Hey. We all float down here, didn't you know that? Didn't you know that we float down here?

Hey, didn't you know? Didn't you know we float? Because that's what probably the most famous clown in horror fiction says. You know, from that story about the horror clown by that no name author that nobody knows?

It had a TV miniseries in the 90's where fucking Tim Curry somehow is the most fucking terrifying possible clown without the series actually having an R rating because it was on TV. Which it should have had, because you know, in the original novel, the clown literally went around ripping little kids' arms off in the sewers. Thank God hack Hollywood film makers are bringing it back and giving it a R rating only for eventually people to just say "it's a different guy as the clown so it's shit" and maybe rightfully so.

But none of that is important. Or even entirely relevant beyond clowns and horror. So answer the question. Did you know we all float down here?

Down here, among the clumps of trash wading throughout the pits awaiting at the bottom of Anilist's database... there are some special series that are just completely incomprehensible floating in the darkness. This is one of them. A truly shining and imaginative example of the horror genr--

OH SHIT THERE'S A GENERIC AND COMPLETELY UNEXPLAINED LIVE ACTION HORROR CLOWN IN THE KITCHEN RUN YOU STUPID IDIOT ___WHAT ARE YOU DOING_ __

OH FUCK, I FORGOT THERE'S NO MOTION WHATSOEVER IN THIS SO CALLED ANIMATION (UNLESS CHARACTERS JUST SLIDE ACROSS THE SCREEN BUT EVEN THAT STOPS LATER IN THE SHOW) SO YOU ACTUALLY LITERALLY CAN'T RUN

WAIT, WHAT AM I EVEN FUCKING SAYING, THIS IS LIVE ACTI--

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA LOOK HE'S GOT BUTTONS AND HAS A RAINBOW AFRO OH FUCK WE'RE DOOMED ONCE HE FULLY ESCAPES FROM THE MIRROR REALM

#Introduction#

Sekai no Yami Zukan is, no surprise, a creation brought to us by ICLA. ICLA almost exclusively makes only fart and horror shorts. I may have mixed those links up, but I honestly am not even going to fix it because it's probably about as accurate (I haven't watched their horror series about the fart being yet so I can't confirm or deny that). Yami Shibai, what I've watched of it... the first two seasons and the first episode of season FIVE, I feel it's a really hit or miss series to say the least.

Thus, I was surprised to find that Sekai no Yami Zukan was nothing but HITS. Literally every episode is a completely... like the drawings/art never remain consistent, it'll go from aliens to live action clowns to mermen at the drop of a hat, and like the narrator is speaking like they actually kept him completely oblivious of what the show was and told him he was narrating a horror series. If this is a genuine show that ICLA made and believed to be an actual effective (in any sense) horror, then that is amazing.

For this review, I'm honestly just going to go through every episode because I can't honestly believe that this is a thing that exists. Thanks ICLA.

Also, I'm calling bullshit. This genuinely cool looking guy made of insects appears NOWHERE beyond the credits. Why ICLA. Why do you do these things.

#Aliens, Snow Men, Maximum Overdrive#

The entire purpose of the first episode seems to me now after watching the rest of it to be:

"Yeah, this is what we promised. A horror show starring aliens and urban legends, so here's aliens. If you've literally seen any non-ET aliens ever in literally anything, then you've seen our aliens."

I'm still addressing this episode however because it's comical that the husband's reaction to his wife leaving at night, wandering into a forest, and getting cut by branches as she stumbles forwards is that "she's definitely going off to cheat on me."

Like yeah, that's DEFINITELY a human. Idiot husband runs out to confront his brainwashed wife and is immediately abducted by aliens. At this point of the show, I believed this was just going to be a completely generic sibling to Yami Shibai. I was of course terribly wrong.

Episode two is where it starts to slowly creep up on you. Something is amiss. But this episode still meets what this show was supposed to be. Rather than ALIENS they hit you with an urban legend. Yet... the father destroys the snowman at the very start so... am I supposed to believe that the yeti/murder bigfoot literally took the time to fix the snowman and then somehow wear it as a disguise to get the kid to go on a ~~murder~~ magical adventure with him?

