With the weekend coming up and the upcoming weekend I am once again busy moving so I guess this is a wrap up post for Halloween Month! What have we seen, what have we done and what is next?! And of course this post is mostly to wish everyone who celebrates it a Happy Halloween!
What has Pinkie done?!
Let’s begin with a little look at what we have done! The past month everything I did was a bit in the theme of spookiness! We watched weird Horror movies, we played a bunch of scary games and Watched trough the first half of Yamishibai! I had one more movie and Season the anime planned but the fatigue of moving really got to me! I just wanted to move into a big blanket and stare at the tv a bit for the past two weeks after I was done with all my tasks. Forgive me! Post-wise I have done a few interesting things this month and to some stuff you really reacted well! I will highlight a few! Note that I do not think these are the best! I do not prefer any of my posts over others, that would make other posts cry! I simply highlight a few posts based on my favourite “events”. Click on a cauldron to revisit a post you might have missed.
Halloween-month Started with a personal account of some ghost stories I experienced first hand! It got the most posts this month and had a nice number of audience participation! A really nice post to do and thanks everyone for the support! Another Geeky Lifestyle tag post I really liked was this month’s gadget post. Still I am very happy with the love on the spooky stories post!
This month’s anime tag introduced me to the series Yami Shibai which had its ups and downs but the first season is something I can definitely recommend.
I only wrote one fiction this month which was Halloween in Paradise! A small story set in the fictional universe of Paradise Island where the manager has a small horror adventure! It was great fun making images for that post!
Video games I played plenty! I played some classics like Castlevania IV which is always a pleasure to playthrough! My favourite playthrough thought was Call of Cthulhu, Pinkie loves herself some cosmic horror! Plus a game based on a famous tabletop roleplaying game it was bound to sit well with me.
Movie wise you voted for me to watch some weird movies and I really do think I delivered. Rubber, Hausu and Killer Condom all were quite bonkers but only one post features the entire movie for you to watch! Killer Condom is definitely the best weird horror movie I watched this month!
Finally Pokémon! I did a fair bit of Pokémon this month but the post that got the best response by far was me designing my own Pokémon based on the Dark Universe film monsters. I got so much comments on that post! It was truly amazing and it will definitely bring it back in the future!
What has the Staff done?
Kuro wrote another zinger of a horror story about a village plagued by a very mysterious and powerful evil! If you haven’t checked it out you definitely should!
Sunny did a post about a very fun board game that is like a tavern brawl between D&D like characters! I read it and I certainly want the game after reading! So if you play board games you should super check this one out.
Indigo is sitting on a few big projects so in the upcoming months I am sure we can see a story about his O.C. He also had some ideas of posting in the Warhammer universe! So that could be very cool as well! He did some amazing prepwork and sometimes that is the most important work. Also he kept the resort pretty safe!
What have we seen?
I will be honest! This month I have been short on time so I have not visiit as many blogs as I would like! I tried a few routes which it took very well.. it seems to get a bit lost with the tiles in the middle. There are a few things I would like to highlight though! Click on the pictures to link to the post!
First of all GeekGirlJoy finished a project this month that I am pretty sure I inspired her to do in my quest for the truest pink! So I have been a muse and I inspired something that completely goes above my comprehension of coding but I have used it to find the analogue colour of my avatar and some design elements! Which resulted in a slight shift in colours. The pink on my site used to be #ff87ED and it changed to #ff89CD which is a lot closer to my avatar! Great job joy! I am happy I could be a muse!
Scott from mechanical Anime reviews started this amazing project where he interviews content creators across the net using his reach to shout out there people and unify the community! That is pretty amazing and I really commend him for that! I have seen others do something similar but Scott REALLY makes it about the other content crreator and not so much about himself. An effort I can very much appreciate.
I could not find a real featured image.. so this is how I imagine Scott Imagined this!
Of course Senpai made a great post as well.. but when does she not! For Halloween she discussed Urban Legends in Japan and while I was to tired to comment something insightful when I read it it left a great impression on me! If you haven’t checked it out you should!
Blogging Bestie Summer found a great place to watch old horror movies and in this Halloween month I think that is a pretty amazing discovery, love your classics! So yeah a great homage to movies that should get some tribute in this month!
Naja is a great writer and possibly an even better devourer of Otome games! As my most recent Bubble post I made already showed , monsters and be very sexy! Now she makes a much better case of this then I ever could and it even includes Lesbian Vampires… I like those the best! … Now that sounds much lewder than it is..at least in my case. Great post to check out!
What is next!
So what can you expect in the coming month?! Well I will probably take a week’s vacation from blogging after this post goes live, to settle in in my new house a bit , explore the neighbourhood, show my friends the new place and get a bit of rest in my system. After that November I will return to the usual island content! Watch some movies, play some games watch some anime and what not!
What most likely WILL change is the Saturday Morning Anime Adventure, those reviews I will probably spread across the week. Short write up reviews alongside the regular content! Instead of the entire anime post on Sunday, I instead will use the Sunday to recap the week! It will include a personal life update, a summary of all my posts by genre, Staff posts highlighted and a shout out to al Kofi Supporters of the week . I will most likely also highlight some content of other blogs as well but I haven’t fully made up my mind yet on how to shape it. I think by doing the episodic content this way I put the pressure of content creation a bit for myself and I still get to let people get a nice summary post if that is the format they prefer.. they just need to click once or twice now. Something very close to this post.. with less future stuff!
