Avatar The Last Airbender’s Spirit World is one of the most terrifying areas in the entire show. Most areas have scary and humorous elements in equal measure, but not the Spirit World. It also has the dubious honor of containing one of Avatar’s most terrifying characters. The character of Koh the Face-Stealer would not be out of place in an Alien movie. Not everything would be at home in the horror genre, but quite a few meet those criteria.
Introducing The Spirit World
The common refrain regarding this is, “But the spirit world is just the afterlife.” While some people reportedly believe this, it really isn’t the case. The spirit world exists as an alternative plane of reality alongside the physical world. In general, it’s not somewhere that people end up, and even that isn’t a given. The main exception to this is the Avatar who can cross between worlds with relative ease. Even though most people can’t go there, the world is very often affected by the spirit world.
What Makes it So Terrifying
The thing that makes the Spirit World so terrifying is the mystery of it all. Compared to the physical world, it’s so far beyond what anyone can comprehend, and you really know nothing. That’s not to say all the scary parts are just in how unknown everything is. A realm like the spirit world wouldn’t be half as scary without some of its horrors. The most notable of these include Koh – a character who literally steals faces from his victims. Another part is angry spirits traveling to the physical world to kidnap people, among other things.
The Solstice
One place where the non-interaction isn’t completely true is around the solstices. This is a time of the year when the spirit world and physical world partially intertwine. It remains an important part of how the two realms interact with each other. During these times, it becomes much easier to cross between the two realms. Also, certain rituals involving contacting spirits can only be performed during the solstice.
Most Notable Creatures
We’ve already gone over Koh the Face Stealer, but there are a few other characters and locations. The most notable location is called The Fog of Lost Souls, a prison for souls. This location is interesting in that it is both a location and a spirit. The fog has the ability to drive humans mad to prevent them from escaping. The area could certainly serve as an appropriate prison for certain individuals in the series. Since humans don’t visit often, things like this rarely happen. As a result, the area is likely to be mostly a feature of the landscape.
Final Thoughts
The polite way to describe the spirit world is that it’s really confusing and makes no sense. At the same time, large parts of it, both spirits and locations, are utterly terrifying. A large part of this is how humans interact with a fundamentally nonhuman environment. Much of that world is not made for humans in many ways. That’s a large part of what made that particular realm so terrifying. Being a human in that world is not what one would call a fun time.
At its simplest level, the spirit world is just an alternate reality to the physical one. It’s not exactly a vacation destination so most people never see the spirit world. Outside of some very specific exceptions, visitors from the physical to spirit world are exclusively the Avatar. This makes having an angry spirit drags a human into the spirit world quite petrifying to experience. Luckily, most people won’t have to have that experience.
