The Thin Line Between Horror and Stupidity

(Some disturbing visuals are in this blog post, reader discretion is advised)

What if their oceanic creatures grew legs and started terrorizing the people of Japan? What if these horrifying creatures were driven by the power of farting? What if there was a town called Darkness Falls? All these sound pretty dumb right? Notably Darkness Falls, (nobody calls a town that). However, the other example was from Gyo, from the acclaimed horror Mankaka Junji Ito. I want to talk a bit about how easily horror can become silly depending on the framing and execution, And I would like to do that with Steven King’s Work and Junji Ito. Both of them can be very campy writers in their own right but turn their camp into terror.

Junji Ito needs no introduction, he is one of the biggest horror Mankakas living today and has created many classic tales of terror. These would include Tomie, Uzumaki, and The Long Dream, among many others. I have been a great admirer of his work, chiefly for his skill at scaring the shit out of me. He is also very creative, you will not find many of his stories anywhere else, be them The Hanging Balloons or spirals consuming everything. You will not find such creative and interesting ideas anywhere else.

I frequent the Junji Ito subreddit, mostly cause it is a wholesome place where people don’t fight over wifus (cause Tomie is the only one), there is no sus horniness over underage characters and people act like grownups.

One conversation I found when it comes to assessing Ito’s work is that he is very campy. I didn’t think about that until that comment. But that poster was right, Ito is very campy in his horror.

I would like to give the Merriam-Webster definition of Campy, defined as “absurdly exaggerated, artificial, or affected in a usually humorous way.” Ito’s horror often relies on outrageous on-paper storylines and visuals.

The Hanging Balloons is a prime example of an absurdly exaggerated metaphor for mass hysteria and suicide. The idea of floating heads that try to hang people is stupid. No other word to say but it is very stupid as horror ideas go. Same with Gyo, zombie fish rising from the ocean powered by flatulence is peak camp, the commentaries from the same Reddit post I mentioned earlier pointed out that Gyo is nearly Sharknado levels of camp. Something that I can to an extent agree on.

However, when I was reading Uzumaki, a story about spirals consuming a town, with chapters involving people turning into snails or girls having fights with their spiral-infested hair or a kid coming back to life as a jack-in-the-box style zombies, should all be very stupid. But they aren’t, or at least not for long, as Ito either executes the scene in such a way he makes it scary (Jack in the Box zombie for instance) or he brings the silliness to a screeching halt to reveal the horror gut-punch. An example of this would be the hair chapter which ends with one of the girls dying, with her spiral hair capturing the attention of everyone, they don’t even notice the corpse.

Ito demands a lot of suspension of disbelief from the reader. They have to accept absurd or even stupid situations and story beats, but he rewards those readers with a visceral experience. You don’t even care when you see a grown woman dressed in schoolgirl clothes too small for her cause the scene and build-up are too disturbing to warrant any thought.

However, this thin line between horror and stupidity is very difficult to maintain. Ito is able to do this with his manga. The Anime adaptations so far (holding out for the Uzumaki amine) haven’t been so lucky.

Maybe it is because the animation quality was poor, or the addition of color, or the lack of detail in the anime as opposed to the manga. The anime adaptations often lose the terror Ito is able to produce with absurd situations. It’s difficult for me to explain but something gets lost in the translation between manga and anime that reduces the horror or turns everything into an unintentional comedy.

I think the anime adaptations show the genius of Ito’s skills as an artist and storyteller. He knows that what he is writing is silly or absurd. But he has a way of making you believe the absurd. To look past the campy nature of his storylines and see the horror of abuse cycles (Tomie) or the drive for self-destruction (Uzumaki). That is where the anime adaptations fail. They don’t find the horror in the absurd and camp doesn’t elevate the horror. The visuals are too bland to produce the visceral terror that makes Ito great.

Now, let's get to Steven King.

Steven King doesn’t have the most outrageous of stories or monsters when compared to Junji Ito, but he does have a bent towards the absurd or outrageous with his horror. Examples like Maximum Overdrive or Christine are very campy. Maximum Overdrive is more with the absurd notion that cosmic radiation will cause cars to become sentient killing machines. Christine also deals with a killer car causing their owner to go insane with worship.

Christine and Maximum Overdrive both provide a good contrast for how the camp in horror can work and not work. Christine is an example of good campy horror, as the execution is done relatively well, focusing on the corruptive and obsessive element that is horrifying. You don’t care that much about the absurdity cause you are being rewarded for your suspension of disbelief with a compelling unnerving story.

Maximum Overdrive however doesn’t have such themes. It’s a balls-to-the-wall idiotfest about evil appliances killing people for some reason. There is nothing to say about anything scary. There is nothing about obsession, self-destruction, or anything human. It’s dumb fun about evil cars doing evil things.

The difference between campy scary horror and just dumb camp from what I understand is the lack of anything relating to the human condition. If there is nothing relatable to the human condition to ground the absurd metaphors and visuals then what exactly should we be scared of? All I see is a car with a cartoon face on it. Not exactly a peek of horror really.

King tends to mess up more than Ito when it comes to balancing the line between horror and camp. Ito is able to see the inverse of things, from spirals turning into cosmic personifications of obsession and death (when they are normally associated with spiritual enlightenment in Asian cultures) or ice cream being a source of body horror(when it is normally linked with childhood innocence). This I think helps him have fun with what he is creating while also allowing for scares.

King, for every good example of camp like Christine or Pennywise the Dancing Clown you have The Tommyknockers or Dreamcatcher with its Shitwesels. That isn’t to say King isn’t better than Ito when it comes to using camp with his horror. I think it is a matter of quantity. King writes more than most authors ever will in their lifetime so it’s understandable that they don’t work out. Not every story is a good idea, especially if you have a drug problem like King suffered from.

Credit here: https://lee-no-akumu.tumblr.com/post/172184863650/junji-ito-collection

Personally, I love both of these creators and their works. They offer something new in Ito’s case, highly creative gazes into the darkness. They allow for the exploration of the dark underneath the ordinary and mundane. And they don’t hold themselves back from showing us how gruesome, disturbing, and reliable monsters can be to us, mere mortals. They inspire me to try and add my own spin to their methods.

To wrap this up, campy horror can become frightening if it is done correctly, if there is theming to back up the absurdity along with some unnerving humanity to the project. It can also go very badly if there is nothing to back up the horror or if the camp goes overboard in relation to the horror. If the camp is taken with undue seriousness without the horror. You are making the audience buy into some crazy stuff. Make sure that they don’t start laughing at the silly stuff as opposed to getting scared and sometimes laughing.

Please consider reading Black Masquerade: The third entry in the Eight Nightmares Collection, now available at selected retailers.

Where Dreams are Lost is on special at Smashwords for 1.23$ for the month!

Acknowledgments

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