Sophia Holland

For J-Horror/Asian Horror week I decided to focus on manga. I actually found the first manga I read after telling my roommate about the theme for this week. I vaguely knew of the one she mentioned, but had never actually read it.  The Enigma of Amigara Fault is about human-shaped holes that are found after an earthquake reveals the inside of a mountain. This story is actually quite gothic, because each person can find a hole shaped exactly like them. And what would you do if you found a hole shaped just like you? You would get in it. And the issue in this story is the holes were constructed in such a way that no one who climbed in was able to move out, eventually leading to their own torture. Reading this manga also reminded me of an online Korean comic I had stumbled across years ago.  I was actually too afraid to finish this Korean comic then, and am honestly still too afraid to read it now (I startle easily). After researching, I learned that this comic was called  ...

As we have discussed in class, a key part of the Gothic genre is that the antagonistic force has some allure to it. The "evil" is not truly evil because it needs to be seductive to both the main character and the reader. Mary Shelley did an excellent job with this in her piece, Frankenstein . In Frankenstein , we learn the story of Dr. Victor Frankenstein: a young scientist who while at school learns what it is that makes a being alive, and uses that knowledge to animate a monster of his own creation. The knowledge that Dr. Frankenstein discovers is cleverly disguised in the book, making it mysterious, all-powerful, and most importantly, alluring. This is only the first instance of the allure of the evil. We then get to learn Frankenstein's monster's story and the reader finds him almost pitiful. Frankenstein's monster is essentially an abandoned child, who is extremely lonely because there is no other being on earth like him, and outcast for his appearance. The...