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Over the past few years, there has been a number of fairly popular "IPs" – a collection of creative works that together form a marketable whole – that have finally escaped the grasp of copyright and entered the public domain. That they have taken so long to get to this point is worrisome and not ideal, but it is not the point of this small bit of writing which I have delayed writing for more than a year; what I would like to discuss is what is being done with this newfound freedom after it has finally been granted to us normal people.
As it turns out, these last few IPs have all more or less met the same first encounter. There's no name for this phenomenon, so I'm describing it in plain language: make horror from it. The first thing to do with this new material is to turn it dark and broody and "frighten" (not literally, but that abstract ineffable sense) others.
For various reasons outlined in previous articles I wrote, I find this fairly unsatisfactory and upsetting. There are two particular reasons why this is so: first, I already have a predisposition against horror, so that was never going to work out well for me. The second is that it feels very cheap. All the new IPs that entered the public domain is material suitable for children. The idea as it appears to me is that making it a horror is a basic tactic to create the narrative contrast and effectively create intrigue.
There's probably a third reason why it's done this way: it's also easy. It must be fairly easy to arouse the emotions that horror creates, otherwise it won't be so incredibly popular amongst authors in general. It's possible that it's so easy that such horror can be generated at a press of a button. While not the case for the actual creations created from the IPs mentioned above, the ease to create that scary feeling seems to be just so that the amount of creators wanting to make something like that is high, and so the output in that department is also high. Add on the contrast between the innocent nature of the IP and it just makes it that more enticing.
In the end, horror just has a "low skill floor": it's easy to frighten people and harder to inspire other emotions. As for what to do with this, there doesn't seem to be anything to be done here. It's a natural outcome of the circumstances the world has given us. I don't really like it but there's no particular reason why it should be suppressed. What a shame though; I would have preferred something more interesting.