Horror is a genre that generally does better when it’s low budget

 or at least seems low budget from a 21st century perspective, the Lugosi Dracula and Karlof Frankenstein may have been the most expensive films of 1931 for all I know.  My point is in the Hammer Dracula movies it’s not a bug that all the blood looks obviously like red candle wax, it’s a feature.

Sometimes the superficial expectations of what “high quality” looks like doesn’t actually fit the aesthetic of the kind of story at hand, it’s similar with classic Film Noir.

Big Budget movies about Frankenstein or Dracula just wind up looking like superhero movies using Victorian pulp rather than comic books as their source material.  I enjoy some of those movies, but they aren’t movies I’d recommend watching as Horror.

My reason for this rant here is that every week now when a new HigurashiGou comes out there is somewhere a twitter image comparing an old 2006 Higurashi screenshot to it’s Gou counterpart saying “and you think Deen looked better then Gou”.  And it feels similar to what I ranted about in that old Sakuga post.

Art is subjective.  And Gou is not objectively better because it looks more pristine and shinier and more like an average generic 2010s Anime.  Rather that is exactly why it no longer feels like Higurashi to me.  I enjoy plenty of generic 2010s Anime, but that’s not what I watch Higurashi for.

I don’t want to dunk on Gou, it’s not the worst looking, I can tolerate it more than Pokemon Sun and Moon which I dislike for similar reasons, and the storyline has my attention still.  My point is the old Higurashi worked, it became nigh universally considered the best Horror Anime partly because of the very visual aspects these people are now trying to bury it for.

This is not any kind of Childhood Nostalgia for me, I first watched Higurashi in 2017, my first post about it on this Blog was when I had just first watched it, so not even half a decade yet have I been into it.  What I do have childhood Nostalgia for is Sailor Moon. I'd started seeing it on TV before it was ever on Toonami even.  And I am fine with how Sailor Moon Crystal looks, it also looks very different from the 90s Anime, but it’s not simply trying to force those character designs into the most conventionally modern artstyle, the opposite really, it's trying to be stylistically faithful to a 90s Manga in a way the limitations of 90s Anime couldn't.  

But perhaps a more apt comparison is Fate/Stay Night another Visual Novel adapted by Deen in 2006 and then later by a more "respectable" studio with "seemingly" more budget put into the Animation.  Fate/ has horror elements but that's not it's primary appeal.  So yes for Fate/ the Deen Anime is almost unwatchable to me while UFOTable is in every way an improvement.  But the reason Deen's style didn't suit Fate/ as well is because Fate/ is meant to feel Epic and Mythical rather then Spooky.