Wait, can we just... take a moment and look at a comparison between episode one and episode two? Did like completely different people draw every episode or what? It's not like Yami Shibai is at all consistent, but at least the art remains mostly the same from episode to episode.

Also, even as he lay dying after being pushed off a cliff by an abominable snow creature that was in the middle of kidnapping his son, the father is still trying to scream out warnings to his idiot son who's about to be brutally murdered. Even though, EVEN THOUGH, his son was literally celebrating his impending death with his murderer. Michael, you little shit. You deserved to be hugged to death by literally bigfoot probably (why do these reviews keep returning to children dying or being murdered? thanks horror anime).

"Aliens, murderous snowmen, what else do we got? We're not out of ideas yet! How about murderous trucks? Like an episode where a hitchhiker just gets into some passerby's truck, and then it turns out, WOAH. The truck literally eats humans... for FUEL TO KEEP DRIVING DOWN THE ROAD SO IT CAN KEEP EATING HUMANS FOR MORE FUEL."

Okay look. The lady being eaten by the truck still talking and repeating the same things over and over again even as the hitchhiker guy is losing his shit, is a bit better than generic alien or murder snowman. I give ICLA horror points for that, but I must immediately deduct them because the entire episode is mostly just of the truck coming down the road and when things start to go wrong, they simply use that same drawing again but zoom in and just throw the camera around. But it's clearly the same drawing when the guy was just talking to her, and not actually fearful for his life.

#Crop Circles, Robots, Sea Creature#

Crop circles??? Excuse me, but we literally did aliens at the very beginning. You can't just go right back into aliens a few episodes later, that's bad form--

Oh wow, it WASN'T aliens. It was gigantic monstrous winged shining bugs. That's... kind of deflating. Okay sure yeah, bugs. Fine. But... why wouldn't they just eat the entire field? Why would they only eat enough to leave weird looking crop circles to suggest ALIENS? Why wouldn't they kill the humans that interrupted their meal as well?

I get that the whole thing is "Crop circles aren't caused by ALIENS, but something ELSE. Like monstrous gigantic insects for example." but... ugh. Whatever, let's just keep going. It's too late to stop now.

Okay, so a guy goes to a restaurant to get some dinner but for some reason the waiters aren't serving the customers. They're just standing there. Another customer literally punches one of them in frustration only to reveal, oh hell, the waiters and everyone else with obviously strange green skin are in fact ROBOTS.

Immediately, we go right into the robot revolutions. Like ICLA has taken the gloves off entirely at this point and... an episode about a robot revolution? Sure, I didn't know what to expect from this before it started to air (although had an idea since it was ICLA) but this was definitely not it.

Then... I can't believe this, but it turns out to be a twist ending and the father and leader of the human resistance was in fact one of the robots all along. There was of course absolutely no hints or anything of this prior to it happening... like this episode would have been the highlight of the entire show for me if what was approaching right around the corner hadn't been there.

But you see, there's actually a further layer to this stupid moronic twist ending. The human being a robot all along is just the surface layer. For you see, it's not that it was all just a dream, but in reality, a VIRTUAL REALITY SIMULATION.

Don't you understand? ROBOTS ARE GOING TO OVERTHROW HUMANITY SO THEY CAN... MAKE VR SIMULATIONS OF THEIR OVERTHROWAL OF HUMANITY FOR THEM TO RELIVE. ICLA is trying to warn us, and I believe we should take their warnings with the utmost seriousness. We have to abandon all technology and advantages of modern life and go and live in the woods otherwise, the robot revolution is coming.

Then there's an episode where some dumb young people decide to take pictures in front of a strange beached whale monster. To... obviously bad results. One of the better episodes (as far as this show goes), but also one of the most boring ones. Sea monster with tentacles that eats people, GOT IT.

...Let's just get to the clown already.

#The Motherfucking Spookiest Clown#

I literally could not believe what was happening when I was watching this episode. Let's just take a brief second to take a gander at my raw reaction to it two months ago. That's right, we're going meta on this one.

I genuinely thought that they may have actually ran out of money, and that the rest of the episodes they were possibly going to do live action like this one. Thank God however this was not the case, and this was just a random and very strange hiccup placed in the middle of the show. It's almost brilliant really. People who decide to watch this later now that it's finished completely airing will make it to this episode and not even realize what the fuck just happened by the time they get to the next one, because with episode eight it's right back to the drawings like nothing even happened.

