Yami Shibai.
Seventh season.
The seventh season of Yami Shibai.
There have been seven whole complete seasons of Yami Shibai.
...And including this season, I've now reviewed three of them.
The futility and insanity of doing a third Yami Shibai review is not lost on me. Like what more can I possibly say about ICLA and their... their spooky (???) shenanigans?
Either you like them or don't, and even if you don't, you might still choose to cling to them because the landscape of horror anime is a fucking desolate wasteland and you have to cling to what little you can get. Especially when it comes to horror series where the goal is... is to be scary.
I mean, backing up, I suppose I should first be honest and disclose the information that I've started writing this review eight episodes in. I have absolutely no confidence that there's going to be anything worthwhile in the remaining five episodes that have yet aired at the moment of writing this.
Yami Shibai 5 was a fucking catastrophe but then Yami Shibai 6 came along and I'm on the record genuinely saying "oh hey this was almost okay" for.Yami Shibai 7 is a real... a real return to form.
I think it’s fair to say at this point that any times Yami Shibai has a good episode beyond like… season three that it’s a complete fluke. If there was any competition whatsoever, I don't think we'd have made it to seven seasons of this.
But this is really the only horror anthology series I have out of anime. There was the Junji Ito Collection of course but that had fairly cheapish looking animation and of course... no season two. I can't even think of a single series marked as horror that has made it to a season two out of the last couple of years.
Yet Yami Shibai is up to seven.
And as long as ICLA remains afloat, I think we're just gonna keep going. Because you know they just... they just don't have anything else. Typically, for a negative Yami Shibai/ICLA show, I'd go through all of the episodes but...
Unlike Yami Shibai 5, there's not really an abundance of interestingly terrible episodes. As a matter of fact, there was an episode in 7 where I thought I was experiencing a stroke because I could have sworn one of the episodes was just a straight up repeat of an episode from a previous season.
It just turned out though that only the setting was the same. The episode in question from Yami Shibai 5 was an episode about a phone booth where you can make calls to curse people.
The phone booth episode in Yami Shibai 7 is instead about the phone booth itself. Phone booths are such a good spooky thing, but in the age of cell phones, they're not really much of a thing anymore. So what about a killer phone booth that EATS CELL PHONES???
~~But also you because of course it wouldn't be scary if it just killed cell phones.~~
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
...There was also that episode about Amazon deliveries where through box after box, a corpse got delivered. That was a pretty cool one.
I mean that of course going by Yami Shibai standards. Because someone probably just went "oh hey, I get a lot of Amazon deliveries, what if we do an episode about a delivery man?"
Then the crowning jewel of the entire season was of course the final episode where the entire episode took place from the perspective of the family refrigerator.
I know that entire previous line just reeks of sarcasm, but I genuinely mean that was both the best and most interesting episode of the entire season. You have the refrigerator innocently and naively reacting to the family devolving and falling apart.
And at the end, I couldn't even tell what the take away was. Did the family kill the abusive father and fill the fridge up with his cut up corpse or... what was the deal with the ghost kid? Like I noticed that he wasn't changing through the timelapses and then the episode just straight up said it, so like did the father kill the kid or what? And the kid became the fridge...? But that doesn't make any sense because why would the fridge see the kid then...?
But you know apart from those three episodes, the rest are... pretty much just shit. Like oh, an otaku brother crawled underneath of his sister's bed to get his manga back but then a ghost showed up and does a very unscarily runs across the room as a shadow... multiple times... and way too slow to be even remotely startling...
Oh, there's that episode where like there's an annoying old man who won't shut up about the TV being too loud and threatens his neighbor that he'll get the landlord to evict him. So when the old man starts coughing horribly, the guy has a chance to call an ambulance for him and actually just chooses to ignore the old man.
Of course the old man dies and flies through the wall screaming "YOUR GODDAMNED TV IS TOO LOUD" but he should instead be focused on the fact that his neighbor just purposely let him die. Him choosing to instead continue harping on him about the TV volume strips any sort of sympathy away from him. Like really? You're still gonna go on about the TV?
They do a doll episode... mannequins... spooky woman, spooky hotel, spooky art exhibit, spooky elevator ride with a serial killer that's being haunted, spooky woman again...
I think that's about it.
#Conclusion#
I guess I'll praise them for being wise about saving the best idea to come out of this season for the very last episode, but I don't know.
~~it probably says something about your series when your best episode is from the perspective of a fridge~~
I think I'm really running on E for Yami Shibai. I mean I'm sure some will say that this season isn't even that much different from the other ones but... it really just seemed like one of the worst to me.
Five was just a big ol' lovable bundle of insanity that drew quite a lot of laughter out of me. Six was again, in my eyes, almost okay. Seven for the most part was just... snoresville. And it really bums me out. If ICLA would just put some more effort, creativity, or money into Yami Shibai or at the very least had the voice actors sound just a bit more convincingly scared... I'd happily praise Yami Shibai for being the one horror series to just keep returning and chugging along amidst a wasteland.
Instead, I'm just giving yet another season a low score. A 2.5 out of 10 or 25 out of 100.
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