I've recently watched the 2023 indie horror movie Stop Motion. Despite the year only being half over, it's shaping up to be one of my favorite horror movies I've watched this year.
The plot revolves around a stop-motion animator who is struggling to cope with the death of her abusive mother. As her mother had previously overseen and controlled every aspect of her film, the animator struggles to find her creative footing after her mother's death, The animator begins to see a young girl who encourages her to craft her stop motion puppets out of increasingly disturbing material, such as mortician's wax and a dead fox. She then begins to envision the villain of her film, the Ash Man stalking her in her real life. We follow her as her creative ambitions send her into madness.
I found the visuals to be the strongest point of the movie, It combines live-action and stop motion in a way you don't see very often, especially in movies aimed at adults.
This really got me thinking. Why aren't stop motion and animation used more in horror movies?
We do have a few horror-adjacent animated movies, but they are mostly targeted at children. Classics like Coraline, Corpse Bride, and Paranorman are all undoubtedly great movies but are definitely targeted at a young audience.
I feel like this is a huge missed opportunity. Animation is such a versatile medium with so much potential. Stop motion especially holds great opportunities for horror storytelling imagery. The way stop motion is animated, with uncanny character designs and jerky movements, is a perfect match for horror storytelling.
Adult animation has become increasingly more accepted and respected in the past fifteen years. Shows like Bojack Horseman and Rick and Morty have been highly acclaimed by critics and audiences alike. However, even with the deeper themes and sensitive portraits of a serious issue that come along with some of them, the vast majority of adult animations are comedies.
In my personal opinion, this is a really unchaste waste of potential. Children's animation comes in a wide variety of stories and genres. There are animated mystery series like Gravity Falls, animated fantasy series like Adventure Time, and animated horror series like Courage the Cowardly Dog. But they are aimed at children.
I can't talk about horror animation without talking about anime. There are so many amazing anime horror series aimed at an older audience. Some of my personal favorites include Another, When They Cry and Elfen Lied. These anime are not only aimed at an older audience but contain dark themes and gory imagery that would be completely unsuitable for children. Yet they are still held in hard regard by the anime community as a whole.
If there are so many successful, well-loved horror anime aimed at an older audience what is stopping Western adult horror animation from being made?
Though the selection of animated horror for adults is scarce, it is not completely barren. There are a few notable adult horror animations that are well worth the watch.
The Mad God is a 2021 Avent Guard adult stop-motion horror film that actually took over thirty years to produce. Mad God is wonderfully strange visuals-wise and has an absurdist plot involving an assassin journeying through the underworld. It feels like a fever dream, Though it is not necessarily my absolute favorite, I think it's well worth watching.
One of my absolute favorite animated horror movies is 2009's 9. 9 is a computer-animated horror/sci-fi extensional film set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans have gone extinct due to a computer gone rough The only hope for life on earth are nine creatures sewn from fabric and they are being killed off one by one by rough robots.
An adult animated horror film that I have not seen yet but I am very excited to watch is 2022's Wendall and Wild. A collaboration between Henry Silick, the director of Coraline, and the legendary Jordan Peel. The story has two entities known as Wendell and Wild, who enlist the help of a thirteen-year-old girl named Kat to bring them into the land of the living, but what Kat wants in return with send them on an unexpected, horrifying journey.
Even with the tremendous inventions that have been made in the realm of animation in the past two decades, animation is still often unfairly labeled as "kid's stuff" by default. Animation is such a versatile medium with near-limitless possibilities that it seems like a waste to confine it to children's media. It holds so much potential when it comes to horror storytelling especially. There are so many more opportunities for creepy and disturbing imagery that would just not be possible using live-action actors.
The success and cult classic status of the animated adult horror films that have been produced, whether they be Western productions or things like Japanese anime, shows there is indeed a market for it and an audience ready to eat it up. If we could only break the stigma of animation being only for kids, we would be blessed with creepy, disturbing, unique, and groundbreaking pieces of horror media that would not have even existed otherwise.
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Wonderful analysis.