November will be a bit lighter and looser in content because besides my moving ,there is also my birthday, plus a lot of social and bureaucratic stuff that needs to be done surrounding my move. Within the restrictions of the current society of course! However starting in December I will introduce official theme months for the blog. This can be anything from Retro to Sci-Fi and from Horror (Like this month) to “Pirates” . Staff posts are exempt from the theme but as for me I discovered that writing in a theme , like last month has given me so much joy that I will do it on a regular basis. Whether I will do it every other month, monthly or quarterly remains to be seen but it’s in the works!
Other than that I will see what time brings us and teaches us! For now I will enjoy settling in my new home and taking a short break! Maybe you don’t even notice and content picks up again right after this weekend ( In which for sure I will have no content because I have to throw out the final stuff out of my old apartment then) I do think I will be gone for a week or so though but no promises! I will see you all very soon! Happy Halloween! Love, Hugs and Kisses
Hello again my dear mortals! This week will be crazy for me so content is going to be a bit strange here. I am settling into my new place and while I am writing this I am working a lot on getting the final things packed! EggSandwich being a pal provided me some relief! How? He nominated me for The Bubble Tag! Of course for Halloween Month I am doing it a bit different! My Bubble.. is a strictly spooky one!
The Rules
Lyn the Otaku Author created this tag! It is a great idea and such an orginal tag that provides some good spirits in these strange times! Which people would we lock ourselves in with!.. Well I am fairly late to the bubble party and so.. I am not sure if the people what would be in my bubble can be trusted! So I made a new one! A bubble of people with whom I .. assuming we would befriend each other.. would stand a good change to stay safe! You can’t become sick if you become undead!
Other than giving him credit which I’ll happily do I shall also provide you with another shout out to EggSandwhich who tagged me for this! I will do a monster special version of this tag for Halloween but the actual one I will be tackling as soon as I return from my moving week. Here are the rules for those wanting a copy pasteble thingy
Put ‘The Bubble Tag’ somewhere in the post title and as a tag on the post.
Thank the blogger who nominated you and link back to their post.
Select up to nine people, real or fictional to join you in your bubble.
Nominate five bloggers.
Stay safe.
The Bubble
Thus it is time to craft my bubble. For this specific version of the tag I will only use monsters! Though the word is the biggest sense of the word. Vampires, ghosts, or anything occult goes. If there is some way you can call it a monster, other than in the personality sense.. it is allowed! So here we go! What bubble will we create?! Here are my 9 picks!
Vampire Willow (Buffy The Vampire Slayer)
Let’s start with my most dangerous choice here.. but Hubba Hubba! Vampire Willow is something I am extremely into! In the episode where she gets “isekaid” we see her having some semblance of a redeemable persona.. before she gets killed. Still.. she is undead.. she is a lesbian.. and she does have a facination.. of sorts with pink girls. While I would have to give up on the sun to be with her. it would mean I am in no danger anymore! Can’t get sick if I am undead! She would probably not be the one I’d let me turn.. because.. I do not fully trust her and ..well her vampirism form is akin to dying and a demon living in your body! She is one of the few people in the world I would wrinkle the sheets with and let’s be honest, besides the internet and games there isn’t that much else to do right now! At least not in the Netherlands. While I love gaming.. she is here for variety!
Jeanette Voerman (Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines)
Jeannette would be my ideal sire! She is a Malkavian Vampire which provides a healthy dose of insanity on top of your personality! The Vampire the Masquerade vampires keep their old personality but I’d see the things in a whole new way. I would get incredible insights in how the world truly works. Jeanette is incredibly fun and volatile as well, you never know what you will get around her .. which makes things rather exciting and a whole lot less stale ..also stable which Google Docs suggest to me is the word I was looking for! She would be a great insane big sister type!
Eucliwood Hellscythe (Is This a Zombie)
Having two rather insane vampire chicks that I adore live in my house means I have a high risk of death..with the way the world is right now.. and not just the pandemic.. I also risk death. So it is always good to have a necromancer at your side. Given how Jeanette probabaly never will shut up it is also nice to have a quiet person in the house! I could just draw with her or sip tea in silence! She can bring me back as a zombie.. which is better than nothing! At least I know it would not ruin my magical girl chances!
4. Wisemon (Digimon)
Wisemon is a powerful digimon that can mess with time! So he is a great backup if Eucliwood fails me.. and my plan backfires. However Wisemon also has the power to be anywhere in time.. so he can get me the good take-away before it’s gone, he can get my Cyberpunk 2077 before anybody else does and he can get me all my shows that will get delayed! It will be a hassle but.. it is something! I am pretty sure he can also reset my internet bundle on my phone so I can use it as a hotspot where-ever my bubble might be! That way I could have a bubble in the woods or on a tropical island!
Mii-kun (How to Keep A Mummy)
Mii-kun is mostly here because it is so cute! Still undead though so it is also perfectly safe to keep it around as well. With 9 people things tend to get crowded so it is best to take this into account. Mii-kun takes no space, isn’t too noisy and is mostly just fun to be around! He will also be a very good distraction for Jeanette who is sure to love the heck out of Mii-kun. I also want to see if I can teach it to hum the Mii-Channel theme! So It gives me a mission.
