Danmaku is a type of emerging comment prevailing in East Asia. It is submitted by online video viewers and is overlaid on the video in real time. Chinese horror film lovers are particularly fond of using Danmaku. They love to submit thousands of Danmaku at a specific time to cover the scary scene and protect each other. This large-scale collective behavior is frequently happening in Danmaku subcultural community.

Danmaku Protection is a data visualization project that proposes a data-driven approach to dive into this unique collective behavior. A Danmaku analysis engine is built to crawl the data from Chinese Danmaku video platform, distinguish the protective Danmaku, and generate posters to visualize the distribution of Danmaku. With the analyzed Danmaku data, the engine is able to automatically edit a horror film supercut to show the most frightening scenes.

Danmaku Protection provides a reference to horror movie viewers when choosing films. It is also a record of a disappearing, subcultural phenomenon. A lot of excellent horror movies are banned in China due to the Film Censorship, and horror movie fans are facing increasing survival difficulties. Danmaku Protection Phenomenon is a collection of contribution behavior supported by every single community member. It is a co-creation, a celebration of thousands of horror movie fans with a strong sense of virtual community and subcultural identity. However, if the pirated horror movie resource is deleted one day, this captivating co-creation will also be nowhere to be found.