Anna Sibilia

David Steiling

August 30, 2015

East VS West

The Monsters in the Mirror

Personally, I do not have the stomach for most of the modern horror genre. It wars against too many of my moral centers and exploits my unease in ways far more severe than what would be necessary to send a message. I cannot sit still through these absurd and appalling stories; I often get sick and nauseated when I bear witness to these grotesque tales, as the sight or sound of torture imbeds itself firmly into my nightmares. As such, I’d like to note: if I have any night visions plagued by unnameable peril and demonic distortions, I blame this class. As it’s painfully apparent, I’m quite a horror virgin, though I do know the vast differentiation between the thematic goals of Western and Eastern horror. 

The East has this tendency to isolate and intertwine, to weave narratives out of stray threads and then bring them together in a knot at the end. These varying characters have  their own sins and hellion thoughts, and it is the power of an individual’s thoughts that make the Eastern depiction of horror thrive. 

The emphasis is placed upon the psyche, a fragile, malleable thing that can be trained to imagine nightmares into glory, or comfort into chaos. If a person has been subjected to evil repeatedly, they intern begin to see it in everything; soon you have sadists and serial killers from haunting pasts that now inflict their agony and sorrow unto others. There is the prevalent notion of taking a single person and tainting them with trauma, disconnecting them from all the good in the world. Soon, the individual festers and destroys that which thrives around them, spreading evil like a disease. 

Here in the West, most horror comes back from a more traditional point of view: the Highest Good vs the Darkest Evils. We focus more on the individuals in a conflict scenario more so than a war of minds. Manipulation is used, yes, but it is mostly a duel of wills to survive and conquer one another. In most cases, it is a Man VS Man story where the audience watches as one side (more soften than not some average people thrown into a situation far worse than they imagined) is pitted against their oppressor whom uses mind-bending games or brutal scare tactics to corner their quarry. This is not so much a test of whose mind is stronger as much as it is a metaphor for the battle between good and evil latent within man with a side being a champion for the virtues and the other a representation of terrors.