say geo sabay is 13 years old and spending a sunny afternoon hiking in the mountains with his extended family his grandparents his aunt and uncle his cousin she groom and his mother Seiko as the family make their way up the cliff Oh cives cousin pretends to shove him from the trail only for Seiko to grab him panics as she clings to her son the rest of the family laughing at her overprotective nature after a little while oh sub a and she grew break off from the group and begin to explore a nearby forest and discover
a small clearing leading out onto a vast ravine but as they do OSA BAE's mother emerges from the forest behind them warning the boys to step back from the cliff but she guru ignores her only to lose his balance teetering over the edge of the threshold but just before he can fall he's saved by OSA BAE's mother clutching her nephew closed her chest and for a moments as strange quiet and falls over the clearing as she guru pulls away and stares into always mother's eyes a look of terror spreads across his face and he utters
a single frightened word auntie Oh sube paralyzed in silent horror watches his cousin's body vanished over the edge of the cliff his terrified eyes slowly moving to his mother before she turns to him and just smiles this is Chino Adachi or trailer blood a story by Shuzo oh she me and published in big comic superior and it's horrifying this is the kind of story that creeps inside of you and whispers that the world is a more frightening place than we'd ever liked to admit as OSA Bey is forced to live with the knowledge of what
his mother has done and in fear of what she might do next in a story that conveys the simple human horror that can lie in the people around us buts maybe you don't like horror maybe what I just described sounds like a very very bad time and you know what while in a way you are not wrong you are also the person I'm making this video for see I think to a lot of people the horror is still seen as a cheaper or less than form of entertainment something designed to scare and startle like a
rickety amusement park ride and hey I recently watched a film about a haunted elevator I love me some good popcorn horror but the idea that that's all horror can be is what I think keeps a lot of people away from the genre and that's a viewpoint I've really tried to fight back on with these videos and so before we dive into a trail of blood I first want to answer a little question and that is why horror when you're ready peel it back there are two instincts that have kept the human race going lost and
fear lust has kept us existing but it's fear that's kept us alive without fear we'd never have escaped our natural predators or devised the means to overcome the fear is an intrinsic part of being human and all that horror is is the commodification of that fear since humans have emerged as the undisputed champions of the food chain our relationship with fear has changed a lot outside some very unusual and specific circumstances most people will go through their lives without ever having to confront the pure terror of a natural predator and while people not getting eaten
is mostly a very good thing it does mean that we've lost touch with an ancient and intrinsic part of who we are and what horror does is let us reconnect to that part letting us discover things about ourselves in a way that no other type of entertainments really can specifically what I want to talk about today however is horror through imagery horror can be incredibly powerful just through a still image and you can see this throughout history in any number of on settling classical paintings or even in the old medieval sea maps which featured detailed
drawings of horrific sea creatures that potentially lay in wait in the cold darkness of the ocean my extensive research shows that these creatures did not actually exist but the reason they were there was likely to frighten sailors in order to keep them away from more mundane dangers like unknown or turbulent waters possibly my favorite example of historical horror based imagery however are the 15th and 16th century paintings of hell and particularly from the artists Hieronymus Bosch and I love these paintings I mean just imagine that you are a medieval farmer you've spent your days toiling
in the fields tending to your livestock never having laid eyes on anything that wasn't part of the natural world and then just imagine the sheer mind-numbing terror you'd feel upon seeing these paintings how much more frightening and real the existence of a horrifying afterlife would become in that moment her imagery even had a boom in the 50s and 60s appearing on the cover of pulp our magazines and in the pages of Western horror comics a movement that was unfortunately stamped out by massive public and academic backlash something that I feel that Western horror comics have
only really started to recover from in the last two decades but where you can find horror imagery still alive and thriving is in the pages of Japanese manga like the u.s. 50s Japan had a massive horror comics boom driven by titles like Kotaro of the graveyard introducing audiences to the creatures of Japanese folklore but without the same conservative backlash that scene was able to grow and thrive and produce many amazing horror authors like Kaz Oh Amazo Hoshino or sewer hero maro all with their own distinctive brand of visual horror and this is something I love
about horror manga I think horror is that it's best when it's intense and personal and because manga can be produced by a single person at a relatively low cost at least compared to games or movies it means that there's more room for weird experimental personal kinds of horror letting each author carve out their own distinctive front fear take one of the all-time best Genji ito for example he's a master of distortion taking things from the natural world and corrupting them house cats aquatic life the human body the horror of his images coming from both the
prospect of being faced with these hideous unknowable creatures but also becoming them the feeling of our own bodies warping and distorting and slowly turning against us trapping us in prisons of our own flesh that is a very specific kind of fear but compare that to the images of koji Matsumoto whose illustrations capture the simple morbid horror of encountering creatures far larger and more dangerous than you are creating these nightmarish images where humanity is no longer the apex predator but small weak and frightened both these artists are incredible at creating strong visual horror but the kind
