You’re walking alone in the dark woods. You don’t remember exactly how you got there, but you can vaguely recall taking the last train from the station in an attempt to return home from... Something. Surrounded by shadows and an unearthly aura of hostility, you want nothing more than a source of shelter to protect you until daybreak... And that’s when you find Gregory House, an odd hotel set way out in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization and any sort of reliable customer base. Taking a chance, you find the hotel is run by an anthropomorphic rat, and populated by other absurd, macabre creatures who don’t seen to have your best interests in mind. There’s no clear way out of this hotel once you’ve checked in, and no safe path through the forest either, leaving you in a desperate struggle to retain your life and sanity as you experience the true horror of Gregory House.
And no, not the Gregory House with a bad American accent who thinks Asexuals aren't real. That's another horror entirely.
Gregory Horror Show was the third collaboration between director Naomi Iwata and producer Milky Cartoon, all three of which share the same blocky CG aesthetic. I don’t have any evidence of this, but I really wouldn’t be surprised if some of Naomi Iwata’s work aired on American kids’ TV in the nineties, as he also directed a Pingu spin-off entitled Pingu in the City, and his work definitely looks like something that could have aired on Nick Jr. when I was growing up, especially the series Pecola. 3D animation at the time was cursed as hell, I personally preferred stop motion, but even in it's earliest years of existence if any audience was going to accept CG with open arms, it would have been children. How does his aesthetic design style work in the horror genre?
Well, it’s important to note that he didn’t make that jump directly. Gregory Horror Show clearly carried influence from Iwata’s previous works... Several characters just look like reskinned and repurposed models, including Gregory himself who looks like an alternate form of Dr. Chu from Pecola, just with different hair, wall-eyes and liver spots. What’s more important however is the shift in presentation from Midnight Horror School. From what little I’ve seen of that series, it reminds me a little bit of Monster High in terms of it’s bright colors and happy energy. It’s clearly a fun kids’ show that just had a spoopy coat of paint thrown on for flavor, which is why the jump from that to Gregory Horror Show feels so vast.
Starting with the good, Gregory Horror Show is full of spooky looking locations. The mist-covered forest outside of the hotel looks adequately creepy, and the sound effect of the door opening to begin each episode never gets old. The interior of the hotel itself is ominous, labyrinthine and barren, shrouded in shadow, instilling a nightmarish feel that you could encounter any number of horrors around any corner. The negative, however, are the horrors themselves. Iwata’s rudimentary CG block characters CAN look somewhat frightening at first glance, both the first time you see them and sometimes even when they show up again later on, as there are creepy elements of their design, but then they start moving. And talking.
The animation itself isn’t necessarily bad, but the blocky characters are extremely limited in movement, dynamic and expression. You might never have an issue with this in either of Iwata’s previous creations, because happy, fun childrens’ shows are usually full of fast movement, bright colors and lots of cuts to distract you, but this is the horror genre. You normally use longer cuts and tighter focus when you’re trying to create a sense of suspense or tension, and Gregory’s face movements make it really hard to take him seriously when he’s talking. His nose moves up and down, his eyes shift around, but it all just looks like a loop of random twitches. I don’t think there’s a single character in this who looks scary for more than five seconds, and for a show that uses first person perspective to convey horror, it’s hard to relate to the main character’s reactions to everything.
The sound design is basic, but it’s fine. It sounds like it was taken from some Halloween compilation CD at the dollar store, consisting almost entirely of dramatic musical cues and spooky sound effects, but they’re used well for what they are. The English dub was produced by Teletoon... Yes, this is a Canadian dub... And it’s equally serviceable. I haven’t actually heard of any of the actors involved other than Carol Anne Day, who played a creepy lost doll looking for her owner in an early episode, and she has a major role in another anime I’m planning to review by the end of the year. Dave Pettit plays Gregory like the twisted mad scientist villain of a cereal commercial, and it works just fine for the material. As for Brendan Hunter... Well, I don’t think his performance is the ONLY reason Judgement Boy used to have a Onceler-esque cult following, but he couldn’t have possibly helped matters.