Ryuugajou Nanana (Nanana’s Burried Treasure)
A “ghost” girl that is into gaming and in return only wants pudding seems easy to please. Sure she has expensive tastes.. but we got Wisemon who can reset my bank account to a moment prior to a transaction. Just by ordering to the front door she would probably rush over to receive those puddings ..and my other groceries! Besides that she is a gamer and I do love to play video games so we could play Mario Party together or bond over some Smash Bros Ultimate. She would be the ultimate partner to finally play Overcooked with! And if I can ever venture into the world she may tell me about some super valuable relics to boot! So heck yeah she is in my bubble!
Brook (One Piece)
I assume at one point humanity will even grow more stir crazy at it is.. so eventually the internet will be done.. luckily Wisemon can connect to the wifi of yesterday and such .. but the monster has to sleep at some point! So we need entertainment for that time and Brook is perfect! his music is catchy and he is Skeleton! So we can use his ribcage as a jewelry cabinet and such! He is no slouch in fending off the looters either. He sings some jaunty tunes and I can see him develop a beautiful friendship with Mii Kun.. and who knows alongside him maybe one day my dreams to become an idol girl can come true!
Dark Magician Girl(Yu-Gi-Oh)
So is this one a monster? Well yes of course she is a monster in the game of Yu-Gi-Oh, she even has her own squad of magical girls as an archetype these days! Perfect opportunity for me to get recruited into the squad. Magician Girl Pinkie! If not DMG seems to love to play analogue games. She might make good Waifu Material as well, in case Willow doesn’t work out! She is like the ultimate 2d! Even in her own universe she is most of the time 2d! Which means she is easy to store in my house! She doesn’t take up space unless I want her to! She has played with capsules/figures/cards and dice so she truly is a pretty good game master, so with her in my deck I never get bored!
Rimuru Tempest
Two Vampires, A skeleton, A ghost a mummy, A witch, A necromancer and an overgrown Jawa! That is some pretty solid squad..I figured I would add a cute little dragon Maid .. to cook and clean for us.. but this would leave me with a few problems. First of all.. it would be to Harem like and I don’t want that. Secondly.. with Tohru present everything would devolve into utter and complete chaos! I am not a great bubble leader! I am a great lieutenant, a second in command but I am the weakest off all of these by far. My leadership would not be accepted and some are to chaotic for me to control! So I need a strong person, that is also a classical monster. Since the Blob is a thing Rimuru would absolutely work as a monster. His special skill besides being super overpowered is making a community out of monsters so tadaa it’s perfect! Our leader will be Rimuru.
To Be Continued
Tohru would be the 10th Nakama we sneak in because DMG is a card and we can hide her and Mii-Kun easily enough! That being said this would not be my actual “real” Bubble.. that one I shall return to when I get back from moving.. that is the one that I will use to nominate 5 people to do this tag. Until then you can self nominate by being a Coconut or by commenting that you want to take on this tag! I hope my Bubble will not burst! Arceus knows that a guy called Murphy is going crazy at the idea of this being my actual bubbl.
Who do you think will be in my real one? Who would be in your monster bubble? What are you doing for Halloween this year?! Let me know in the comments and I will see you all in my next post! This is Pinkie and her Dragon Maid she hid illegally in her bubble signing off!
I have gathered enough power and self respect to self nominate for tags my dear mortals. Tag posts I can do without a brain or without inspiration and are the perfect blog for a zombie to write. Also they are nice content for in the middle of my moving weeks where I am so busy I can barely remember my own zipcode.. mostly since I have to use two now! Still Senpai said it would make her happy if I did this one! So here it is! And I am happy I did it!
The Terms of Our Contract Most Unholiest!
So like most Tags this one has some rules! And of course I followed Senpai’s example and Answered right below said rule! So you can not copy paste! MWUHAHAHAHAHA MWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Anyway.. here are the rules!
Thank the person who tagged you and link to their post!
I wasn’t really nominated by Irina from I Drink and Watch Anime encouraged me to take on this tag! She is awesome but you all know I have a great amount of respect for her and her style! I haven’t been commenting as much as I would like on her posts.. I don’t know where she finds the time to watch all this anime! Perhaps she is a temporal spectre…. or perhaps she doesn’t have to spend hours per day to make progress in their new Pokémon game and shiny hunt.. it could be that.. but I am going with temporal Banshee here!
Put the rules at the beginning or after introduction!
I nearly went full on anarchist and placed them somewhere in the middle.. but fine after the intro it is!
Answer the 13 questions!
I did! It’s in the next section!
Tag 13 people to do the tag!
No! First of all Thirteen is an unlucky number! I do not want bad luck to decent on those who follow me! I’d lose followers! Secondly, that really is WAAAAY to many people! That’s almost all my active daily readers. At a good day I can get double but no! So since I can’t follow this rule I will follow Irina’s example and nominate no one! All my Ko-Fi supporter/Coconuts are automatically tagged and if you want to join in on the fun fill in the blank in the comments. Spook Scary <Blank> send shivers down your spine!
