Category: Finished Series: Horror

That is a surprise to see Tomie appear in this series as i originally thought her stories where to be covered in a separate OVA that is to come out. Now out of all of Junji Ito’s creations, Tomie is without a doubt his most Iconic. There are eight Tomie live action movies though their quality seems to be of questionable worth and Tomie has a whole manga omnibus with stories dedicated to her. Her general gimmick is simple, Tomie is a girl that cannot die and men tend to become obsessed with her to a unhealthy degree. Eventually those who encounter Tomie are driven to kill her, by obsession or just Tomie being a bit of a bitch. Then the monstrous nature of her is revealed as her version of immortality is a rather unnerving one. Chop her into two and you will have two Tomies, ingest a part of her and you become Tomie, and even her regeneration can take on nightmarish aberrations of mashed together Tomies. This story of the painter does a good job of showing what she’s all about and her character, namely a desire to immortalize herself despite being actually immortal and how people become obsessed with her. As well as her general manipulative nature and massive vanity. But as far as Tomie stories go this isn’t the strongest as she has better tales. In simple terms Tomie is like a Succubus, it that she leads all that come to love her to hell as they all clamor for her love but she can only love herself.

The second story is the most straightforward story to date with this series as it has a predictable setup. A couple crash in the middle of nowhere, encounter some strange vampire children and take refuge in a castle with a mysterious stranger. The only real inventive part is that there is a strange disease that is turning people into trees that bare fruit that contain blood. The disease ultimately gives an ultimatum, either die and become a blood fruit tree or drink the blood fruit from yourself and become a monster with an unending thirst for blood. And yet again the story ends on a non ending of the most predictable fashion. It isn’t helped that the anime cut out quite a bit from the story, likely to make room for the Tomie story, as there were more scenes involving the vampire children. Even one scene with the vampire children breaking into the mans garden of blood trees only for one of the tree villagers to reveal to a boy that he was his father, just right before the boy disregards him and rips the fruit from his branches. Personally I don’t really see this worth adapting as I would prefer something more haunting like the Hanging Balloons story though I guess this was chosen for timeframe reasons. Not that I expect that story would be given any justice but well…it would give me more to talk about.

Well I don’t know what kind of production trouble hit Deen, but this was the worse animation of this show to date. Honestly this was near the level of just having powerpoint animation as still frames were abundant and any scenes with animation were made far away enough to excuse lacking detail. There is a scene with clowns running on stage and I swear their running animation is literally three frames. So yeah this series has hit a new low despite the stories being relatively interesting. Our first story details a woman with amnesia who has her former fiance attempting to get her to accept his proposal and remember him. However the woman is clearly rattled by the mans strange sickly father and her nightmares involving giant centipedes. The final twist is stranger than her imagination as the man brings her with him to his father’s death bed only to see him getting devoured by some strange centipede creature. Turns out that seeing this creature is what caused her to be traumatised enough to lose her memory and to make matters even more strange the strange caterpillar creature is actually the collective brains of all the man’s ancestors. So it is family tradition that your brains eaten and joined with all the other brains in the centipede creature. Making for some kind of immortality as all the brains ingested appear to still has sentience. Makes for a decent scary story but it does have its share of holes, such as why is it that the man somehow thought she would change her mind on marrying him if she saw the caterpillar creature again. This one also has a non-ending as the woman just gives up on running away and is presumably…forced into the family? Hard to justify why the entire family is on board with the whole centipede eating your brain thing. I mean you can claim insanity but even the insane have some logic.

The second story was on the weird side as the circus has come to town and men from all over come to see the beautiful tightrope walking girl who captivates all that see her. However the show gets progressively more disturbing as the performers each die horribly during their acts.The level of nocalanence the ringmaster presents to each of their bodies getting dragged off stage makes this seem like a common occurrence. Ultimately it’s revealed that the top performer in the circus gets to marry the beautiful tightrope performer and each performer is gearing to win her affection. Though it’s a scam as the ringmaster appears to have some supernatural ability to sabotage performances so they have gruesome results. At the end of it all the ringmaster states that all the performers are dead and asks for volunteers from the audience with the prize of winning the tightrope girl as their bride. I was originally thinking there might be a bait and switch when the tightrope girl started claiming the ringmaster was a demon collecting souls for I thought it was rather on the nose to declare the supernatural entity. If anything I originally pegged the girl as the demon for she’s the one attracted the men to the tent in the first place by walking around town before the show. However it does appear to be that simple and I really question the logic the male characters show here.

