Month: October 2023

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 31: Some You Already Probably Know

Well, somehow I managed to make it to the end of October having put up a post each day about some of my favorite obscure, and less-obscure spooky, supernatural anime. Having gone back to work after having a baby, I consider that quite a feat (especially since I have maybe 2.5 or 3 hours of semi-useful awake time after I get home from work to cram in everything I need to do, including chores and what-not). Today, since it’s now everyone’s favorite spooky Autumn holiday, I thought I’d take it easy and throw out some recommendations for a few series that are more popular and easier to find. I want to throw folks a bone who don’t want to deal with gray-area media legality. I hope everyone has enjoyed this spooky season series, and if you know of a particular spooky series I didn’t cover, feel free to throw the title into the comments. I might do something like this again next year!

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 30: Some Shorts and One-Shots

Have you ever had a memory that you weren’t exactly sure was real? Recently, when I was coming up with the list of episodes and series to cover throughout October, I faintly recalled an OVA I’d seen some years ago. All I could remember about it was that it involved people fighting using calligraphy, and that the title probably started with an “S.” Not very helpful. I first checked over what I had saved on my large hard drive of archived anime, and no dice. Then I tried to Google search based on various keywords. Nope. It wasn’t until I took my entire lunch break today to go through My Anime List year-by-year that I finally figured out what it was. Hopefully the result will be worthwhile to my readers!

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 29: Otherside Picnic

There are relatively few anime series that star adult characters, so when I find one I definitely take notice, even if the end product is somewhat uneven. Take Otherside Picnic, a series that stars two college-aged heroines who become friends (and more). At its best, the series is creepy and unsettling; at its worst, it’s merely enjoyable. But overall it’s a fun ride with some amusing characters who find themselves in some spooky situations.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 28: Shiki

There’s almost nothing as satisfying to me as revisiting something I enjoyed in the past and realizing just how correct I was about it. Case in point: Shiki. I watched the series as a simulcast in one of the earlier incarnations of Funimation’s video streaming service. I had a backlog of episodes and spent an afternoon catching up to the current simulcast episode so I could watch it week-to-week from there (I believe episode 11 or 12; it was somewhere about halfway through the series). I’d been lukewarm about the series at first until that point; then I was hooked. But there are a lot of series I watched around that time period that I probably wouldn’t enjoy nearly as much more than a decade later. But I had the opportunity to watch Shiki again within the past couple of years and I think I may like it even better now.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 27: Kakurenbo: Hide and Seek

Mou ii kai?

Mou ii yo.

Thus begins a game of kakurenbo.

When you’re part of a group for a long time, you get to see the culture of that group develop and traditions emerge. The anime club I attend has always had a Halloween event where, rather than watching the typically scheduled anime (the series that people have voted on for that particular semester), there’s a costume contest and selections of spooky one-off anime to watch instead (some of the selections I’ve featured so far on this list have turned up in the past). Oftentimes folks will watch something as a younger attendee of the club that they’ll want to return to again a few years later; since many of the special event episodes that we watch are more obscure/lesser-known that your typical mainstream anime, I’m sure it leaves a stronger impression on many people. The first time I saw Kakurenbo was at one of these events many years ago.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 26: Blood-C

Hey look, it’s time for vampires again. Or is it? Over the years there have been a few different entries in the Blood franchise, which began in 2000 with Blood: The Last Vampire. In that animated film, a teenage girl named Saya battles vampire-like creatures on behalf of some mysterious American handlers, while allegedly (as we discover later) being an immortal vampire herself. In 2005’s Blood+, an alternative universe retelling of the general details of the film plays out over 50-something episodes. But we’re not here to talk about either of those versions today. Instead I’d rather share my feelings on the “black sheep” of the family, 2011’s Blood-C.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 25: Den-noh Coil Episode 9 “Miss Michiko From The Other Side”

It’s no secret that I love Den-noh Coil (or Dennou Coil if you prefer the classic romanization of the title). One look at my user icon across the various social media I use on a regular basis would tend to make that obvious. If you know, you know. And like many of the best anime out there, the series is structured in such a way that it deftly balances both the speculative ideas it’s trying to present, as well as the plot and character moments that define its emotional core. The first half of the series is largely spent world-building, laying the groundwork for the more plot-focused second half. Because of that, the first half features a lot of characters, locations, and moods that are tied together by the use of the cyber glasses that the characters wear. And because the first half is so focused on “dabbling,” it’s no surprise that one of the episodes is a great Halloween watch!

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 24: Raven of the Inner Palace

I may have mentioned this, but over the last year my ability to keep up with new anime was severely disrupted due to health issues, so when it was time to prep for an anime convention I had a lot of catching-up to do. Usually when I end up in this situation, sacrifices must be made. There are always anime that I wanted to watch but didn’t have time to cram into my schedule, and I’ll realistically probably never get back around to them again. On the other hand, there are almost always some series that I take a chance on and end up loving. Raven of the Inner Palace was one such series.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 23: Dorohedoro

So far this month we’ve tackled psychological horror, comedic horror, and horror-adjacent titles and episodes. However, as far as I can see, we haven’t yet looked at the niche-within-a-niche that is “grotesque-yet-humorous urban fantasy where people are turned into meat pies,” so I wanted to make sure we had that covered by featuring Dorohedoro.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 22: Ayakashi Samurai Horror Tales – Bakeneko

Because I’m standing on the cusp of returning to work after an extended leave-of-absence, I thought I’d take today to write about one of my favorite pieces of media in order to soften the blow a bit. Many years ago, I happened upon a series called Ayakashi – Samurai Horror Tales (or Ayakashi Japanese Classic Horror depending on who’s translating the title). The anthology series adapts three horror tales from Japanese literature and theater. Or, more accurately, adapts a story and a play, and then spends three episodes on an original tale drawn from Japanese myth. It’s that original story, called “Bakeneko,” (“Demon Cat”) I’m writing about today.

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