oh the horror!

The emotion of fear is really fascinating to me. I actually used to hate horror movies. I thought they were too gross, but now I've grown a tolerance for it. Probably because of playing video games, there was a lot of blood in fighting games and horror games, but it was so fake looking. Gradually I got used to it, and my mom was always watching CSI shows, so I got used to that too. It was more the anticipation of the gory stuff, what I imagined was more disgusting then what was actually on the screen. The movie Halloween had very little blood in it, I bet most people wouldn't guess that, except for one scene where a girl gets her arm cut off.

I started to get really interested in japanese horror movies when I kept seeing the trailors on tv, like the Ring and the Grudge. I watched the american remakes too, but those really sucked. I guess I related more to a japanese audience; the scripts were buit on japanese urban legend and culture which just didn't translate well. Americans prefer werewolves and vampires I think, compared to asian audiences. There was a lot of psychological tension building in those films. I think it was a natural progression from all the horror survival video games I liked to play. I had started playing a lot of action video games with weapons, and they were getting boring. In the survival horror games, there was the added element of trying to stay alive avoiding monsters or forces compared with which you are underpowered. Just combat with other humans wasn't as exciting as winning against a zombie.

One of my favorite video games was called Clock Tower. It involved stealth and hiding, and I read that it was based on a Dario Argento movie called Phenomena. I saw it posted in parts on youtube, and then I started looking at other Argento movies too. They reminded me of some of the CSI shows that my mom watched, there was always a main character that would get drawn into the mystery somehow and go around investigating. The tension of who did it was always what pulled me in. And when you find out the killer is a main character, that is more involving. The climax where the killer is revealed is usually exposed by some tiny little detail, and that revelation knocks me off my seat. In one movie I guessed who the killer was early in the movie, but I still wasn't sure, and that kept me interested for the rest of the movie.

It's hard to find other people who like horror movies, but there are lots of them on the internet. I just wish I had someone like a local friend who liked the same stuff so we could talk about it and make our own movies. I guess it's not a popular hobby. But I don't think I'm weird. I think the fangirls are way more obsessed than me.