I mean it could be there is some sort of spell keeping them blinded with love and stopping them seeing the trick to it all but I don’t think that’s quite the case. I mean the girl straight up tells the trapeze artist, whom she seems to have genuine love for, that if he tries to perform that he will die and the ringmaster has sabotaged the act somehow. But he’s like “No, I will perform perfectly, have no fear my love!”, thus the trapeze breaks and he falls and dies. Almost comical the timing of it. The final clown at the end with his oh so brilliant plan to announce running away from the circus, by shouting it up to the girl while the ringmaster was quite literally right beside him was just…really I am not sure we can blame magic on that level of stupidity. So we are well past the halfway point of this show and we can be pretty sure this is what we are going to get for the remainder. It appears that Junji Ito’s works just are not suited to the animated medium, or at least they won’t be getting a fruitful effort any time in the future. We have an anime for those not particular interested in reading manga but honestly the manga is just the better option as you get these stories with better artwork and more details that the anime cuts out. But I will say that Ito’s work very much is a matter of interesting ideas not quite fleshed out into full stories even in manga form.

This has to be the weirdest episode of this show yet. The first story was rather standard, namely about a record that causes people to become obsessed with it upon listening and seems to lead to the owner’s death. Not much to say about this one as what you see is what you get. I would say the escalation was lopsided as the girl killed her friend over it within minutes of the start of the episode. Which does make it seem like a chunk of the story was missing. And yet again the story just cuts off abruptly without much of a conclusion. The only thing we learn is that the record was somehow made by a singer after she died and the story suggests that it has been passing from hand to hand, killing those it comes into contact with.

Then we have the second story and in this case a large chunk of the story is actually missing. I previously didn’t focus on the adaption of this series much as I have come to believe that even with top tier production values, i don’t think Junji Ito’s stories can really work outside of their medium, at least not without significant adaptation decay. But this is one time were I really think the adaption of this story was mishandled. For some remarkably odd reason they decided to cut out the entire beginning of this story and have it start right in the middle of the story. Watching this was a bizarre experience as I as somewhat reminded of Mirai Nikki with the girls trip to her aunt’s house becoming more and more surreal. The story itself starts off on a confusing not by citing Socrates and some method of appearing in people’s dreams by whispering in their ear as they slept. Let me fill in the blanks here. Basically a boy was sneaking into this girls room at night through her window and things grow dire when this boy is mysteriously killed. Her family suddenly grows concerned about her and mention that they saw the boy in her room that night. What follows is her family growing increasingly paranoid and concerned over her. So much that when she returns home she is integrated over where she has been. The anime starts at the height of this escalation where he parents just have disregarded any sense of her privacy at all.

The idea is actually rather fascinating with the center of the town becoming a mad place where people’s privacy is nonexistent. Strangers walk through other people’s houses and even the act of locking ones door is enough to incite a mob to attack your house. It has become the social norm to have no privacy whatsoever brought to light by the girls aunt who walks around her own peephole filled house topless(If you watched the crunchyroll broadcast this was censored and she was given a sports bra. Odd that, violence is ok but boobs are not?) I do find having my privacy just abandoned and being constantly watched to be a terrifying prospect but this story takes it a step too far with weird eye monsters and of all things, jack the ripper? Much like many of Junji Ito’s other works we have a foundation for a good story but it really hasn’t been brought out to its full potential and that does seem to be a very recurring theme with this series.

My friends, I lament to say my interest in this series has fallen to a degree that I really can’t seem to care all that much about it. It’s a shame that it should turn out this way but not entirely unexpected. Our first story has to do with a boy being tormented by his weird neighbor who calls out to him at night and if there is a story that was killed by this anime not capturing Ito’s style, it’s this one. Let me give a visual example, this is the woman from the anime and this is the woman from the manga. One of these women would have me raise an eyebrow and wonder what the hell I was looking at. The other would have me shut the window, close the curtains and nope the hell out of there. You can go right here to get classy and architectural window films. It’s painful how still the animation is with not even the womans mouth moving as she speaks and the final twist just leaves the story hanging. Was the house trying to eat the boy? Or trap him? Why was the woman so interested in him? What even was that woman? I can get behind the idea of being tormented by a woman keen to get personal with you that you really want nothing to do with. Though if that woman was supposed to be bait to get the boy to enter the house then this house should have looked up some playboy magazines to create up a woman that the boy would be more keen to interact with. Though maybe that is the point, the house wanted to attract the kids attention but didn’t know how to appeal to humans. Regardless without ito’s detail this story just falls flat without a conclusion. We don’t know it the boy was finally gotten or if the house just stretched over and didn’t manage to get him. I think the bigger question is however…why didn’t he just sleep in a different room?

