A Look at Fear from a Media Presentation
Japanese culture has lead the charge in moving on- at least in terms of dealing with our fears, fears that stem from our communal memories. Technically I’m looking more at ‘Daikaiju’, or Big monsters. Big monsters themselves aren’t a japanese construct- they’ve been featured since as early as 1924, with the first japanese version being Godzilla in 1954.
Rawr
The cycle of grief. This’ll be an over- simplification, but here’s how I understand it. Our first reaction is usually Denial, wherein the we imagine a false, preferable reality. Next we feel anger, usually at our inability to deal with the situation, but we project this onto those around us. During the third stage, we begin to look at trying to avoid the cause of grief, before we move on to Depression, where we understand the inevitability of the situation, but are unable to come to terms with it, and finally Acceptance, were we embrace our impending demise…
Here, have a kitten
Part of being a social creature is our fear of the unknown- that which threatens our society. This is why a great deal of our fears, and thus monsters, revolve around the idea that the monster will make us one of them; each with its own original and complex story;
You have your zombies- converting their victims through bites into mindless ravenous consumers as depicted in George Ramero’s Dawn of the Dead. These represent a mindless mass incapable of intelligent thought;
Vampires, converting their victims through bites to be overt representations the victorian fear of sexuality
Werewolves; more biters who take away a victim’s self control leaving them as feral beasts during full moon.
Ghosts take the cold bite of death and make us fear the other side, and serial killers take some good sound bytes amd make us fear the wolf in sheeps clothing that may be our neighbour
That being said, these monsters are generic, and can be found in almost every culture. What we’re looking at is more specific- if these monsters were the only aspects of horror films, all horror would look the same, and it doesn’t. There’s massive variation from country to country, and here’s where our fears get specific.
What we really fear are the places where we lost our humanity. take for example American and British horror scene. American horror films almost always take place in the outskirts and suburbs, with horror movies taking place in the city turning into mere parody’s of their original scary selves-“Leprechaun in da hood” takes a serial killing irish creature and makes him rap in a sequence almost two minutes long,
while “Jason takes manhattan” takes place almost exclusively on a boat, and when he finally arrives almost none of the new yorkers actually notice the mass murderous hockey mask in their midst
B; Likewise in British films- “Worlds End” is a film about an alien invasion wherein almost the entirety of a town is turned into mulch, and yet the film itself, in small town england, is a comedy.
The reasoning for this can be found in our history. American horror films take place in the outskirts of society because that’s where they lost their humanity- during colonization, the hunting of the indigenous indians, and later slavery, while british society did their dirt in the center- the age of industrialization saw a sudden shift where human life didn’t cost as much as continued productivity, and where children were sold into orphanages. These are the events that we’re grieving- and the events that we’re moving on from. This is where cinema comes in. These stop-gap monsters fit a certain niche in the cycle of grief, fitting in around the bargaining/Depression stages. It’s only recently, however, that we’ve had a monster slide down a stage.
This guy
