Week 3 J-Horror

For week 3 I read stories from the Kwaidan. The assumptions in the works I read about good and evil, where at times very black and white and also at time ambivalent. In most “western” horror I find you can find a cause or reason for evil and bad. As I read the stories of the Kwaidan, I could see ways that “western” horror differs. In “western” horror or the gothic, I find the stories are layed out with information leading you to an understanding of why and how. 

A good example of an ambivalent horror story would be MUJINA. The spirit weeping women “O-jochu” has no face really, but why? She is weeping so one could assume that her spirit passed in way in agony or anger, and the at the ending where the witness to the faceless women encountered another spirit without a face? Some how the apparitions are connected to each other, the weeping women and the soba-seller or maybe not.

            In the Kwaidan stories I found that the why is often not the key part of the story, where in “western” horror there is always a reason. Sometimes bad things and or weird things happen to good people (for no apparent reason), the people in stories tend to walk the line between the spiritual world and our physical world always. This leads into strange happenings. In “western” horror normally the innocent is effected by relations to the guilty.  

            In “western” horror and the gothic evil is created by man, the innocent be comes evil and somehow the triumph over it will sent it to rest. And I fine that in J-horror that, killing the evil and good somehow winning doesn’t end the story.  Good doesn’t always win, which is a lot different then in “western” horror.  You can see it more clearly in the J-horror cinema.

From the stories I read from the Kwaidan and from J-horror movies I have these different assumptions of evil, contribute to a very different type of horror.  It’s unique and different to the horror I grew up with.