The second story was actually rather interesting and may have worked simply because it’s appeal wasn’t on finding the situation scary but instead on the idea of the story itself. In this story we have a family who bring back relatives as ghostly projections to help get over the grief of a family death. A newly wed girl is brought into this family only to find herself treated coldly and is rather keen to use this power to bring back her father when he dies as she has had constant nightmares of seeing him die and leaving her alone. I don’t think anyone was shocked to find this story pull a sixth sense and reveal the protagonist to be one of the apparitions brought back to life after an unfortunate death. The end of the story is the most conclusive i have seen from this series so far having the girl come to terms with her death and take comfort in the knowledge that both she and her father are not long for this world and at least will spend their last days together. It’s a good story but I feel it could have been fleshed out more with better characters and a longer duration as it’s developments were rather forced. Namely the husband’s sudden relationship with another woman and laying down the truth on his current wife happened within seconds of each other and could have been built into something better. Again its an interesting idea not really fleshed out to its full potential.

At this point I have pretty much given up on Junji Ito’s work ever transfering well to an animated medium. It is true that maybe with higher production values and a more talented team than his work could potentially be brought to life but even with that I still think it would come up short. Not because Ito’s work is of such polished perfection that nothing other than manga drawings could capture it, actually it may be the opposite. Junji Ito’s work is very much pulp fiction(The term, not the movie) in that the stories themselves nor the characters are not the true selling point. I would compare Ito very much to HP Lovecraft whose work is often highly regarded due to its influential ideas but when judged on his actual quality they too are essentially pulp fiction short horror stories of hit or miss quality. The strength is in the presentation and ideas of the work but not so much on its narrative quality. Indeed Ito tends to rely to heavily on body horror and his stories can veer into goofiness when attempting to be unnerving and surreal. Thus a Junji Ito story without the high detail of his art and the paneling of a manga is like a lovecraft story without the inner monologue of the narrators building madness. Essentially a silly monster movie.

But well we have two stories today and the first one is rather interesting as it deals with the main protagonists house being connected to other worlds. In this case the protagonist Oshikiri is finding alternative world versions of his classmates which all seem to be either terrified of him or wishing revenge on him. The actual concept is fascinating but the story does have its fair share of holes. For one if Oshikiri is aware that his house is a portal to other dimensions then why in god’s name is he still living in it? The big twist as well is that there are alternative world versions of himself which are murderers experimenting with humans in order to make a formula to make humans grow taller. It doesn’t really make sense that a teenager would be fooling around with science, especially one that doesn’t seem all that gifted intellectually and the killer Oshikiri’s motivation is just absolutely juvenile. Still I liked the final climax with Oshikiri and the girl trapped in the house wandering through infinite worlds potentially filled with killer Oshikiris. Also from the look of things there appears to be a sequel story to this so I wonder just where it will go with that.

And for the second story we have a return to the nail biting teenager chuunibyou whose fond of casting life threatening curses on his classmates. It’s clear by the presentation that his actions are more for black comedy than genuine horror but I find it falling flat on both fronts. The comedy is well…childish at best as we are apparently supposed to laugh over Souchi pants being pulled down? I mean yeah, I suppose it’s good to see this kid get some comeupence but this is some Dennis the menace level humor here.As for the horror I just find it offset by the comedy as it’s trying to push it as light hearted but the truth of this matter is that this kid has attempted to kill a lot of people. Yet others seem to be letting him off fairly easy for it. He gets a few nails to the butt and that’s it? If this kid got his way his two teachers and a student would be dead. I just can’t really enjoy this kids antics when he’s such an unlikeable wart of a character. So I hope he doesn’t have too many stories left in this season as they are clearly not gelling with the horror that the series is going for.