But oh it did happen. Boy did it ever happen.

Even now, I honestly wonder if this episode was ICLA just straight up parodying themselves because this episode is outright a Yami Shibai episode but with all of the extra stuff just ripped away. There is a creepy thing lurking about, and it is getting closer and closer to the character/s, and it ends with the creepy thing doing a jumpscare/catching the victim/s.

Perhaps I truly do just have a very bad habit of wanting to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I really do want to believe they knew what they were doing the moment they had one of their interns get into that clown outfit and put that rainbow afro on. Clowns are not exactly new to the horror genre. Like even putting Stephen King aside, there was after all that real life guy who dressed as a clown and brutally killed people. I mean we are literally living in times where the monsters and serial killers of yesteryear cannot even roam about in the darkness of the night without fear of coming face to face with CLOWNS.

On the ever growing list of my "favorite bad anime episodes", this is probably a STRONG contender for the number one spot... I'm biased though because of being a horror fan, but this episode broke me and sent me into a fit of laughter. Like, the entire episode, there's this horrible and infuriating clown laughter put over it, and when the clown gets out of the mirror and invades the house of the sisters', THE SISTER IS JUST STANDING THERE AS THE CLOWN JUST WALTZES RIGHT THROUGH HER HOUSE.

Okay, if a clown were to invade your home through mirror magic, would you just let him wander throughout and possibly assault your sister? Everything about this episode is unfathomable. We're not even done yet.

#Can't Take Anymore#

Tribals? Okay, what could they possibly do that's more insane or dumb than what we've already covered? We have to be approaching... like, there can't be even more.

Yet again, they use only one drawing for multiple scenes, zooming the camera in and moving it around when needed. The guy and the tribal kid initially arriving at the village, the guy discovering one of his dead friends, and the other tribals meeting the guy (aka the single arrow by his foot). I don't know why this bothered me as much as it did/stayed as clearly in my mind as it did, but... like they don't cut this many corners with Yami Shibai. They know. They know that Yami Shibai is their money train and this is just some weird experimental shit they just threw out there because why not.

They can't have thought this was... acceptable as... even like a Yami Shibai. I just can't believe that. They had to have known.

I'm not even going to bother comment on how the blond white guy is named "John" and the tribal kid is named "Jose".

Whoops, I got sidetracked. What happened?

...Yeah, I'd like to know that as well. What the literal fuck transpired?

...What?

So, what you're telling me is that there is a tribe somewhere in the Amazon that either has a shrink ray or actual magic and is shrinking down other people and then eating them and forcing them to fight off germs and bacteria within their bodies which then makes them... well not immortal, but abnormally healthy. Is... is that what you're trying to throw down at me right now?

There is... there is so much wrong with this. You would need so many more people because the couple of guys we got to see obviously had to be in only one tribal and... there is... like three or four shrunk down people are not going to be able to fight off an entire body's bacteria and disea--

What the fuck am I even... this is all complete nonsense, WHY AM I EVEN BOTHERI

#Conclusion#

I was genuinely going to do the rest of the episodes, but I covered most if not all of the really insane ones. Like beyond the point where I stopped, there was an episode about a box. Not just a box, but a supernatural box that makes people who look at it do horrible things. Then there were tree people who abducted children and turned them into fellow trees?

In good conscience, I am forced to give this show a 3.5 out of 10 or 35 out of 100 because I cannot give this a score lower than what I gave to Yami Shibai when this honestly gave me more genuine entertainment than Yami Shibai even if it is... painfully worse than Yami Shibai. If... if that makes any sense at all.

With Yami Shibai, I knew what I was gonna get every episode after the first couple. With Sekai no Yami Zukan I... fucking had no idea of anything... and... just god damn.

Eventually, my memories of this show are going to fade and slim down to basically nothing but the live action clown. I know it's going to happen. But following when these memories fade, let this review be a record of my statement that this is probably overall the most pathetic failure of a horror anime I've ever seen--well...

It's probably at least in the top five. This was absolutely terrible. But I'd take a season two of this over an inevitable Yami Shibai 6.