Chill chill chill I don’t want to seem like an ungrateful bastard. I know we’re coming off the heels of Higurashi: When They Cry: The Remake: 2020 okay? You bet your ass I actually JUST got done watching that before sitting down to type this article. Kinky and I were both a bit skeptical about the art style as it seems pretty soft for something supposed to be scary, but the first episode already displayed a few moments of gore here and there that didn’t look very soft. Ultimately not much was shown though so it’s still up in the air. God knows I’ll be watching this anime every time it comes out on the dot. In fact, it got me so hype I wondered “what other scary anime are airing this October?” to which I quickly found the answer to be “none bitch”.
This got me thinking. Suddenly, I pondered “wait a minute, what other horror anime do I know about? I heard of that Another anime… and.. Corpse Party… but that’s not an anime”. I want to emphasize my use of the word “Scary” in the title. Originally, it was going to be horror, but after Googling “horror anime” to jog my memory I realized that either myself or the Internet has no fucking clue what “horror” means. I saw some wild shit. Tokyo Ghoul, Elfen Lied, oh my fucking God I saw someone say Boogiepop I was ready to commit some horror, and then I saw Death Note and completely gave up. Sure some of those anime have blood and gore in them but not a damn one of them scared me. Well, Boogiepop scared me in an existential way but that’s different. After that I refined my search to “why are there no scary anime” and got some results that answered my question a bit better.
I was way too fucking angry to be scared watching this shit. If you know, you know.
There were a bunch of possible reasons but I’ll summarize the big ones I found. One possibility is that studios are afraid to tackle different shit in fear that it might not do well. After all, most people only really care about scary shit for the month of October. Few people sit down at Christmas dinner ready to watch Grotesque Anime Torture: The Movie. Unless it comes out in fall, there may not be much of an audience for it compared to shounen anime 3000 that people will watch whenever, not to mention horror is an overall less viewed genre than more popular genres like action. Another reason brought up is that writing and directing horror is hard as fuck. I’ve never done anything horror related so I can’t vouch for that one way or the other so I’ll leave the validity of that claim up to you guys at home. Lastly, I read that there’s a lot of factors with the audience that makes it a balancing act. You want to put enough scary shit to disturb people, but not enough to make people not watch it. You want to put enough gore to rile people up, but not enough to get censored by half the planet. You want to make people think about the story and characters, but you also want to make them panicked and afraid.
A holiday special for the whole family!
Regardless of the reason, I’m thankful that we’re getting at least one fucking scary anime for this spooky season. Even if it’s only a remake, when they played the old opening song at the end of the first episode I was in nostalgia heaven. Are you watching Higurashi: When They Cry? Why are there barely any scary anime? Grab your cleaver from the junkyard and leave a comment below!
