Enjoy the Silence

There's something frightening about silence and darkness. Usually the silence is meant to comfort, to bridge a gap so that someone doesn't have to make up words to fill the void. However, to me, silence is a force more frightening than the visible and jumping monster.

I will be the first person to admit that Japanese horror films don't scare me. Actually, I usually find them strange, maybe intriguing, but even the ideas are not all that scary. They are full of mysticism and I think they border more on the lines of folk and spiritual lessons rather than true fright. I am not saying that I think Western horror is scarier, even though to me is usually is, but they hold different values. For example, Japanese horror holds a value in the use of silence and the quiet threat. The spirits in Japanese horror are not usually dangerous in of themselves but what made them come into being.

The stories that I read, the first four in Kwaidan, were more like folk tales than anything. They conveyed lessons or morals, as most stories did in that time. Very few were actually ghost stories like what we have in the Western world. That's not a bad thing but it's still something to consider with the cultures. The Western world really likes to scare itself.

But let me move onto the movie that we were to watch for the week. Pulse was a interesting, if not slow moving, film. It starts with a girl who needs a disk from someone (who was presumably a good friend) and she goes to his apartment to pick it up. During the visit, he commits suicide, hanging himself while she is there. It moves onto another character who takes this disk, what he thinks is an ISP I believe, and puts it in and then this screen just comes up. People moving slowly, almost sickly, in their rooms. It disturbs him and he turns it off. The movie itself is very quiet, setting the tone for a very cold, lonely and disconnected world. Even though the characters are close to each other, the technology makes it all very isolating and distant.

I think that the movie put more into perspective the cultural type of ghost stories and horror than the short stories, though the stories were very intriguing.

But this section not only reflects Japanese horror but the entirety of the creepy, almost detective type, preternatural fiction. One of the other books, Moonwalked, is a reflection of that. It is about a skinwalker named Mercy Thompson who owns a car garage, and like many characters, wants just that and to be left alone. Well, one day a lycanthrope wanders to her garage and she offers him work and a meeting with the territory's alpha wolf, trying to help the boy. Unfortunately, the boy does not live... he is killed and left on Mercy's doorstep. The next steps are a series of finding out why werewolves are being killed and experimented on and leaves Mercy and Adam, the alpha of the territory she lives in, in the middle of the fray. Patricia Briggs is an author that often mixes more horror with her paranormal fiction than many current authors.

Another book that relates closely to the ghost story is No Humans Involved by Kelley Armstrong, my favorite paranormal fantasy author. It's about Jaime Vegas, a necromancer who is a TV celebrity on a show that talks to people's dead loved ones. The story begins when she is put on the show with another girl and a man who can supposedly talk to the dead, though both are fakes, and they are trying to speak to the spirit of Marilyn Monroe. Only Jaime is being plagued by the actual spirits of children and a girl who wants to know who killed her. The trapped spirits of the children haunt her and even with her werewolf associate Jeremy Danvers, she has trouble deciphering why she is being haunted. Add a cult, some very perverted spirits and drama with the other cast members of the show, and it makes for a very good read.

Though all the stories are a bit of a mix of the gothic and the mythical ghost story, they are all engaging and chilling reads.