Delete Question 13, add a new number one question of your own!
But I like question 13! So instead I replace the question: Bobbing for Apples or Pin the Witch hat! Why.. because I have nothing interesting to tell about it.. we don’t do that here! Also.. I’m a witch! We don’t follow all the rules! Plus I like anarchy!
You are free to use the tag image somewhere in the post!
Thanks for the permission I guess! It could use a bit more pink! I do like the image though! Even though it seems like a fire hazard! Anyway thank you for the fun tag Ofaglasgowgirl the great logo and all that! You gave me a great passtime! In the spirit of my senpai though I will have to break a few rules! Hope you understand!
Questions! Questions Most FOUL
And then now it is time to answer the questions. I will not be to much of an anarchist here! I will answer these to the best of my ability! Also the title is only for flavour I do not hate the questions!
What’s your favourite thing about October?
When I was a little Chibi-Me in Fall we would often go to a Bungalow park during school break. Being in the middle of the woods with the autumn leaves like burning embers on the ground. The seasonal shift and the nights becoming darker really gives me a sense of tranquility. To this day I like strolling around in the woods for hours during October. The birds slowly begin to migrate away and there is and this blanket of silence descends upon the world. A short season of bliss before the stressing of my upcoming birthday in november begins and then the holidays. In october I always get a bit of a recluse mood in October.. even though I am fairly busy! It is the month I normally very easily can recharge my mental battery! I can stay inside my cosy house…normally.. and the seasonal food! I really love october!
Are you a big celebrator of Halloween? + How Do you Celebrate it?!
Okay so I might have ended up doing the Irina thing and answer question 7 ahead of time.. so I merged them! See now none of you will know that I messed up and just read this as a double question! Sometimes I am so smart.. my big head makes sense! Should you take on the tag.. even though I post this like.. two days before Halloween.. remember this is two questions…except for when I do it.. I would never mess up! I swear!
That depends a bit on context. You see Halloween isn’t REALLY celebrated in the Netherlands. There is no Trick or Treating there is no Halloween candy and while there are some decorations now.. there never where decorations while I was growing up. In the eyes of the Americans I do not do a lot for Halloween, but as a Dutchie I am probably extremely into it. I normally go out of my way to visit 1 to 3 halloween theme parks , just wander through their scare zones and haunted houses. I am super big on that! For the entire month of October I watch scary movies, I decorate my house and sometimes I even make scary shaped chocolate.. well before i melted my molds two years ago. Whoops! I play a lot of scary video games and I usually also host a tabletop game of dread. That is a Roleplaying game where your players play a game of Jenga each action they do that is outside of their comfort zone they take a brick from the tower and if the tower topples the character dies! It is super fun! I have dressed up but usually that just makes me look like an idiot because that isn’t really done here.
This year however with Covid closing all theme parks and borders (Halloween is best in germany because they can grab you and drag you into cages and stuff which isn’t allowed in the Netherlands) and me moving there is not a lot of Halloween! Which is why I am celebrating it so big on my blog!
What’s your favourite scary movie?
I changed this question a little to what is your favourite scary movie! Mostly so I can make a fun image of this at the end. I LOVE horror movies! There are so many shitty ones but there are also some REALLY good ones. I love the Conjuring movies for example, maybe even the second one more so than the first. I also really REALLY loved Drag me To Hell. Then I really love some classics like the first Halloween and the third Nightmare on Elm Street. Seeing mister Lugosi play Dracula is also always a pleasure..
But if I had to name an absolute favourite I think it would have to be “I know what you Did Last Summer”.. I saw that in one of those aforementioned Bungalow Parks first. I had my semi-first celebrity crush on Sarah Michelle Gellar and in my head she was clearly the main character; she was Buffy after all! Somehow that movie really shocked me.. but I have always found the fisherman to be something really intimidating. More so than Jason’s Mask or Freddies face.. just the way the movie was shot! It isn’t among the all time greats when we look at quality but like I always say my favourite doesn’t have to be the one I think is best! It is the one I can watch 20x in a row without getting bored of it! I know what you did Last summer did that for me! For the same reason I also really like Urban Legend! ….which is even less good but still I had an amazing experience with it!
Would you rather a cosy night in watching horrors or a big night out in a costume?
For me Halloween isn’t just a night, it’s a season. I love to go to spook parks and if I am allowed to dress up I would dress up but well oftenly I can’t so I sneak in a semi witchy dress or something I would not normally wear but that shows me as a bit more “evil’ or vampiry! So I really love to go out! On the night of Halloween itself though I rather stay in with a good horror movie! Those parks are so insanely stupidly packed for Halloween itself that it really kills the fun out of it. You are rushed through the haunted houses, the good food courts in the park are oftenly closed in favour of the fast ones so people can’t complain as much about a long wait and there is always someone else to scare. No on Halloween itself I like to stay in! Talk to the ghost in my flat, watch scary movies and eats sweets! I sometimes do dress up just for myself! That being said I do like inviting my friends to play Dread with me on Halloween.. but usually they have to stay in and cuddle up with their partners and check whatever halloween movie is on tv.
Which has been your most favourite costume to date?
