Episode 5: Notice of Termination of Service
Plot: A salaryman visits a small town where funerals seem to be happening all over. He checks into a cheap hotel…but….The time has come to say goodbye.
Breakdown: It’s not often Yami Shibai leaves me with little to nothing to say. I’m not saying this episode is boring or anything. In fact, this is a very good entry. It’s creepy, has a pretty unique and creative story and is one of those episodes where you don’t really need everything explained to you because the story delivered the scary atmosphere enough for me to not really care. It is confusing, but I think I’m just thinking about it too hard and it’s a rather simple case of the town being a murder town.
Episode 6: The Veranda
Plot: A young woman keeps hearing strange scratching noises on her veranda, but when she goes to see what’s causing the sound, it stops. She asks her boyfriend to help investigate. What is causing the strange sounds?
Breakdown: Every time someone mentions a veranda, I think of The Golden Girls….
Uh, anyway, this episode is very, very meh. It is probably one of the most overused tropes in horror to go ‘Ahh! Scary sounds!….Oh nothing’s there…..
Other character! Scary sounds!’
OC – ‘There’s nothing there, idiot.’
Both – ‘OMG ACTUAL SCARY THING!’ *dead*
It definitely has to be an additional trope for the scary thing to be a creepy woman with super long black hair and spindly fingers with long nails.
I don’t even really understand this story very much, and unlike the previous entry, this story makes me care about how little sense it makes. The woman had been followed by this creepy demon thing before? When? Why? Was the demon woman thing also killing those women on the news? If so, why?
I will give them some props for animating the demon woman’s fingers more than 98% of anything typically seen in Yami Shibai, but that’s about it.
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The Anime Madhouse 