Lessons of the Gothic: The Supernatural (A Wild Sheep Chase)

     In the horror genre, there is always some character or entity that is supernatural, be it monsters, ghosts, or superhuman. To create a supernatural character we first have to ask ourselves... what is natural and why does the character need to be supernatural? Natural is our average, our baseline to judge from. We can then add (or sometimes subtract) traits to create a supernatural character. Adding to the norm creates contrast and the higher the contrast between characters is, the more interest we can generate, this is why we create supernatural characters. I'll explain how and why a few supernatural characters from three different books were implemented.

     In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Monster is the supernatural character. To make the patchwork creature make enough physical sense, Shelley created a logic for Frankenstein to follow. The science he used to reanimate the body requires that the body be much larger than normal to handle the treatment. This made his body a gigantic 8 feet tall with superhuman strength. Not only is the Monsters life supernatural but so is his body. The extraordinary scenes of the Monster speeding away in a rowboat or quickly climbing cliff faces suddenly doesn't seem unbelievable. Because they are extreme actions, we find them much more interesting than if the climber or rower were an average person.

     In Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, the vampires are incredibly fast, super strong, immortal, incredibly persuasive, and hyper-beautiful. They embody everything a person would ever want to be but at a cost. They can't stay out during the day and have to feed on humans. They are exiled from the life of a normal human.  The vampires power is incredibly enticing even though morbid. We want their power and in turn, find them incredibly more interesting than any human could be. Although we can't just give a character an incredible amount of superhuman power and not have a downside, the character will seem overpowered. If a character is overpowered we won't believe that they have any real conflicts that they couldn't handle. This ruins the believability of conflict. Imagine if Superman didn't have a weakness, he would be undefeatable and any story created with his character would lack conflict to drive the plot.

     In Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase, the unnamed protagonist's girlfriend has extraordinary ears. She is a very bland normal looking girl with nothing special about her when her ears are covered, yet when she shows her ears she becomes hyper-beautiful. She also has minor clairvoyance, knowing about what a phone call will be about and when it will take place before it happens. In general, A Wild Sheep Chase is extremely flat throughout the book. The extraordinary characters are what keeps our attention. Their strangeness and foreign abilities keep us tied to the book regardless of how flat the story it.

     Each of these books implements multiple elements of the supernatural to create interest by sustaining contrast with the established norm. We can use the supernatural as a device to create interest in our own stories. All we have to do is establish a norm and then depart from it. Keep the supernatural in mind the next time you create a character. If you feel like your character is normal and bland, establish a normal and then add something extraordinary. In animation, we want to avoid creating films that could be shot as live-action films and create works that could only work in animation.




Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, et al. Frankenstein: annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds. The MIT Press, 2017.


Rice, Anne. Interview with the vampire. Ballantine Books, 1977.

Murakami, Haruki, and Alfred Birnbaum. A wild sheep chase. Vintage Books, 2002.