in a comment over in the “the wicker man/spirited away” thread mark posted some interesting stuff about more “amoral” japanese horror vs. the christian ethic of the average american horror film. i think this might deserve its own thread and so am cutting and pasting the relevant portion of mark’s comments here.
What I did discover that interested me was the lack of morals of the spirits and whom they choose to reward and punish. This didn’t come up much in Spirited Away – for example the girl’s parents are turned into pigs not out of some god’s whim, but b/c they dared to eat food that belonged to someone else. They “sinned.†In the Japanese ghost story books I read, it seemed punishments were meted out for no good reason; that the spirits were simply mischievous, weren’t judging based on sin, and in some cases couldn’t even be classified as “thinking†(which reminded me of the Cthuhlu mythos, where the malevolence is pure, and the monsters aren’t even really capable of rational thought.)
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