In 2007, popular mystery author Kyōgoku Natsuhiko attempted to adapt a collection of random stories known as the Mimi bukuro or Tales Heard into kaidan, tales of the strange and mysterious for today’s readership. The writing experiment ended with Kyōgoku questioning his own writing abilities and publishing his small collection of adapted stories into a book that was not considered very frightening. Although the experiment failed, Kyōgoku’s efforts raise the question, “if not kaidan, what is frightening in the twentieth century?” The reason why kaidan are no longer frightening is because their central characters, yōkai, have been displaced from the horror genre. Today the yōkai that were once popular in the Edo period have been “cutesified” for businesses, films, and children’s shows. What is frightening today is no longer the Edo period monster, but rather aliens, ghosts, scientific monsters, and serial killers that represent a fear of the unknown. While the unknown has been a fear of man since the beginning, how it is symbolized and interpreted changes over time based on society and individual experiences. Chapter one traces the development of yōkai’s transformation from traditional horror story icons to children’s characters and role models. Chapter two analyzes and compares four of the original stories from the Mimi bukuro to Kyōgoku’s adaptation to understand what was scary during the Edo period, and what Kyōgoku deemed frightening in modern times. Chapter three analyzes three different monsters and explains why they were frightening and what problems or unknown situations each monster represented for modern audiences.

Gender representation in the horror genre has many interesting discussions surrounding it through multiple perspectives such as psychoanalysis and culture. This article intends to expand the investigation of how female characters are portrayed in horror games. The research on female representation will investigate the potential connections between horror cinema and horror games in the survival horror game Fatal Frame (2001, Koei Tecmo), the first title of a series that is iconic f0r drawing inspiration from Japanese mythology and horror tropes while simultaneously using a large cast of female characters. To gather information about the audience to support the game analysis, an online survey will be released targeting players of the games. Thereafter, recorded, non-commentary footage of the first game, Fatal Frame (2001), will be observed and textually analysed through a framework with data points, based on the background of psychoanalysis, horror cinema, culture, and game theory.

The aim of this study is to assess to which extent the concept called the final girl can be applied to a character produced outside USA. To achieve this, I have used a Japanese film called Evil Dead Trap (Toshiharu Ikeda, 1988), where I have analyzed the character Nami and her relations to the conventions of the final girl. Some of the more common conventions are that the final girl do not engage in sex or use drugs such as cigarettes. The theoretical framework focuses on identifying and establishing the different conventions of the final girl by using two different researchers and their texts. The state of research was used to place the movie in a historical context. Because of this, the research used focused on Japanese horror cinema from the fifties to the nineties. When the framework was established, an analysis of the final girl was made. Throughout the analysis I saw that, apart from three exceptions, Nami followed the conventions of the final girl. The exceptions were that she did not survive the movie, she took drugs in the form of a cigarette and showed a lack of intellect when they arrived at the military base.