I've been slacking a bit here, I missed a week but my second entry is The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu (which doubled as my class reading for this week). It begins with a elementary school boy named Sho who is having an argument with his mother over something silly. He leaves for school on bad terms with his mother. We leave Sho to follow a classmate of his as he returns home quickly to get his forgotten lunch money. Sho declines and continues on to school. From this classmate, we learn that the school has in fact, disappeared. When we return to Sho, we find his classroom is in a strange dimension surrounded by a desert with no visible end. It is unclear whether or not the desert can be travelled; a boy ventures out only to fall and stop moving without any clear reason. The teachers of the school try to calm the panicked student body with little success. One stabs his own son with a shard of broken glass as a threat to the students if they don not calm down. The question of how long the people in the school can survive also becomes apparent as one of the faculty locks down the kitchens and hoards all the food, taking a student as hostage should someone try to take any.
A quick bit before I get into genre, I found the sound effects in this story to be really interesting. You can see above how sound effects are used as a literal visual noise to create breaks and disturbances in the layout. Both in the image above and below, there are visual effects use to strike fear or foreboding. Though I cannot read them, it's easy to tell that one is some sort of agonized wailing and the other is something heavy and surprising. Manga does this often with sound effects but I particularly like it to build tension in horror.
This week's reading was very similar to the last one. It is a story in which normal characters are put in a situation out of their control. In this case, it was something presumably supernatural. I also did a little bit of research this week to find generally accepted sub-genres of horror. The list I found most relevant can be found here. Genres listed on this site are:
- Supernatural
- Dark Fantasy
- Sci-Fi
- Psychological
- Lovecraftian
- Gothic
- Splatterpunk
- Satanic/religous/occult
- Erotic/ paranormal romance
- Weird fiction
- Speculative fiction
Without delving too far into these, The Drifting Classroom makes itself apparent at supernatural horror. I might also say it is a bit psychological but that is not as prevalent. Last week's entry, Hideout, was certainly psychological and it is interesting to see how these two stories differ. People reacting to high stress situations is definitely an important part of both and also a pattern I am beginning to see in manga particularly which is where I am beginning my exploration.
My jumping off point was the manga Uzumaki by Junji Ito. It just so happens Ito's work was heavily inspired by Umezu's. I will not be doing an entry of Uzumaki simply because I have read it many many times. Though Uzumaki has a lot of body horror, the psychological bits were the parts I found the most frightening. I can see Umezu's iinfluence easily, particularly in the part of volume three where citizens of a trapped town decide to use other people who have become less than human as a food source. Despite all the body horror, I found this part the most terrifying. Below is an excerpt from Uzumaki.
In Hideout, the psychological aspects were much more clear because there was nothing paranormal being dealt with. An already insane character's life being threatened causes a much more heightened and less realistic situation for the reader to put themselves in. Despite the paranormal being involved, the ordinary characters make this a much scarier read for me.
Next week I will be trying to push away from manga for the time being and read some Western comics.