Running around in a costume is a no go here for Halloween, we have Carneval for that, and while in recent years costumes for kids have been making their appearance the whole world insecurities and protections against the real monsters of this world has prevented it from spreading to adults. You can wear a costume in some locations but no face paint, no long dresses, no props, nothing with pins ,nothing too big, nothing was a loose hat. Etc. In other words for safety reason you can dress up, you just have to look like yourself and have nothing on you that can hide bad things like a witch hat.. About two years ago I wore a vampire costume for myself on Halloween, just some good old fun to send a few photo’s to my family. Then the doorbell rang and I kinda forgot I was in costume. A neighbour was there asking me if I heard a noise as well.. He looked at me like I was an idiot! Maybe dressing up by myself is kinda sad but I had fun!
My favourite Halloween monster costume I have seen in one of these theme parks was in a haunted mansion called the dollhouse. It was a magic maze centered around toys. All the fences to guide you were decorated with a lot of plushies people donated.. some made more creepy by colouring their eyes red or nearly decapitating a doll. As we neared the final wall which was super densely packed with plushies me and my company were looking at which ones were cute and which ones were evil when suddenly a part of the wall turned out to be a man! With his back turned to use.. he blended in completely.. his chest with this “The Thing” like make up of a gaping maw with teeth and other prickly things! Scary!
Altered Question: What is your Favourite Horror Monster
I included this question because I know my blogging bestie really likes monsters! Should she feel tempted to take on this tag late.. she doesn’t have to confess she is super good at bobbing apples ! Besides I have never bobbed for apples and would probably drown in doing so and this year I am the Witch so I really don’t want people sticking pins in me to try and edit on my hat which I had to spend a long time on to edit in the first place.
As for my personal favourite I would have to go with Dracula. I like vampires a lot! Like A LOT! Except for when they sparkle or died more often than your average Dragon Ball character. My favourite vampire is the Malkavian from Vampires the Masquerade/ World of Darkness. Krul Tepes is probably my favourite anime vampire and Vampire Willow from Buffy the vampire slayer could be my cuddle buddy despite the danger! I’d still sign up for Vampirism even when I am as old as I already am!
What’s your least favourite horror?
Much like senpai I don’t really know what is being asked of me. So very similar to senpai I will give multiple answers.
My least favourite horror genre is Erotic Horror… I do realise that is both a cheap option as well as a confliction ones as vampire movies often get the tag. I am more so talking about movies like Verotika games like Lust for Darkness or the whole cannibalism sub-genre. That last genre died out a bit but I really hate it if people get naked in horror movies for no real reason.. other than “their clothes got torn off” or this magic ritual requires a naked girl. Usually the cannibals attack with spears.. .jeesz.. what could you be meaning by that and it often leads into body horror. .. I don’t mind a split head or a severed arm but taking a woman apart in such a way so you emphasis her lady parts I find stupid and annoying and has nothing to do with either horror or erotica in my eyes.
My least favourite Horror movie is Guillermo Del Toro’s Don’t be Afraid of the Dark. Katie Holmes plays dreadfully in this movie and the idea of killer pixies living in the fireplace is kinda dumb. Why do they live there.. because clearly they can get out at times. Why do they do what they do? Because they want to collect children’s teeth?! The conclusion is even more dumb and while the idea of Killer pixies kinda sounds badass it’s more like those blue guys in Harry Potter turned evil and grey.. than anything else. It drags on and on and the male lead being an unbeliever after seeing so many strange things is more than a little bit annoying!
My least favourite Horror anime is a toss up between Attack on Titan and Death Note. They both come up when I look for horror but I do think that Death Note qualifies more ..even though it is kind of a thriller. It isn’t a bad show but it has been completely overhyped for me. The moment we switch to that Heavy Metal opening and the moment Light joins L in that super cop base thing I was so done with this show. The hyper intelligent protagonist just isn’t my thing most of the time but it always felt like this story could only end in one way. It did and I did not care for the journey either. I am not sure if it is horror but in naming this I am sure I left a few people in horror so we are good here! I don’t think it’s bad, I just don’t enjoy myself with it. With most bad horror I can still enjoy myself.
Do you have a favourite trick or treating memory?
Like I mentioned earlier we do not really have trick or treating because a few days later we had the celebration of Saint Maarten. A guy who cut off his big red expensive cloak and gave it to a beggar. In his honor we used to make a big bonfire..until those got forbidden and kids would walk across houses with little lanterns and sing a song in his name to get some mini candy bars. I tried to take part once.. but immediately my little lantern broke..which was quite common! I mean the light did not function! I was more upset about my little lantern not having any light as I was worried about candy so I went over to ask my dad to fix it. He did manage to fix it but just as I was about to run away I tripped over a big rock and had a wounded knee! That got me a lot of pity chocolat from people at the bonfire who had some on them to hand to kids who were afraid to visit the nearby houses and I went home satisfied and with a working latern..but a busted leg!
The year after that my bullying started so no one wanted to go singing with me and since there were rumors of a few child abductors in town so I was not allowed to go by myself. The teachers in school knew this so they came over that year and gave me a lantern and a package of chocolats. It was a super rainy day I remember because we would not even go to the bonfire.. even though it was a three minute walk away… so I was quite happy again. I marched in my room with the lantern I got gifted and sang the song and then went to play Mega Man 2 while stuffing myself with candy! My class-mates might not like me but the teachers did and those were more important right?! Those made me smarter! At least that was how I used to think!
