Japanese Horror and how it Leaves You Waiting in Anticipation

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A trend I’ve noticed throughout Japanese Horror is how benign everything is. It’s strangeness and weirdness leaves viewers and readers confused and frightened. While reading A Wild Sheep Chase, I couldn’t help but have chills at how strange the book was. I’ve noticed a common theme across all J-Horror that suspense is key. Nothing extremely scary or violent happens (there’s definitely a genre that has this) however, chilling moments or things that you anticipate do. For instance, in A Wild Sheep Chase feels like a man who is surrounded by spirits and obsessed individuals –with sheep of all things. I found at the end I didn’t know who was real or who was another spirit. What the story uses is a sense of mystery, only giving readers the bare minimum of what is happening. The last half of the story was scary because it was dream-like and surreal.

This also happened in the film Pulse. There were so many moments that moved incredibly slowly, but in a way left your heart pounding. I found myself covering my eyes when I watched the film –specifically in the scene where Kumiko sees that she is being watched on one of the television monitors and she slowly walks to the door, the camera cutting back and forth between the screen and what she is doing. There are no jump scares and nothing is revealed (the usual mystery and no explanations accompanying J-Horror,) yet my friends and I were squirming with anticipation and what was about to come.

In class, we watched the story of Yuki-Onna, and I was again left wondering what exactly was happening. It appears that J-Horror relies on what can truly be defined as horror (horrific and traumatizing events, being filled with immense fear) and not jump scares. We also discussed how most of the stories of this time were meant to give a life lesson and found the lines of what the message is to be blurry. In these stories, it’s difficult to decide who is good and who is evil, however, I feel at the time they were written they definitely had a clear message.

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