One of my favorite animated horror sequences comes from a forgotten 2010 Gainax series called Hanamaru Kindergarten. The tenth episode’s ending sequence tells the stand-alone story of the show’s protagonist, a kindergartener named Anju, who from the back of a bike sees a mysterious house populated by rabbits and is drawn into a series of horror vignettes. We’re given several quick references in succession that no kindergartener could ever hope to recognize: The Exorcist, The Shining, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Anju escapes to the other side, the rabbits receding to become a distant memory. But then it’s revealed that the teacher giving her a ride is in fact a vampire! Horror of horrors!
Storyboarded and directed by Masahiko Murata, who directed this year’s To Your Eternity, this sequence works on several levels. It’s a love letter to cinematic horror, cramming in as many references as the staff could fit into a minute and a half. It realizes those influences in a loose and cartoony style that still captures horror’s expressionist appeal. Finally, it successfully grounds itself in the perspective of Anju, a kindergartener to whom everything happening here might be nothing but a faintly remembered dream later in life. The sequence resembles the nightmare of a child, plunging its heroine into fragmented scenarios from which there is no explanation or escape. Despite having never watched Hanamaru Kindergarten, I find this sequence deeply creepy and nostalgic. After all, serial killers, houses of rabbit people, and other creatures of the night are statistically rare; but who hasn’t been a terrified little kid at one point?
Another key element of this sequence: it’s short. At just 90 seconds long, this ending sequence packs in more unnerving atmosphere and scares than you’d find in many “horror” anime several times the length. I’d personally even rank it over some full-length horror dramas. So what gives?
When it comes to horror, a shorter length can actually be an advantage. It’s no coincidence that for centuries, horror literature consisted of short stories rather than novels and films rather than TV shows. It’s just that much easier to build and release tension when you have your audience trapped within a limited space, wholly subject to your whims. In recent decades, authors like Stephen King figured out how to successfully produce long-form horror narratives and rode that innovation toward popular success. But these projects work in part because they combine horror with other elements, like character drama or mystery. Pure horror itself remains tough to sustain over a long period without either wearying the nerves of your audience or breaking their trust completely.
Anime has its own tradition of horror “short stories,” from the long-running series Hell Girl to Kenji Nakamura’s bizarre visual experiment Mononoke. Several of these are quite good — I especially love Mononoke, which looks like almost nothing else ever produced. But you don’t need the full length of a 24-minute anime episode to scare somebody — some of the weirdest and most unsettling Japanese animation out there is less than five minutes long. One of my favorite recent discoveries is Eve, a former Vocaloid producer whose YouTube page is full of music videos featuring talented independent animators beloved by Twitter’s sakuga circuit. The spookiest of them by far is 2020’s How to Eat Life, an orange and black fantasia where a boy is pursued through a city where time is mutable and everybody wants to eat you (and you want to eat everything). Animated by Mariyasu, the film is packed with motifs that appear throughout Eve’s work: giant monsters, doomed cities, and far too many hands and eyes. There’s a new fixation on cannibalism that will turn your stomach and an ending that avoids catharsis for something messier and more fraught.
Watching How to Eat Life is like coming in at the climax of a long-running anime series with no other context to understand the sensory overload happening on-screen. I can’t help but ask questions about what exactly is happening here: Who is this boy and what is the purpose of his fanged case? What does the city’s giant headless monster want with him? These questions frustrate me, but that’s the point. Like many videos released under the Eve banner, How to Eat Life works because of, rather than in spite of, what it chooses to leave unexplained. Those unresolved associations stick in your craw only to resurface while rewatching the video, while watching other Eve videos, or, worst of all, in your dreams. One of the great advantages of short-form horror is that lack of context, forcing the audience to fill in the blanks themselves. Often what they put in those blanks can be nastier or more personal than anything you’d write in yourself! That’s the fun part.
Another advantage of short-form horror is stylistic: unusual, off-kilter experiences are often more feasible in smaller packages than larger ones. One such example is My Little Goat, a 2018 stop motion short created by Tomoki Misato. It recasts the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats” as a modern tale of surviving abuse and trauma. The goats are adorable, fluffy little creatures, but having been cut out of the belly of a wolf in the opening minute, all of them are burned or even disfigured to varying degrees by the wolf’s stomach acid. The main character, a human boy abducted from his family to replace the goat mother’s missing child, hides under a wool cloak but is feared and distrusted by the other goat children. Despite being adapted from a classic fairy tale, My Little Goat keeps you guessing throughout its eight minutes. Will the goat children descend on our protagonist and tear him to shreds? Will the wolf come knocking on their door? The film ends on a relatively warm and sentimental note, but there are hints that the goat family’s happiness won’t last forever.
My Little Goat could have been told in another format but I’m glad it was done through stop motion. The tactility of the goat puppets heightens both their cuteness and sense of creepiness. The practical transformations and matter-of-fact magic tricks (like the moment a goat abruptly transforms into a picture frame) add to the film’s fairy tale nature. The start-and-stop movement of stop motion itself is a fantastic tool for generating unease, as it has been employed through the career of master director Jan Svenkmajer. But stop motion is both costly and time-consuming, due to the nature of its production. My Little Goat’s length of eight minutes must be a practical measure as much as it is an artistic one. All things said, the film never wears out its welcome and finds new ways to surprise you up to its final seconds. Tomoki Misato must understand the value of punchy, creative shorts, since he rode that very train to success with this year’s hugely popular comedy series Pui Pui Molcar.
Two connections between My Little Goat, How to Eat Life, and Hanamaru Kindergarten’s ending sequence come to mind. The first is a sense of mystery or ambiguity. That the wolf in My Little Goat is both a man and a beast, or that the lore of Eve’s music video universe is suggested rather than explicit. The second is surprise. There was no reason Masahiko Murata had to turn in a horror masterpiece for an ending credits sequence, but that’s exactly what he did. You might ask: Does a credits sequence really count as a film in its own right? Not a traditional one. But then again, like a well-executed jump scare, good horror can appear just when you least expect it. All you need is a good eye.
Do you have a favorite horror anthology? What’s that thing standing behind you? Let us know in the comments!
Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. When he isn't recommending that people check out The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, he sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? You can find him on Twitter at: @wendeego
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