how much time animating would take This is often the case due to dialogue being recorded post-animation, whereas Akira had all the sound files ready before animating any facial synchronisation. However this works for Akira, as we can see into every instance of the character’s emotions and mindset rather than the typically mouth and eye only movement that prevails eastern animation.

The film opens with shots of Neo-Tokyo, 31 years post World War Three, the prevailing theme of war and terror already an undertone within this body horror. However the main over-arching theme throughout both the manga and anime of Akira is that the mind and body are linked and that as one expands, the other must expand with it.

As Tetsuos physic abilities are first awakened in the film, the concept of body horror is purely conjectural; he has premonitions of his body rapidly expanding and his internal organs erupting out of his stomach as the ground collapses beneath him at several different points. This can be seen as a matching concept as in Dead Ringers, with Beverly’s dreams of his body being physically conjoined with Elliot. For a film-goer, these forewarnings are a welcome thing; showing hints of the climax of the film to keep the viewer interested in seeing how the gore and visceral imagery of the film develops as the film progresses.

While both the animated movie and manga show aspects of bodily mutation, they portray Tetsuos downfall in different ways. In the film Tetsuo remains intact and human as his abilities develop; he takes medication to subdue his head pain as a way of keeping his powers at bay - the usage of drugs are a point of interest in the film; unlike Dead Ringers, where drugs are a catalyst that create the body horror element and leads to the protagonists breakdowns, Akira shows drugs as one of the few things restraining Tetsuos chronic migraines that lead to his bursts of telekinetic energy and therefore his eventual mutation - but as the climax unfolds he connects technological aspects into his arm for structure before his body rapidly expands and mutates into a fleshy childlike entity as a visual metaphors the lack of control over his telekinetic powers despite trying to retain in charge of his own body. In the manga, however, the mutation is drawn out and slow. ‘(A)s Tetsuo becomes more and more powerful, he also becomes less and less human.’(Anderson, 2015). In the manga Tetsuos body doesn’t explode rapidly as a way of reaching the climax of the story but instead mutates slowly as his abilities increase; as his telekinetic powers increase, his body increases in size (along with amassing technological elements) as a way of amassing ‘inorganic matter to contain the absurd amount of power awakening inside him.’ (Cinefix, 2015) Tetsuo still ends up becoming a fleshy mass and then eventually turns into pure telekinetic energy, but the process is much slower and shown in more detail in the manga compared to the films rapid finale. He is even shown to have some control over his transformations, going so far as to willingly mutate rapidly to force bullets out of his body.

‘He metamorphoses into a pulsating, pustulating mass of flesh and machinery that explodes outward, absorbing or consuming everything in its path.’, writes Bolton, describing Tetsuos mutation. (Bolton, 2014, 304) The linkage of organic and synthetic materials is a curious aspect of body horror and is shown interestingly in Akira; Gottesman explains that in 1988, the year of Akiras release, Emperor Shōwa was close to death and was ‘only kept alive by machines’, Japan was facing financial and economic ruin and its structure as a country was in flux. The Emperor was seen as a symbol of traditional values and his connection with machinery to elongate his life shows a realistic view of ‘melding of machine and man’. Gottesman goes on to explain how Tetsuos bodily presence is ‘overwhelming’ and that “rather than celebratory, the force of technology in Akira is purely destructive, as the atomic bomb was in Japan…” This links back to my previous points of pieces of media reflecting the culture they come from; Akira represented Japan and its fear and fascination with the body becoming conjoined to technology in times of need. (Gottesman, 11)

The linking of technological materials and human matter is one that Cronenberg also explores in the ending scenes of the Fly: as Brundles mutation into the Brundlefly is complete and his mind-set is altered he fuses himself with the teleportation pod itself, the prosthetic fly flesh connecting with chunks of metal similarly to Tetsuos fluctuating arm merging with protruding wires. The connection of flesh and metal is a fusion that, while not present in every body horror, helps in creating the aspect of perversion in the genre; a connection that is unnatural yet is something partially human that fits right into the uncanny valley of what the viewer perceives as both familiar and comfortable yet also alien and unnatural. Body horror as a genre aims to arouse disgust ‘- and in its own way pleasure –‘ and the combination of human and non-human is the perfect way to both intrigue and trepidation. (Hurley, 1995, 203)

Akira inspired a live-action film called Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a film revolving around a man slowly devolving into a pile of metallic scraps. The use of practical effects is Cronenberg-esque, possibly showing that despite being an Eastern film the usage of decent practical effects with the intent to disgust and instil terror is overarching despite cultural differences, as well as cementing the fusion of man and metal as a body horror principal. While the animated Akira has inorganic matter as only a smaller part of Tetsuos fusion, Tetsuo: The Iron Man has metal as the films prominent source of repulsion and horror. The jarring flickering effect of the camera twinned with the haunting monochrome adds to the sense of Tetsuo being in the uncanny valley, further repulsing the audience, but the rotting of flesh and replacement with machinery is truly where the audience's discomfort lies.

