Search Results
7/14/2025, 11:12:23 AM
>>11333086
The trouble is more the psychological niche than the horror genre. Shrinking does make things personal, you're the one who is pulled out of the world and made aberrant and everything no matter what that affects you does so moreso, granted, been discussed to death. But horror doesn't need to be like that to have impact.
The opposite of psychological horror is physical horror and that does work at large scale. Uru's Elf Princess is fucking scary. Not to you, not to me, not to most of the people invested enough to actively post in this thread, but that's like watching the Alien movie for the twentieth time. The real problem with Elf Princess is the same thing that we see in a lot of female monster or fem serial killer narratives, "she is like this because she was wronged even worse and everyone she kills is heckin' bad and sexually deviant okay." One of the most prolific real life fem serial killers was a babysitter who specialized in snuffing preteens, a huge number of others were medical professionals who likewise killed people because they were babies or patients in a state of vulnerability, the moralism compulsively stapled to these stories is nonsense, but real life female serial killers are not conceptually "scary" either. They're boring and poorly motivated, uncompelling people. Homolka was boring. It's a big problem with female monsters. The compulsion to humanize them and give them sensible motives works against the genre, since that becomes the story and that story is a drama, not horror.
The scary version of why does Hachishakusama want the young narrator is nobody knows. She's an ancient demon god and the wards that kept her sealed were destroyed over centuries, forgotten save as demon warded stones. Maybe she'll crawl down his throat and wear him like a skinsuit like that amanojaku legend. Maybe she'll just eat him. Maybe gramps doesn't know the real banishing ritual because no-one does. That's not psychological horror, not really.
The trouble is more the psychological niche than the horror genre. Shrinking does make things personal, you're the one who is pulled out of the world and made aberrant and everything no matter what that affects you does so moreso, granted, been discussed to death. But horror doesn't need to be like that to have impact.
The opposite of psychological horror is physical horror and that does work at large scale. Uru's Elf Princess is fucking scary. Not to you, not to me, not to most of the people invested enough to actively post in this thread, but that's like watching the Alien movie for the twentieth time. The real problem with Elf Princess is the same thing that we see in a lot of female monster or fem serial killer narratives, "she is like this because she was wronged even worse and everyone she kills is heckin' bad and sexually deviant okay." One of the most prolific real life fem serial killers was a babysitter who specialized in snuffing preteens, a huge number of others were medical professionals who likewise killed people because they were babies or patients in a state of vulnerability, the moralism compulsively stapled to these stories is nonsense, but real life female serial killers are not conceptually "scary" either. They're boring and poorly motivated, uncompelling people. Homolka was boring. It's a big problem with female monsters. The compulsion to humanize them and give them sensible motives works against the genre, since that becomes the story and that story is a drama, not horror.
The scary version of why does Hachishakusama want the young narrator is nobody knows. She's an ancient demon god and the wards that kept her sealed were destroyed over centuries, forgotten save as demon warded stones. Maybe she'll crawl down his throat and wear him like a skinsuit like that amanojaku legend. Maybe she'll just eat him. Maybe gramps doesn't know the real banishing ritual because no-one does. That's not psychological horror, not really.
Page 1