of horror those images convey is totally different and so with that in mind I want to know us the question what is the horror of trail of blood and the answer to that is the simple intimate horror of human emotion a lot of Ashima stories focus on emotionally vulnerable people trapped in awful situations that slowly push them towards breaking please like inside mari a body swap story about a young college dropout who awakens one morning to find himself in the body of a high school girl but where the scenario is usually used for romantic hijinks
inside mari is a disturbing look at identity obsession and the feeling of losing yourself in another person and this is a common theme with a she me he writes about characters going through disturbing frightening changes whether it's direct allegories for puberty like his vampire manga happiness or more subtle series like a Ohana flowers of evil the story of a teenaged love triangle that gradually spirals its characters into darker more violent versions of themselves I had to cut I had a big paragraph about flowers of evil because it didn't flow with the rest of the video
but it's really good and you should read it and not watch it and okay and what makes these stories so disturbing is how amy is able to take these intimate frightening moments in people's lives and trap the reader in them making us feel everything these characters would feel and to show you what I mean here I want you to imagine that you are a small child walking in the park with your mother but your little legs can't keep up with her and she shouts at you to hurry it up and she drifts further and further
away and begins to disappear over the horizon you call out to her only for her to stop and look at you like this fear is gonna hit everyone differently but when I read this panel it filled me with what I can only describe as sheer pants terror and what makes this scene so frightening is hello she me visually traps us in this moments the entire scene unfolding from first-person forcing us to embody this small child meaning that this first page carries the uncomfortable sinking feeling of losing your parents at a supermarket but then when we
turn the page and reveal this furious face contorted in haze this woman isn't staring at a character in the story she's staring at us and it's frightening but it's this kind of subtle visual horror that makes a chemise work so disturbing there's this unsettling duality to a lot of Oshima's illustrations he's an incredible painter able to create works of real breathtaking beauty but it's like there's always this other side to his paintings always some little visual aspect that feels strange and wrong a young girl gazing down to the viewer her cheek speckled with droid blood
a woman staring at you whispering something to a child against a flesh-colored background a young face covered in shadow melting into the distorted darkness that surrounds it and a lot of it's so subtle I could see people not finding these images frightening but to me what's creepy is a lot of them feel normal until you just stare at them for a while and slowly something unseemly begins to creep to the surface it's these images that are the building blocks to Oshima stories whether he's drawing a small town at sunset the exterior of a family home
or just a figure standing in a doorway he knows how to create panels that quietly whisper to you that something here is very wrong but it's more than just these images being spooky by themselves as its through these panels the trail of blood builds its tension most cares in horror come in two parts the gradual build of tension say like a character wandering through a spooky house and the release of that tension with an actual fright the reveal of something supernatural or a serial killer or whatever these cycles of tension and fries are the basic
building blocks of horror and how a piece of media handles them is going to define a lot about the kind of fear it creates and this is where trail of bloods distinct emotional brand of fear really shines when trail of blood first released it was advertised as a new series full of chilling silence and what they meant by this is that so much of trail of blood is taken up by quiet empty space pages passing whether it would anything really happening but because of chemise panels are so good at conveying this uncomfortable uncanny feeling when
it combines them into pages it creates this creeping atmosphere of dread focusing on the tiny details of a scene but in doing so grinding the pace of the story to a crawl and forcing us to experience every little sensation and emotion each tiny jolt of panic and every little twinge of fear which is why some of the most disturbing moments of trail of blood can be as subtle as a hand clasping over a shoulder a startled terrified glance or an eye peering through an open doorway it's not uncommon for multiple pages to pass without a
word of dialogue or anything significant even happening and it can be agonizing but it's that tension that traps you in these scenarios forcing you to feel everything that these characters feel but what's so uniquely frightening about trail of blood is how it pays off that tension with the freights themselves frights that often consist of nothing more than the social intimate horror of the human face like a lot of things with trail of blood that might not sound terrifying straightaway but think of it like this a person's face is the most expressive part of them studies
have identified seven core facial expressions that occur naturally from birth across all races and cultures meaning we are biologically hardwired to express ourselves through our faces the minut folds were skin and subtle movements of our muscles indicating not only how we feel but who we are and whether we should be treated with trust caution or fear that's why it's so important for artists to have a solid understanding of the language of the human face and how to use it as in the right hands it can become a really powerful storytelling tool conveying fictional creations as
