A while back, kind of around my lowest point in that recent bout of depression, I caught a feature length cartoon, the conclusion to the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, on late at night, completely randomly. Especially as after I didn't understand what I had watched until after extensive reading of backstory and synopsises (synopsii?), looking back I'm surprised I bothered watching it at all. Convoluted and fractured to the point of being postmodern at times (and I usually intensely dislike postmodernism), by all logic I should have flipped channels in the space of a few minutes.

But for some reason, I was riveted. I could hardly take my eyes from it; when my dad came home from the night shift, I haltingly tried to explain what I knew to him, but stopped when I realized how little that was. And yet still I watched it till I was sitting still after the credits were over, struggling to find some meaning that seemed just beyond my reach, or on the tip of my tongue, or whatever. Anyway, so just coming across that little blurb about the director/creator/dude basing it on his experiences with depression, it got me thinking. Maybe this movie was one of this things where the significance of it all isn't really in the surface story so much at all, but in how it hits you in the back of your head. That is, whether by something Freudian or Jungian symbols or whatever system one might want to look at it, maybe I just really identified with not the shallowest aspects of the story but the underlying, between-the-lines stuff that's not readily apparent at all.

Then that got me thinking, maybe that's how the better aspects of the horror genre work - I suddenly want to go pick apart a good King story or go play Silent Hill.

Google + Shakespeare = I really wish I had this while in school