Onryo 怨霊 (Vengeful Spirit)

Onryo 怨霊 (Vengeful Spirit)

The vengeful spirits of the Heike clan

Yokai is a generic Japanese term for spirits, ghosts and other entities that exist in Japanese Folklore. There are many spirits that can be categorised under the word Yokai, including Onryo which when translated means vengeful spirit. I chose to mention Onryo because I feel that it relates closely to my project on urban myths in recent US horror. In the American adaptation of The Ring, the spirit shown, I feel, matches the characteristics of the Japanese Onryo.

The full meaning of Onryo is debated but from the research I have done, I discovered that Onryo is a deceased individual who died as a result of a dramatic or unjust death. The spirit would then show wrath and anger by returning to the real-world in order to cause suffering in revenge of its original death. Many Japanese still believe in such spirits and can be fearful or honourable of them.

Onryo also appears in other stories most notably in Suppon on Onryo which is a story where hundreds of turtles crush a fisherman in revenge for their slaughtering. The onryo spirit is usually represented in stories by natural elements such as animals and natural disasters.

The Sound of Fear

The Sound of Fear- Dan Blumstein

The video that I found focusses on the use of sound in horror films and how it is engineered to cause fear. During the video, Dan Blumstein references marmots (small rodents) and how they use their voices to crate distress calls. He conducted an experiment where he graphed the frequency of the distress calls. After the research experiment, he found that the distress calls were a result of short, high frequency bursts of sound, usually consisting of high pitches. One of the key findings of this experiment is the reaction, he had to the distress calls. Blumstein found that the distress calls cause a fearful reaction from human e.g. dropping the marmot.

To strengthen his findings, Blumstein conducted further research into animal distress calls and graphed the frequency/time results. This exploration found that the data recorded from the marmot distress calls were replicated across other species. The repeated results of non-linear sounds create a fearful reaction in humans because it activates our fight or flight instinct to respond.

These findings were then applied to films and the data showed that across a variety of film genres, horror consistently came out top for its use of frequent non-linear high pitch sounds. A famous example of non-linear sound in horror is in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho shower scene.