people who feel and think letting us empathize with them on a primal emotional level this is something that Oshima is really incredible at he's insanely skilled at drawing the human face and able to capture all these subtle flashes of emotion that can feel so genuine and chilling he's able to give characters the glow of someone who's just fallen and lone for the first time but also the paralyzing terror of someone who's just witnessed something unspeakable even just little obscured glimpses of his characters facial features are so adept at communicating their state of mind that it's
difficult not to empathize with them not to feel their fear their sorrow and their rage and where this becomes a tool for horror is when it's used as a window into who these people are revealing things that are awful and frightening for example after witnessing what happened on the cliff oh savais is racked not only with horror at what his mother has done but guilts having lied to protect her boats there's also the small issue that OSA BAE's cousin actually survived brain damage and comatose but a lie but as he begins to recover the truth
starts to seep out Rosso Bay's aren't slowly piecing together what really happened and so when one day she appears in front of us of a school offering him a lift home it's already kind of horrifying the two writing in silence against a creeping sense of dread until finally she casually confronts oso Bay about what really happened and when a survey lies again she looks at him like this this is the face of a woman who's just realized her sister-in-law tried to kill her son and that her nephew is lying to her about it and it's
horrifying this is how trail of blood scares you it creates these disturbing frightening scenarios building the tension of these scenarios through its panels and then crescendoing that tension with these horrifying revelations about its characters conveyed purely through their facial expressions and it's this cycle of horror that makes trail of blood so unique and uncomfortable and there's one more instance of this I want to talk about but this time one that touches on the core horror of trail of blood it starts with OSA Bay returning home from school but as he does he hears angry shouting
coming from the back of his home and when he draws closer he finds his parents arguing his father furious as to why psycho hasn't visited her nephew in the hospital and storms away Saeko falls to her knees silence but after a moment she begins murmuring whispering something about wanting it all to disappear but then begins speaking in a strange voice as if to a child waving her hands in the empty air as if stroking someone and holding them telling them to put on their shoes and that it's time to go say she realizes with horror
that she's speaking to a delusional version of him as a child and as he peers into her eyes he sees this [Music] this is the face of a woman lost in a blissful frightening delusion one whose grasp on reality has slipped and they have now fallen into a deep violent madness and now there's no telling what they might do to her family to her husband to even her own son and it's all there plain to read on her face there's no pleasant way to put this but trail of blood is a story about a mother
slowly going insane and potentially hurting her own child and that's a subject so taboo that precious few pieces of horror ever even go near it and reasonably so parents harming their children is a deeply upsetting and unnatural concept and if you're sensitive to material like that I think very carefully about whether this is a story you want to experience as the reason I spend so much of this video talking about how the horror is conveyed visually is because of how intimate and frightening it makes it feel and particularly around psycho OSA BAE's mother is terrifying
easily one of the most frightening characters I've ever experienced in horror and so much of that is how she's presented to us like a mother early chapters are littered with panels and scenes where we view her from first-person as she watches us from the edge of a classroom looks down on us as we hold her hand or as she peers deep into our eyes filling the page and making it feel like her face is just inches away from our own and it's from that intimate perspective were given is horrifying breakdown of this woman someone who
for years has adored a life she never wanted each passing day pushing her closer towards her breaking point slowly cracking her open and letting something evil and horrifying creep in this is why I think the moment on the cliff is so horrifying it's a moment where for a seconds oh so BAE this young kid sees what his mother really is he sees that the person who has moved and protected him his entire life is also something terrifying and hateful and there's a real pure horror in that moments but there's also something kind of human there
too most people spend their childhood idolizing their parents seeing them as these infinite heroic protectors who will set everything right but as we get older we realized that they are not that that they are just people people who are as flawed and fallible and capable of evil as anyone else and that's a pretty frightening realization for most people and all trail of blood does is it takes that feeling and drags it into a searing horrifying life and in doing so exposing it confronting us with the uncomfortable truth that the people we love are just people
and that in them lies the capacity for great evil that's why I'd love horror it can be silly and fun and cathartic but it can also let us engage with the darkest parts of being human and in doing so help us understand them that's why it bothers me when I feel like there's still misconceptions about horror if you look at the list of the most profitable films of all time horror or things that are horror adjacent take up nearly half the list and get in the near 100-year long history of the Oscars only six horror
movies have ever been nominated for Best Picture and sure who cares about the Oscars but I do think that disparity shows that to a lot of people horror is still considered cheap or less than but to me the opposites true horror can be anything but distorting reality and breaking taboos it lets us experience existence at its most frightening and in doing so breaking us open and revealing truths like nothing else can and that's what I think a trail of blood does friends thank you for joining me today I hope you had a good time with
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