This week I finished watching The World Yamizukan which I have written about before as it was beginning to air. Just to refresh your memories, the show is very similar to Yamishibai in that each episode is only four minutes long and focuses on a creepy short story or urban legend. Basically what this post is going to be about is my reflections on the series and the last couple of shorts I watched. So with that, let's get started!
Personally, I think the scariest episode I watched was the clown episode. That was a weird story that especially stuck out to me because real people were used as opposed to the drawings featured in every other episode. Because they were real people the effect was that much more polarizing and it felt like the strange creepy pasta-esque story could actually happen to me. That short is about two sisters who read a story about a clown coming into your house when you're home alone and taking you into another dimension. The next day they're both still shaken up by the story and while the older sister is brushing her hair she sees the clown enter her house through the mirror and is paralyzed with fear. This really freaked me out because I've had dreams where this exact thing happened to me. I knew something scary was happening and I was unable to scream or move to try and get help, so seeing it happen to someone else messed me up. The short ends up with the clown capturing a sister and it's super eerie.
Towards the end of the show, the stories stopped being solely scary and most of them turned into being strange or trying to impart a weird lesson onto the viewer. Some of them talked about people being turned into monsters, or were kind of like the movie They Live where humans are surrounded by otherworldly monsters and aren't aware of it. I was a bit disappointed because I wasn't especially creeped out but the stories were still interesting despite the lack of scariness. Another noteworthy episode focused on a house with a cursed box. People would buy the house because it came at such a low price because of all of the tragedies that happened in it and then would see the strange box inside of it and become cursed by it. They would either die terrible deaths or disappear entirely. While that story is nothing new in the horror community, I thought the episode was worth mentioning solely because of the last part where a little girl is possessed. She's portrayed like a straight rip off of Reagan from The Exorcist and I thought it was so weird to see an anime-ish version of her that I should mention it here.
All in all after having watched all thirteen episodes I would say that The World Yamizukan is something worth watching. It was definitely different on a general scale, but there is also another anime exactly like it that is actually done better and is quite scarier. However, the episodes are only 4 minutes long so you really won't be wasting too much of your time if you decide to sit down and watch the entire series. The art was really cool and some of the episodes were actually quite interesting. It was entertaining to see so many portrayals of what Japanese people think American people are like when faced with a scary situation, but also kind of weird that a majority of the stories took place in America. I wonder why that was? Anyway to close out this post, I think this was a unique show that was broadcast at a weird time in the year but was overall pretty good. Check it out!
-Bookwyrm
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