The joining of flesh and machinery creates a sense of new-ness despite corruption; both Tetsuo and Brundlefly end up being fused with technological aspects in an attempt to strengthen and purify themselves in some way, yet 'the emphasis is much more on the protagonists dehumanization by the alienating powers of technology', describes Napier. While some depictions of human and robotic fusions focus on the protagonist learning to control and use their mechanical aspects for benefit, such as Robocop (1987) or Megaman, pieces of media like these tend not to be focused on the horror aspects of the body, whereas the ungodly 'fusion of human pilot inside armoured machine' in (typically Eastern) body horror media show how unnatural the synthesis of organic and inorganic matter can be. Technology, while initially having the potential to be something positive, ultimately ends up corrupting its hosts humanity more than anything and leads them to their inevitable downfall in the majority of body horror films the usage of it is a staple in. (Napier, 2005, 90)

Ultimately, the animated Akira is an incomplete companion piece to the manga, but this does not take away from the widespread cultural and cinematic impact it produced. Akira gave the western audience a glimpse into the future and created a wave of new ideas and stylistic challenges that continue to this day, it inspired classic movies that will forever be hailed as success stories, and will likely be seen as a pinnacle point in cinematic history for many years to come.

CONCLUSION

“I am a man. I am good and not a beast. I am an animal with reason. I have flesh, I am flesh, I am not descended from flesh. Flesh is created by God. I am God. I am God. I am God.” ― Vaslav Nijinsky, The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky

"Cronenbergs images, it was said, might be shocking, perverse, even disgusting, but they revealed a fascination with the myriad ways that we can be betrayed by our minds and bodies." Writes Morris (1994) is his description of Cronenbergs work, and the same can be said for Akira and other works of the body horror genre; the aim of body horror is to repulse its audience but also spark a primal intrigue. As a species we are fascinated with seeing how far our bodies can be pushed, and the genre of body horror encapsulates this fascination in all its gory, twisted, unnatural glory. Whether through slow build up or sudden expansion, body horror is genre that causes 'recoil and repulsion' but also a feeling of interest and perverse wonder, 'something incomprehensible', (Botting, 2011, 148) and whether the film comes from East or West, body horror will always invoke these feelings.

Society creates media to reflect itself. The fact that cultures of all kinds depict versions of the body mutating surely represents that through humanity faces different hardships and struggles depending on what part of the planet the media is produced, we always fear ourselves, the over arcing theme throughout the human race is the fear of loss of control of oneself, whether it be piece by piece or all at once. Both Akira and Cronenbergs work share themes of the mind and body being linked and as one grows, the other joins it - whether this is growing in size or growing unstable.

Cronenberg is aware of Western society's primal fears and plays with them to gauge a response. Despite its daily usage in our everyday lives we fear technology overtaking humanity, and so body horror films with that aspect show machinery corrupting the flesh and eroding humanity away, Western society being left behind, and so Cronenberg shows Brundle merging with the teleportation pod and portrayed man melding with technology in Videodrome.

Otomos work on Akira represents Japans fear of instability, of a loss of traditional values and lack of control. The culture of Japan was fluctuation with new technology overcoming traditional values, and Napier describes animation at the time as being the ' ideal artistic vessel for expressing....[Japans] obsession with fluctuating identity’ (Napier 2001, 12). Tetsuos fusion of flesh and nonorganic matter is a "metaphor for the loss of control" (Gottesman, 2016, 110) during Japans capitalistic and fascist period and his expansion into the famous mechanical flesh-baby could be seen as a metaphor for Japan rising from that period of time and being reborn into a society that embraces technological advances in its culture.

Perhaps as modern-day technology continues to advance to higher planes each passing year, the next generation of body horror cinema will continue to show grotesque fusions of man and machine. As cinema continues to develop, adapt and reflect society's ever-changing views, it can only be assumed that the future of the body horror genre will continue to strike fear and fascination into the hearts of its viewers.

#captainbobbin #writing #dissertation #body horror #essay #japan #usa #america #east vs west #flesh #horror #cronenberg #akira #otomo #uni stuff

1 note · View note