What’s your favourite thing about Halloween?
I love the weather around Halloween and the whole theme parking thing I normally do! I love being chased by monsters but I love setting my friends up for scares even more. One year we would go to the most expensive and visually incredible halloween park in the Netherlands. Walibi Flevo or Walibi “Holland” .. I hate that term! .. One of my male friends whom I shall refer to as Fit Phil, has ZERO tolerance for horror. So he always made me go first in the haunted mansions thinking they would scare me .. as a pink feminine person is sure to provoke more reaction then this swoll dude that is a fair bit larger than me and has arms my legs could almost fit in. He was right for the most part.. but I did not scare that much. I even walked into someone because I thought they would move out of my way!
I threw some Green Mushrooms at him.. but that only seemed to make him angrier!
Anyway we came to the haunted house he feared most. The one with the movie villians. I wanted to hear him scream so bad.. so I came up with a plan. When Michael Meyers showed up I pretend to be super scared as he jumped out behind me.. so I pretended to run ahead saying “oh don’t .. leave me alone” and I dashed a few meters ahead.. now I could walk this house all alone. Fit Phil bravely made his girlfriend walk in front of him. So when I entered a room that clearly was based on scream and I saw a cabinet with a huge gap. I held up two fingers.. Second person behind me. I puffed myself up.. “Big guy” and then I made a tiny heart and a shaking in fear motion. The door stayed closed and I walked passed.. My friends were catching up. Girlfriend could walk safely. As I moved on ahead I heard him yelling in fear so loudly! That I had a huge smile on his face. I then told all the scare actors ahead that the big guy with the Dragon Ball T-shirt was the most scared and they all targetted him. Outside he wondered why normally they would prank his girlfriend or me..and he could coast of our scares instead! Then leatherface came out of the house and pretended to saw me in half and then chased away Fit Phil.. how sweet he remembered! I love doing stuff like that on Halloween!
Scary costume or Silly costume?
As long as it isn’t a slutty costume you are golden! Senpai said the best costumes are the ones that do both and I refer to the teddy bear/John Carpenter’s The Thing costume as proof that she is in fact correct about this. I do not mind seeing classics so even a sheet with holes for eyes can be kinda cute.. but those girls who dress up in a latex bathing suit with hooker leggings and some devil ears.. come one guys.. it’s okay to be sexy with Halloween but at least be a bit original. Do what you want but some of these costumes just scream “I am easy”. To me a good costume makes ask.. who is that!.. So Team Rocket for the win!
What’s your favourite Halloween candy?
We don’t really have any! Yet there were these jelly monsters I really liked when I was a kid! We had this tiny little candy store in our town and it was super cute. For about 25 cents of our old currency which would equate to about 5 cents right now I think.. I could buy a gummy bug or ghost and they were very tasty! I oftenly ate myself sick on them! They also had nice white chocolate ghosts on a stick! I loved horror candy so much that for one birthday my mom and dad gave me what is in dutch called “Professor Horribelus, Snoeplab!” It also was issued in America it seems as Dr Dreadful Food Lab! Here you could make your own Jelly Spiders and even some bubbling brain! I really loved the taste of the brain! The jellies had some consistency issues and I had the un updated version.. which fixed some potential health or things not working so who knows it could have tasted better if I got the new batch after I hate the first one. It was a great way to make Halloween candies and I later used the molds still to make chocolates and other things for many years.. of course until my last shapes melted away in a freaky accident. Check out the commercial!
Ghost decorations or skeleton decorations?
Silly question! One should never limit themselves! I mostly use spider decorations in my house for halloween as they are the easiest to come by and our skeletons look kind of tacky at times but I love skeletons as well. I always have this old hot sauce bottle shaped like a skull that I get out as a candlestick older now.. Nowadays it is all dusty and patchy from the wax that went everywhere and I really like it, it gives it a very otherworldly quality. I really like ghoty decorations too. My father used to have a printing store and the last year I had him print a photo of me as a window sticker! But I had made the photo transparent and part of my face was replaced by a skull.. so to the unaware eye it seemed at first as if the window would show me in the back as a reflection but if you looked closer it was actually ghost me!… It did not really work out as well as I had hoped because no one really stares out my windows and I don’t always wear the same outfit as I wore on the window sticker!… But do spooks like you want! And go as crazy as you want! Even trash bags and dolls can be scary!
Tag Done! If you still want to participate you are welcome! All Coconuts are invited by default.. and those who want can participate.. for those who feel like their need to earn it comment Spookly Scary <Blank> send shivers down my spine in the comments and voila! You earned it! Speaking of earned! If you think I deserve some of your throw away cash.. do not hestitate to support me on Kofi! Mwuhahahaha! Comments will do though but if you become a coconut you are tagged for EVERYTHING! Including tommorow’s tag!
Hello once again Mortals, we are drawing closer to Halloween and I am nowhere even near done with spooky games…at least for myself. However one big title should not be missed out on during this month! A classic that I hold close to my heart! That classic of course is Castlevania..and since most of my old consoles are already packed up.. I started with Castlevania IV on the Mini SNES! Luckily this is my FAVOURITE Castlevania game!Hooray! Instead of being scared of the monsters this time they can be scared of me!
