The Heroic Journey

After re-reading the Hobbit, I had the opportunity to really understand the beauties the story has to offer. First, I wanted to talk about the development of Bilbo Baggins and his role in this story. Ok, so who is Bilbo Baggins? He is the hobbit that is afraid of what the world has to offer outside of his home. After being visited by a wizard named Gandalf who wants to take Bilbo on an adventure, Bilbo reluctantly declines the offer due to being afraid of what is outside of his hobbit hole. I think this says a lot about Bilbo, its makes him really relatable and seem real. This amazing character is afraid of what the world has to offer and doesn’t want to find out. Later into the story Bilbo really leads this group through the adventure, when the others are down and not knowing what to do he makes the group decision. It is a huge improvement in responsibility and matureness; Bilbo becomes the biggest impact for the group where at the beginning he showed lots of weakness. The biggest scene that defines Bilbo is when they find the cave with all the gold and the big dragon, Smaug. I think this book has a really interesting hero setup, we learn about the hero’s week side immediately. Bilbo is small, scared, timid, and afraid of the big world. We know he wants adventure, but is afraid of commitment and what the world has to offer.

The way Bilbo’s character develops as a hero can be related heavily to a general hero layout. The hero is usually a underdog, or someone has a big problem that they are usually afraid of or not ready to face. An example that I have is the main character from Jaws, he is in this place were true horror and fear are. He is pushed to his limit when he has to conquer his fear of the sea, by going on with two other people to kill the huge shark. The hero is usually pushed into doing something they know they must do, but are reluctant to do it till its something they cant run from any more. Once they finally face their fear and conquer the task, that’s when we really see these characters develop into the heroes we see them to be.

J horror why are you so scary!

After many years of terrible pop scare and cheap gag horror films, its time to look back and truly understand the birth of this beautiful genre. Some of the best horror films were getting made several years before Japan or China took from us, we were making movies like Night of the Living dead by George Romero, and Alien by Ridley Scott. Most of these stories were driven by pure fear and had a lot to do with what was being influenced at the time in modern culture. Alien for example, was around the time of the Vietnam War where we knew we weren’t winning and most people were against us being over there. Now this is a stretch, but I believe Alien had a lot to do with this fear of something we cant escape and is going to kill us eventually. The reason Alien was so terrifying was solely based around the fact that we couldn’t win, and escaping is impossible. Anyways, the movies America was making at this time were heavily influencing the Japanese into making films like, the Grudge, The Ring, and Pulse.

After this weeks work, I can safely say Japanese horror is terrifying, they have taken our means of horror and totally manipulated it into something we would never do. They take the psychological side of horror where the unknown is our worst fear. In the movie Pulse there is a scene where the main character is found wondering around the city trying to get answers about this place that is the forbidden room, most people in their right minds would find this terrifying, but he continues on and finds a door with red tape all the way around the door. He is mystified about this door and something tells him to open it, when he gets inside he walks down these stairs, and walks down a long hallway where at the end there is a couch and mural with bright red marks are all over it. He is confused and turns around to leave and sees a figure at the end of the hallway where he walked from. He panics and jumps behind the couch before the figure makes it to him. He is looking from underneath the couch and we see nothing until the very end when the face starts to slowly lean over the couch and it cuts to the next scene! That seems to be very stereotypical of Japanese horror though. Darkness covering the beast and we aren’t allowed to fully understand it. I think that makes the story a lot more suspenseful and terrifying, where most American horror films are scary based off jump scares, gore, violence, and cheap storytelling.

To say the least Japanese Horror has truly inspired me, I love the whole world of literature and media and highly recommend others to read further into the folklore of the creatures they show in their story telling.

Vampires come in all sizes

After reading Anne Rice’s Interview with a vampire, I feel I can say that the pop culture vampires are totally different then the way they started. Anyways, in this blog post I wanted to talk about the social understanding of vampires and some good examples of famous work.

There are certain rules and understanding that vampires have that they must abide by, I think the most understood one is they must drink blood to stay healthy and young.  Being immortal makes them older which in return makes the vampire really powerful. Vampires are photo or mirror sensitive, so they wont show up if you try to get a quick shot of one, but by far my favorite rule is the vampire must be invited in your home before they can come in. The idea of that is so unsettling, you have to basically accept this devil because he tricked you into thinking he or she is something they are not. These rules where established early on with some really popular and powerful works such as Dracula and Nosferatu.

Tod Browing introduced this creature in the early 1900’s with a title called Dracula. This is the first time where the vampire is really seen in our culture. There are old writings of creatures that are life sucking and evil that we could compare this creature too. The vampire is such a interesting idea, a beast that is virtually un killable that haunts you and wants to slowly get closer to you till he or she sucks your blood is so terrifying. Dracula was the birthplace of the vampire culture, but not long after Tod released this movie to the world, a movie by Nosferatu was introduced. Nosferatu was a totally different, but at the same time totally relevant. Actually so relevant Tod and his wife sued the director of Nosferatu and had all the copies burned, we are lucky to still have this movie in our lives due to hidden copies spread throughout Europe. Nosferatu was not as pretty as the Count, he was tall, disgusting and basically resembled a rat.

Some modern day films that took the origins and manipulated them into what people associate with vampires are Twilight and true blood; while these have good characteristics of vampires I think a great example is Byzantium. This movie really embraces important roles from Anne Rice, where the vampires have real emotion and moral, and even the vampire needing companionship and love. The movie is about two sisters who are moving in between towns in search of money and hopes of finding somewhere they can live happily as vampires.

I think as a culture we are moving on from the vampire phenomenon, but I'm excited to see what what pop culture will do to this genre in the future when we bring it back.