Monster Mess

Good horror anime is notoriously rare. Only a handful of titles spring to mind, and even then, I'd be hard-pressed to define them as pure horror. Hellsing, for instance, is firmly an action show despite using a slew of popular monsters. The Higurashi franchise is about half slice-of-life, and getting more so with each pointless installment. It seems most of the really suspenseful or grotesque scenes in anime are in service of science fiction or action plots rather than a work meant only to scare us. That said, this season I'm following two 5-minute shows that are each specifically horror: Kagewani and Kowabon.

Before fully diving into the shows it's important to ask whether horror works at all in 5-minute doses. Is there even enough time for that vital buildup of tension? The answer is yes, I think, and of course it's all in the writing. There should be something keeping us coming back, whether it be interesting, charismatic characters, the promise of a memorable payoff, or an overarching mystery that we can't help but try to solve. Pupa from a few years past failed at most aspects because it was more concerned with showing us incest-vore and building up pregnant mad scientists that end up doing nothing; the characters were too weird to relate to, and the B-movie cliches were distracting. So now let's look at how Kowabon shows us successful horror, and how Kagewani . . . doesn't.

The premise of both is, by necessity, simple. Each of the (currently three) Kowabon shorts features a young woman minding her own business. The electronics around her begin to act up, and she becomes more and more nervous, until a mysterious pixelated figure appears, and then they both vanish. Kagewani follows a determined professor as he investigates a series of vicious, possibly interconnected monsters mostly through secondhand information from their victims. From that summary one would assume the latter is the better show to follow, with a clear protagonist and more variety in its threats. One would be wrong.

Like Pupa, Kagewani wallows in the B-movie cliches. The monsters aren't creative, as we've seen the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman, a kraken, and a giant turtle so far (not Gamera, sadly). We were just introduced to an evil scientist/businessman rival for the professor, who is collecting samples of the monsters for his evil research/business (you can tell it's evil by the way he acts). And the victims . . . uh . . . kinda deserve their fate. I mean, we get stereotypes like teenage assholes trying to get Internet-famous by shooting fake monster footage only to get killed by THE IRONY, and a mountain climber who puts her whole team at risk during a climb because she must find out what happened to her father up here, dammit! By far my favorite is the pair of kid brothers who crash the remote-controlled drone every parent apparently buys their children in a stream. The drone floats into that dark, smelly sewer that strange noises come out of sometimes, so of course they go in to search for it! Tell me, so any of these situations sound plausible outside of a SyFy Channel “original” movie?

Which brings us to Kowabon. The victims could be anyone, could be us, doing everyday things we might do. Ride an elevator with headphones on. Video chat with a friend. Finish up some after-hours work at the office. Bam! We're invested because we're not watching people violate the Top Ten List of Things Not to Do in a Horror Movie, we're watching what could be our own lives until something, something goes wrong.

It's still not clear exactly what happens each episode, but in this case I feel less is more. What is it that attacks the girls? One thing or many? How is it related to the electronics that always seem present? What triggers its appearance? What happens to the people it makes disappear? This show doesn't bank on each episode's payoff to reel you in, it invites you to puzzle out what's going on long after the episode ends. That's a type of horror that can't be improved by throwing an Abominable Snowman into the mix.

It's the same old story with visuals as well. Once again Kowabon makes the effective choice and uses rotoscoping for its animation. For those unfamiliar, that's when a scene is performed by a live actor, then they and their environment are traced over frame by frame, most famously (and controversially) used in Flowers of Evil, it can help us better relate to the characters because they blink, fidget, and make a thousand awkward movements like us. But not quite like us; human movement can never be captured perfectly, so a bit of an “uncanny valley” effect can result. In other words, perfect for a horror show.

Not so for Kagewani. I don't know exactly what their animation technique is called, but it reminds me of the cheap short story adaptations they used to show me in elementary school. You know, the ones obviously designed to be watched along with the textbook, so the budget is almost non-existent? Where the characters are basically cardboard cutouts that never move more than their eyes or an arm at a time? Now this style could work in something like a fairy tale, a basic morality story where characters are painted in broad strokes anyway, and you know from the beginning whose actions are right and wrong. But you sure don't end up caring for anyone, not any more than for the cheerleader who goes off to have sex when an ax murderer is on the loose. If anything, the art makes Kagewani feel like even more of a cartoon than it already is.

With all that said, I recommend watching both. As mentioned above, horror is a rare enough genre in anime that even the mediocre stuff deserves a look. Also, my opinions concerning these shows are even more subjective than usual; what scares or intrigues one person certainly may not do likewise for the next, or not in the same way. It's not a giant time commitment this time, so go have a look/see and form your own thoughts!