Today’s stories fell a bit flat for me as one of Ito’s tendencies to not explain his horrors actually somewhat backfired. In the first story we had a tale about a jade stone which cursed people with a disease that causes holes to open up on their body. The story itself was relatively simple but I can’t help but notice some logical inconsistencies. For one they state that the girl next door had been afflicted with this hole disease for all her life and yet when other people are infected they die within days. So what was this girl so special that she lived so long with the disease? The disease itself doesn’t make much sense either and while Ito does tend to stretch credibility to make his monsters come to life, here is another example where I feel he pushing things too far. This hole disease does create holes in the body as shown by the last victim who even had one of his eyeballs falling out of it’s socket due to a hole under his eye. Yet the victim can still somehow live which makes me wonder just how blood circulation works when the body is full of holes. Who was the doctor and why was he connected with the stone? Frankly I feel the horror of the story fails because we as the audience just know far too little of the situation to get what is even happening. At most we can speculate and even with that we have far too little information.

The Marionette Mansion story also has issues but at least there is more to work with when it comes to that story. Being about a brother that comes back to town and mysteriously his family are controlled by strings like puppets. The key factor her appears to be the puppet at the end who somehow must have been in control of all the strings. If i had to guess I would believe that the brother never actually came back to the town and the family which our protagonist was talking to was just puppets controlled by Jean-Pierre. The reason I believe was to somehow trick the protagonist and his sister into joining the house as it appears the older brother abandoned the puppet, he needs a human to be “complete” so to speak. Though in this puppets case he wanted the roles to be reversed. Again this story has it’s holes, namely that if the main protagonist found the house to be so suspicious then why did he keep coming back to it? He was clearly wary of the house and it’s puppet antics and yet he still let his sister stay there and kept coming back. Also why did the puppet freak out so much over the jealous girlfriend and attack the protag? How does the house ever work in regards to being controlled by strings all day? How do the puppeteers know what they want to do? The final reveal just kinda felt on the weak side as it was pretty obvious that was the case.

If there is a big flaw with these stories though it would be the endings. I have noticed this so far with all the stories but they tend to end far too suddenly. There isn’t really a sense of finality to the conclusion, instead it feels like the story just stops suddenly and is rather unsatisfying as a result. Even if that is the stories ending in the manga it would be better to dwell on it a bit to let the ending sink in before cutting to the credits. Another issue is with the presentation which while fine is still far too similar to watching a slideshow of the manga. Their is very little animation or attempts to truly adapt these stories to screen. They are essentially the manga put into an animated format without any real adjustment. Which may be fine for purests but when the anime just ends up an inferior version of the manga then people might as well just read the manga instead.

Our two stories today regard the handsome man at the crossroads and slug girl. The handsome man story was given the most screen time and it is a decent story, albeit unfinished. What was presented here was only the first part of the story and I believe it will be continued in later episodes. But what we have here is a town haunted by a mysterious figure whom people have taken to asking about their love life. Which would be fine if the mysterious figure didn’t always claim that their love would be unfulfilled and his words have such an effect that the girls commit suicide. There’s never really and explanation as to why or how this monsters came to be but if I had to make a guess I would say the monster of this town is the mysterious fog that appears whenever the pretty boy is walking about. The catalyst for these events seems to be an incident in the main characters past, where he told a pregnant woman that her love was doomed and that caused her to commit suicide. This appears to have given the fog a taste for blood as it appears to be trying to trap more girls souls within it by spawning the pretty boy and having him make girls commit suicide. At least that’s my interpretation though it doesn’t quite explain that the murders seems to only start up once the main character moved back into town.

The big question here is whether the handsome mans words are some kind of mind control considering the effect he has on his victims or if the mans words only have such an effect because they cause the victim to realise something. We have a case here of a girls friend asking the pretty boy about her friends love life only for the pretty boy to say that she should worry about her own. His words causing the girl to aggressively pursue the main character as though he were her last chance at love. Eventually leading to her suicide when he rejects her numerous advances. Considering how the girl becomes like a woman possessed as she transforms into a ugly visage of herself it would be easy to say that it’s all just some form of mind control. However it could be that this girl did have worries about her own love life and the pretty boy’s words merely confirmed her greatest fears of never finding love. Thus she pushes herself to find love no matter what and her efforts just backfired disastrously. Though it could be some kind of primal instinct stimulated that pushes for the ultimatum of either procreate or die. Thus this begs the question that if the main character did accept her advances then could she have potentially gone back to normal?