Belle Monde
Castlevania IV released on Halloween 1991.. well at least in Japan! A few months later in December in America and the likes and almost a whole year later we got it in Europe! On the 23rd of November just 6 days after my 6th birthday. It was the 6th game that bore the castlevania title! So 6-6-6! An unholy trinity of events! Little did I know than how devilishly good this game would be. It scores about an 8.2 out of 10 on average but the only grade I can give it is 1! A number 1! Soon after this the game would take on a more adventure style approach with Symphony of the Night and while that is oftenly the fan favourite I really prefer that genre with Metroid while I prefer the old style Castlevania. I see them as almost different series in fact so I shall not be comparing them to any of the Alucard or Soma Cruz sames. They are great as well but this was a whole different kind of beast.
Belle Monde means pretty world and that certainly can be said about this game. Producer Konami really went all out in giving us neat little details in the background, amazing Mode7 graphics and very recognisable monsters. Translucent ghosts, fragmenting skeletons, a hulking frankenstein.. and a 9 foot tall dracula are all in this game and they are all impressive fights of their own accord. Classics such as the Medusa heads come back to frustrate you now more than ever before.. or is it?! With the new control screen players can whip in any direction and even wiggle their whip about all limply giving it some stringlike control which can be used to slowly tickle an enemy to death! As a result of this simple change Simon Belmonts techniques have drastically improved. On our 11 stage journey we travel through castles, swamps, caves, spinning stuff and of course clock towers. Every stage has two or three very different looking segments.
A lot is done with motion in this game’s graphic design. We see Skeleton ornaments following the hero in the background. We see books trying to leap out of their bookcase, and so much more allowing the background to truly come to live! This also results in more tension! Will that thing come leap at me or is it just a simple background element? The certainty has been taken away and that is a good thing! Not only do you have to pay attention to your opponents.. you want to keep an eye on the background as well.. the game forces you to appreciate it’s beautiful world! My favourite stages for the background are stage 8 and stage 9.. while i hate stage 8 in every other sense.. the creepy paintings that might grab you, the carpet that can push you into the ceiling that is great! Stage 9 is my favourite! It’s a treasure room where colourful ghosties constantly rise up! What a great night to have a SNES mini!
Belmont
Part IV of the series does not follow up on any of the games. Part 1 was followed by it’s sequel and both dealt with the story of Simon Belmont, while Part 3 was actually a prequel and it told the story of Trevor Belmont and his companions. Rather than follow up on the story of Trevor and Alucard among others Part IV focuses on Simon again.. but rather retells the story of the original game.. in a new way! This means we will both visit familiar and unfamiliar locations and face a slew of enemies that the oldest castlevania player will immediately recognise.. and so does everyone else for that matter because these monsters are really iconic. We will once again face off against mummies, frankenstein, death and even the giant bat makes it return albeit in a different spot in the game and it is not really a bat.. yet it is still the good old familiar boss from the first game. The game does a good job off playing into nostalgia with the iconic themes such as vampire hunter and bloody tears being hidden deep inside the game. You will have to work for your shot of nostalgia! The game has some nice tunes but nothing near as iconic as aforementioned themes but hey it’s a konami game you know at worst you will be pretty well off in the sound department.
Control Wise alternate timeline Simon has no equal. Even Richter from Dracula X and later Rondo of Blood could not be a master whipper like this Simon! As a result of the tight controls I find this Castlevania relatively easy….among the linear games. The exploratory stuff is way easier. Still I deem this game fairly “doable” in terms of difficulty. Mind you that this is my favourite Castlevania, I know some patterns by hand and some timing by muscle memory but easily up until the 8th stage I breezed through this game like it was nothing. The eight stage however has one excruciating bit of trap dodging! I can never really get that pattern down and always end up using luck to make my way through. Since I so often get stopped there it by far is my least favourite stage in the game. If you are new to the series and want to try a game out I do suggest you start out with this one for it’s supreme control scheme and playing the best Belmont but like Castlevania III there will be a few cheap moments.
These moments in comparison to the third and most diverse game in the franchise however are few and far between. You have unlimited continues at your disposal and a password system to clear the hurdles ahead. A game over will send you back to the beginning of a stage however and this includes sub areas. So if you are on stage 9-2 and game over on the boss you get 5 new lives to try again from 9-1. This is how it has always been with Castlevania and with the exception of the last stage that is rather fair you really do become a better player for it. No risking the biscuit you really need to learn and master clearing it all in one big swoop. It felt really rewarding to finally clear a stage after mastering the bosses and minibosses. Given how varied the stages are it doesn’t feel like too much of a punishment either.. except for the aforementioned stage 8 that is littered with Instakill boobytraps in it’s second coeur and with how a bat randomly flying through that trap can ruin a run and send you back over and over again… that stinks! The final stage.. Stage B, has a four man boss rush that is quite hard and a game over.. sets you all the way back! So be prepared to get good. You really must become a true Belmont but are also very much given the proper tools to do so.