Usually at this point in a review I’d start talking about the writing and story of an anime, and any other notes I had to share regarding my feelings towards it, but for Gregory Horror Show, I don’t actually have much to say. This kind of anime really isn’t about writing or story-telling, I mean, it’s a series of two minute shorts. The whole season is just over an hour long. The way the story is set up, it’s just a series of vignettes, allowing the viewer to experience a number of encounters and incidents going on at the hotel. You don’t really get a story until the very end, when the protagonist finally tries to mount an escape, and it’s fine, I guess. Nothing memorable, but at least it adds a little bit of intrigue to the scenario, even if they have to constantly break POV in order to tell what little story they have. Seriously, there are moments when it shifts from first person to third person without even cutting between shots.
It might be scary for little kids... I was a pussy whenever it came to characters dying when I was little, especially when they were being eaten, or didn’t get the send-off their demise deserved. This is going to sound weird, but seeing a thief getting eaten by the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin or one of the villagers get eaten by an ottoman in Beauty and the Beast was way more traumatizing for me than Mufasa or Bambi’s Mother dying. At least someone cried for them. Hearing Gregory describe the disappearance of a guest with a gold tooth, then seeing the protagonist drink a mysterious soup that has a gold tooth floating in it, that shit would have given me nightmares for months as a kid. That’s just the one example that stands out the most strongly in my mind as something my child self would have likely found effective, but as an adult, the scares in these vignettes just range from confusing to predictable.
That’s not saying I’d recommend it for kids either though, because for a series that’s as short as this one, there is a LOT of talking. There's way too much exposition, Gregory just telling you the backstories of half the creatures you encounter. In between scares, characters just dole out weird, self contained philosophical monologues, the subject matter of which is usually way too adult for younger audiences... Not adult in an inappropriate way, mind you, but in more of an esoteric way, where whatever they’re saying is just so dense and misanthropic. I’ve heard people call the series funny, and it does have a really dark sense of humor, but it didn’t really work for me. If you’ve seen one undead creature with a visible head wound say they have a splitting headache, you’ve seen them all. I could see the concept of a first person perspective exploring a spoopy hotel working for a video game, which is weird, because apparently the actual video game for this series is in third person perspective.
So who would I recommend this for? For sincere purposes, I don’t know. I might mention it to someone who was really into unique short-length shows with a spooky aesthetic, and Monster High was too girly for them. If you’re a fan of the macabre to the point that you’re willing to embrace this sort of bizarre little oddity on it’s own terms, enchanted by the visuals and over-all mood and aesthetic, you might like it. I’d recommend it to a hardcore Tim Burton fan, someone who liked The Nightmare Before Christmas but didn’t think it was enough of a mindfuck. Or that it just needed more blood. I also wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who suffers from motion sickness, that feels like an important note to add.
Gregory Horror show was available from Geneon, but is now completely out of print. You can still find it fairly easily on Ebay, the early volumes being pretty cheap. It’s also available in full on Youtube, which is probably technically illegal, but I doubt anyone cares. There was a Playstation 2 game, but I don’t think it was ever released stateside.
Gregory Horror Show is a novelty. Being the most successful and well known of Naomi Iwata’s work, it’s fair to speculate that most people who see it have never seen anything like it before, and there’s an understandable appeal to that. It didn’t really do anything for me, I honestly had a hard time staying awake through it, but there are some aspects of it that I guess other people might enjoy? With all the morals and introspective monologues this show likes to throw at the viewer, there’s a decent chance it’ll say something that’ll have some kind of meaning for you, or hell, maybe you just like the way it looks. I don’t hate it. Check it out if you’re curious, or if you’re just looking for something unique to binge on Halloween, it’s only an hour long commitment after all.
I give Gregory Horror Show a 4/10.
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