Why do some girls become sparkly and adorable when they transform, while others turn monstrous or grotesque? In Japanese pop culture, the magical-girl boom and the horror boom have repeatedly risen side by side. Kumiko Saito explores how both genres tap into different forms of social anxiety–especially anxieties about girlhood, the body, and changing identities–and thereby reveals how cuteness and the grotesque at opposite ends of the spectrum are deeply interconnected within the same pop-culture imagination.