Paulo Seabra

Horror should be surreal. Horror is that moment when things cease to make sense, it's that moment in a story when what ought to happen doesn't and what ought not to happen does. And that, perhaps most of all, is why I find Junji Ito to be such a master of horror, and of course, a great inspiration in my own writing. His artwork is insanely creative and detailed, any brief search of his name will likely be nausea or nightmare-inducing if you've never heard of him before, or even if you have. His work is almost simple in its conception in the sense that he starts with everyday objects or events but then reworks them somewhere in his bizarre imagination so as to come up with something incredibly twisted. And while his imagery is indeed brilliant, or brilliantly bizarre, I find that the other great aspect of his work is a kind of pervading sense of doom and helplessness, some kind of dark energy that fuels the world in which his characters live, a world they could never hope to...

This movie isn't particularly well-liked, that much is no secret. People seem to dislike how odd and bizarrely subdued it is, especially considering the explosive nature of its titular superhero. In a nutshell, people find this movie boring. The criticism I most often hear is that it is essentially a very pretentious take on the Incredible Hulk, an ego-driven attempt to come up with some deep psychological meaning behind a green giant who smashes things. And it's tempting to agree, in a sense it's tempting to brush it off as pretentious and conclude that a film about the Hulk that fails to deliver two action-packed hours is an automatic failure. But of course, I disagree. Even when I was a kid and went into the cinema with my limited knowledge, but great appreciation, of the comics, I never saw the Hulk as a jolly green giant. At one point, the character was seen as a mere physical manifestation of Bruce Banner's repressed anger awakened by gamma radiation, but eventual...

Arthur Fleck was a good man. Or at least he was one at some point. He genuinely believed in his life's mission of bringing joy and laughter to the world. Thing is though, he was born into a broken world. And since he wasn't gonna be the one to fix it, he would have tried his best to make people's lives just a little bit better... But the world wasn't interested. Nobody cared. And more than the hatred, more than the pain and mockery, that is the true punishment – the indifference. But still, Arthur tried what he little could. If the world hated him, then maybe there was something wrong with him, maybe they were right to abuse him, he had to have done something to them, otherwise they simply wouldn't have treated him that way. Isn't that what Alyosha says when Ilyusha throws rocks at him and bites his finger until it draws blood? Isn't assuming one's own faults the christian way? And even if the abuse was carried out for no reason I suppose one still ought...

Berserk is amazing, there's just no way around it. I read the manga twice and will most certainly read it at least once more when it is finally completed in 2097... Though like everyone else, I initially thought the original anime was insufficient. The show spent hours with these characters, building a world in which reality as we know it still applies, only for it to be insanely flipped in the end, leaving no possible escape for our protagonist, Guts. It was only when I read the manga that I began to see the whole story differently, both in philosophical terms, that is to say, the underlying meaning of its world, as well as in psychological terms, that is to say, the personality and mental state of its complex characters. Comparatively to the manga, the story depicted in the original anime is of course reduced to the Golden Age Arc almost in its entirety, as well as two short snippets of the Black Swordsman Arc, one of those snippets being the very first episode, and the second s...