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Looking for some psychological horror this Halloween? The dystopian tale of Everything is Fine is a perfect webtoon to start with.
The horror genre has expanded beyond simply including jump scares and gore in its stories. One of the medium’s more terrifying forms is psychological horror, which may be much more subtle but is no less scary, and Everything Is Fine, created by Mike Birchall, is a webtoon everyone should be on the lookout for.
If you look on the cover page in Webtoon, you might mistakenly think it’s a cute story about cats — in reality, it’s so much more terrifying. Here’s why Everything Is Fine is a must-read on Halloween this year.
What Is Everything is Fine About?
Set somewhere in a nice and peaceful neighborhood, a couple named Sam and Maggie live with their dog Winston. On the outside, everything looks normal — except, Sam and Maggie aren’t quite normal. Everything from the neck down looks like a man and a woman but instead of human heads, they have enormous cat heads. It’s never explained why the characters look like this and is simply accepted as the norm, making it deeply unsettling.
And that’s only the beginning. Reading on, you discover everything is decidedly not fine in Everything is Fine. They pointedly ignore the fact that Winston has been dead for a long time. Seemingly innocuous and joking statements carry a dark undertone: One wrong step and Sam and Maggie’s lives are in danger.
Everything is Fine is a 1984 Webtoon
The Everything Is Fine webtoon has some similarities to another dystopian novel: George Orwell’s 1984, a novel where society is being led by a mysterious leader named Big Brother. The governing body is known as the Party that uses a variety of surveillance methods to keep a close eye on every citizen, from two-way telescreens to hidden microphones. But the most dangerous of all is the Thought Police, who punish those whose thoughts do not align with the political ideal of Ingsoc.
That’s exactly what happens in Everything Is Fine. There are cameras outside and although it’s not explicitly shown, it’s clear that Sam and Maggie have to be careful how they act in their own home. Their perspectives are being controlled so they see what the system wants them to see. Their emotions are repressed to the point where things that should be upsetting are met with only bland interest.
There’s also a character named Charlie who, like Winston in 1984, tries to rebel against the system. He builds a place in his house to escape from the watchful eyes of the surveillance cameras and his neighbors, trying to find a way to help people like Maggie break out of the system’s control.
In 1984, when the Party finds someone who poses a potential threat to Ingsoc, they’re secretly killed and erased from society, becoming “unpersons.” What happens to Winston is much worse: he gets dragged to Room 101, where he is tortured to the point that he betrays his lover and declares his love and devotion to Big Brother.
What happens in Everything Is Fine isn’t so different. Anyone who is deemed to be a rebel conspiring to “undermine the optimal functions of society” is deemed “red-status.” Besides their eyes turning red, the individual appears to suffer immense torture of reliving their worst memories. Once they’re red-status, nobody is supposed to acknowledge they ever existed.
Why You Should Read Everything is Fine
The drawings are simple, but this only adds to how disturbing the story is. One of this webtoon’s most terrifying aspects is how there are scenes where one character says something ominous and, because of their cat head, their expression remains completely unchanged with only a slight shadow casting on their face.
What makes Everything Is Fine so good is how subtle everything is. There’s such a disquieting nature about the story that makes readers uncomfortable, paralleling the experiences Maggie is feeling in the webtoon as well. Everyone knows there’s something wrong and things aren’t as fine as they seem on the outside, but nobody can really pinpoint what it is exactly. With so much mystery surrounding who is behind the totalitarian system and whether or not Maggie and Sam will break out of it, it’ll be a while before everything will truly be fine.
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