Slug girl was given the shorter runtime of five minutes but the story it presents is a rather good example of Junji’s approach to absurdist horror. There is no explanation as to why it happened but for some reason a girls tongue turned into a slug. While the first transformation was horric, the second does bring to light a certain problem I have with Junji ito’s works. Name that Ito has a tendency to go a bit too silly with his ideas. An example would be a chapter from his work Uzumaki where the people of the town gain the ability to create whirlwinds by spinning their fingers. A rather weird tonal shift for what was a rather tense grim story. Here we have the parents of the girl convince her to bath in a bath full of salt to kill the slug. I feel the parents went a bit overkill by having her bath in salt considering that her mouth was the main area affected and oddly enough this resulted in the girls body completely disappearing, leaving her as just a head with a slug coming out of its mouth like some kind of messed up snail. The implication that the girl is somehow still alive despite being reduced to a snail shell is a rather disturbing concept but I just find the logic of it to be rather flimsy. Sure it’s all fiction and it doesn’t make sense to have her tongue turn into a slug in the first place but it just feels like Junji had a disturbing idea and took it to too much of an extreme to be taken seriously.

After the first episode started off as a black comedy, I was worried that this series may suffer the same problem as Kino’s Journey in that the weaker stories in his work would be chosen for adaption. Lucky this does not appear to be the case but there is another problem which is not quite as easy to resolve. Junji Ito’s work has always faced problems regarding his work getting adapted, much in the same way that Stephen King’s work has had a lineup of failed adaptions. The big issue with Ito’s work is that the quality of it isn’t so much in the characters and writing but rather the idea and artistic value. Ito knows how to think up disturbing and strange horror concepts and work to illustrate and panel them to become massively unnerving. However when you strip away his artstyle, the apparent silliness of his ideas becomes more visible. Much like how Ufotables adaption of Gyo turned out, which was an admirable effort but sadly didn’t quite succeed. The live action efforts are marred by bad CGI and other factors, though the Tomie movies seem to have succeeded to a degree. Now Deen are taking a stab at it and their take appears to be sacrificing movement for detail. This has been a double edged sword as while this anime may be the closest to Ito’s style, the lack of movement makes it very much like a slideshow of the manga at times.

Our first story brings to front Ito’s style of using unconventional and sometimes humorously strange monsterities. It features a horrifically monstrous model whom a college film crew decide to include in their movie. Without Ito’s signature style this story could very easily fall flat on its face but it actually succeeds in being rather creepy here. I like it for being a bit of the subversion of the heart of gold trope in that usually in anime and media, a monstrously ugly person actually turns out to be nice and misunderstood. However in this episode we have a monstrous looking woman whom everyone gives the benefit of the doubt but really turns out to be just as horrific a monster as she appears. For judging book by its cover is bad but that doesn’t mean that someone can’t have an ugly appearance and an ugly personality as well. It also shows the deep discomfort of having caught the undivided attention of someone whom you don’t find attractive or the torment of being stalked. The main character has caught the attention of this monstrous creature and it’s quite disturbing to think that this woman won’t so much rip him apart with her fangs but instead…ugh…eat him in another sense. If i had a problem with the stories presentation it would be that the ending was rather abrupt and parts of the original story showing how the main distorted the women’s image in his head was missing but otherwise it was strongly shown how uncomfortable the situation was.

The second story is Ito at his best as while not really scary in the usual sense but the very idea of it is deeply unsettling. Detailing a story about a hospital patient who is experiencing long dreams, dreaming in which he spends large amounts of time stuck in and growing longer by the day. While time passes normally for everyone else, the patient goes to sleep and lives through 8 years in his dream. This is contrast by another woman whom has a massive fear of death and believes she will die soon. One is scared of their time getting cut short while another is terrified that their dream will continue for eternity. It’s a pity that the anime cut out a few panels with the patient describing his dreams such as 10 years as a soldier wandering a jungle, 6 years cramming for student tests and 8 years with a full bladder searching for a toilet that doesn’t exist. Made worse when his body begins to adjust to the time he spends in dreams and age prematurely, eventually transforming into a macabre husk. Leaving only dust and strange crystals behind. The last scene make for an interesting twist as the doctor treating him administers the crystals to the woman which in turn gives her long dreams as well. The doctor rationalises this that a eternal nightmare is better than the void of nothingness that death could very well be. Personally I find the idea of being trapped in my own mind for a century in a single night to be a atrocious alternative to death. But well if you can get the internet in there, maybe I would think about it. The presentation falls a bit shorter in this story but luckily the story itself is enough to carry it.