Dark Gathering

The reason that horror as a genre has been so resilient for so long is because at a base level, it's kind of fun to get scared. It's like a rollercoaster or bungee jumping; you get right up close to something dangerous but in the back of your mind the experience is (hopefully) carefully curated enough that you can enjoy it. There's a triumph in coming out the other side having experienced something that made us feel so vulnerable.

Dark Gathering is a series about that bizarre mixture of terror and euphoria that we experience with horror. Its characters experience everything from familiar campfire ghost stories to grisly tales of true crime, getting right up close to mortal danger. Although they're scared out of their mind at the things they witness they're also fascinated and exhilarated by it too.

The show is broken down into two halves. In the first the trio of Keitarou, Eiko and Yayoi encounter smaller scale local haunts that they dispatch after some issue in a monster of the week style adventure. In the second half, a new threat presents itself and the gloves come right off. The ghosts become far more grisly, their backstories become far more horrifying and their designs become more abstract. In order to combat these our heroes start utilizing powerful ghosts Pokemon style to try and take them down.

The show's heart lies in the trio's dynamic, as Keitarou's struggles to keep up with Eiko's fascination with the occult and Yayoi's dogged crusade against the supernatural. He's the straight-man essentially, having fairly understandable reactions to the horrors we encounter yet still remaining brave to hold on to the only connections he's been able to make after years of isolation. There are aspects to his character that could've been explored more, like his apparent high intelligence that I hope to see more of in a potential season two.

His childhood friend Eiko is a strange case. At face value she's the perfect supportive friend who only wants what's best for Keitarou. But secretly she's an obsessive adrenaline junkie who loves the thrill that scary things gives her. If Keitarou is meant to be the everyman the audience is meant to relate with, Eiko is meant to represent the thrill we get in seeing what new haunt the show comes up with this week.

But the real star of the show is Yayoi. With her massive cowlick, skull pupils, blazer and tie combo with shark tooth pumps, she looks like a Pokemon trainer who got really, really into Soul Eater. She is the show's action hero believe it or not, a vengeful crusader on a mission who doesn't mind getting right up close and literally strangle ghosts with her bare hands if she has to. Her fearlessness is equal parts thrilling and hilarious, as well as her budding relationship with the other two members of her group.

Production wise the show stays at around a "serviceable" level. Whenever the show isn't deep into the new horror of the week it's content to mostly keep the characters as talking heads with minimal movement. Horror tends to suffer when we can see the seams in the production, so the lackluster character animation, flat coloring and distracting auras did tend to take me out of the experience. Thankfully, where the show did shine was in its stellar sound design, where you hear every scream, croak and creak in extreme detail.

Horror has never really had a foothold in anime despite a rich history in manga and film. TV broadcast standards usually neuter it and it's difficult to merchandise. As a result we barely get a drip feed of it every few years, which is a shame. Dark Gathering may not be perfect, but it takes big swings and has a real love for the genre.