Tales of the Black Freighter

(2009) ****

I really didn't prepare properly for Horrorthon this year, and when October rolled around I'm ashamed to say I had a couple of non-horror Netflix discs gathering dust in my house. I was sending them out when I paused and kept this one, realizing it fit the bill perfectly. The envelope said it was an hour and forty minutes long, so I thought it was a bit of good luck.

Well, not exactly. I guess the whole disc was that long, including the fake documentary Under The Hood, but Tales of the Black Freighter itself only clocked in at 22 minutes. Whatever! HandsomeStan broke that mold already, I'm clearly not in it for the numbers this year anyway, and I don't think anyone is going to get abusive about screening short choices. Just be glad I did send back Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

For the handfull of you who don't know already, this story first appeared as a comic-within-a-comic, being read by a side character in the original Watchmen graphic novel. Panels and narration of the pirate story provided wry counterpoints for what was going on in the world of the larger story, because Alan Moore is so very clever. And because Zack Snyder is so very clever, he made this short animated feature happen in conjunction with the Watchmen movie coming out.

It's the story of a ship's captain whose vessel has just been destroyed by the demon pirates aboard the titular Black Freighter, a boat so steeped in supernatural evil that its very hull is made from the bones of dead men. The hapless survivor is washed up on an island along with the bodies of his crew, and makes a desperate gamble to reach his home and loved ones before the Black Freighter gets there and kills them all.

That gamble is a raft made from his shipmates' bodies, and the true success of this cartoon as a horror story happens right there. Not one opportunity is missed to depict the disgusting horror available in a pile of human corpses. They expand like balloons, burst with noisome gases, and spew vile ichor onto the protagonist as he moves them around. The ordeal's effect on the captain's mind is a key feature to this story, and the appalling grotesquery of these scenes makes that quite believable.

I can't expand further without giving the game away, but I will mention that I've been curious about the possibilities of animated horror since my first 'thon. In 2004 I screened a Japanese animated movie called Legend of the Demon Womb, a big player in the anime subgenre charmingly known as "tentacle rape." While it fit the bill for animated horror, I wasn't really drawn to screen more of it. I think there's a fair amount of anime horror out there, but for Horrorthon purposes I'm more interested in offers from other countries besides Japan.

I've certainly found that in Tales of the Black Freighter, although I wish it were four times longer than it is. If I were really a jerk, I'd watch certain segments of Heavy Metal and count those too. Where are your scary cartoons, men of the West?