Cool Whip
What makes this stand out most to me is the gameplay itself though! While Castlevania III had more diverse characters and ways to traverse through a stage this one is more focussed on giving Simon a new challenge each and every stage. The first stage has you jumping between a foreground and a background stage. The second stage places you inside streams of water that hinder your control, the third stage has vertical/ceiling hazards. The third game may offer you a different set of characters, I really prefer it if you have to overcome new obstacles every time. Except for the instakills in stage 8 this game really does a much better job at that. It really feels you have to master becoming Simon! One can argue for the choose your combat style approach of the later parts but to me it feels much more satisfying to use the tools you have! You HAVE to master Simon’s whip, you HAVE to clear that one boss you can’t seem to hit with it. The game hands you just enough tools to get the job done, but doesn’t make you overly cool and competent and thing that moderen games for me oftenly have. We are handed tools for flavour rather then challenge.
There is the old Castlevania clunk, the annoying knockback, the non momentum based jumping and the occasional unfair enemies, but that in a way is part of the experience. It gives this Castlevania something “scary” Leaping to a platform you can barely see, fearing there might be a bat to knock you off towards your demise has something we don’t really see these days. There are still indie games to that, but it is weird that this lack of polish causes.. a “personality” in the game. Back in the days we would look at our cartridges or at our screens and say “Castlevania IV I am going to beat you today” .. now we usually talk about events within the confines of the game. “Come on Geralt you got this” “Handsome Jack you are going down” which is fine as well but in the end it is also your character that conquers a game. These old games might not offer the same immersion but they offer this amazing reward of conquering and you actually feel skilled for doing it! Those weird Castlevania quirks that are present help that experience SO much.Climbing a stairs and the floor goes out of sight? Well that means if you get hit on the stair you now plummet into the abyss! You inch forward.. not in game..but you’re busy with your controller, hitboxes, invincibility frames etcetera. You are fighting a game!
I can not beat Dracula in the capacity of my person and in the end who cares about Simon beating Dracula.. it happens a million times. However me beating Castevania is unique to me. That is my feat! While I also beat Breath of the Wild and fought those two Eldritch like being in Smash Ultimate..those feel more like I played through the game. I experienced the game. I beat the final boss because I had the right tools, I feel like without too much effort I would have done it the next attempt even if I had died there. This old game .. I did not beat because I had the dash move, the big sword, the upgraded bomb or whatever. No I beat it because I learned the Pattern Patterns, I was able to distinguish the spots where my character would be safe. I discovered a strategy to deal with those pesky energy balls Dracula shot and I found a way to deal with those fireball enemies in the sky! It is not anything in the game that made me beat this.. it was ME! It wasn’t even that cool magical whip! … No it was me positioning a character in smart spots, me using a extra weapon cleverly! ME! ME! ME!
Vampire Killer Game
I do think that Castlevania I through III have aged a bit, the challenge is rather grueling! Mostly the second game is obnoxious with it’s puzzle element and poor translations, messed up ending screens and weird gameplay choices. I and III are difficult to a point where it isn’t as much a part of the timeset anymore. Castlevania IV does the same thing.. yet it does it perfectly. While sometimes unfair, dying feels like your fault always.. even when it’s not (Except for stage 8) having to redo a stage feels super frustrating..but the stage has enough variety that it doesn’t feel like intense punishment. It is perfectly beatable in a short time if you are good enough but can get you trapped for hours if you can’t deduce a boss pattern! It is still your fault! It emulates perfectly on the SNES mini… BUT that is because it has a great controller for that. Should you emulate this game on PC and use a PS4 or Xbox One controller, I think you fill find yourself in a lot of trouble. You need D-Pad accuracy here, no Analogue stick can do that, lot of these controllers also have issues with double direction inputs like up and right..when using the D-Pad.. I think this would be so much harder to complete on those.. so play this on an SNES mini or on a virtual console with a proper controller.
Yet once again this also proves a point, this game wants you to use that SNES controller, it wants you to go D-Pad, it wants to be played as it used to be played. Now don’t get me wrong! I think anyone playing a 2d platformer with an analogue stick when they have the option to not use an Analogue stick should have their Gamer Card marked… not totally revoked just marked! Yet this game shows it a lot more than others. I usually prefer momentum based platformer action like Mario or Donkey Kong yet strangely this game shines because of its amount of clunk! I can drop to my death just because I was a fair amount of pixels of my jump. I can get knocked into a ravine and be forced to start way back at the beginning just because I missed the timing of a single whiplash and there is a slight delay .. plus my hitbox is slightly larger than me so I can’t cheese it in the final moment. In Mario when I make a mistake I can correct (somewhat) here if I make a mistake I am dead. Yet that gives this game it’s horrorish vibes. Single mistakes can lead to a painful death, not just for Simon it will be painful for the player as well.
So in a game like Castevania its flaws become its strengths for me? Does that mean its strengths become it’s flaws? No! The stage design is still briljant and plays into that level of non immersion while still being super cool. Dracula’s castle has clear game mechanics that make no sense in the context of the world, but it is not trying. Nowadays characters notice everything so when we suddenly see barriers appear it has to be given a lore explanation through a cutscene, while the makers just wanted to give you some action. Sorcery, creatures carrying sealls or whatever.. it all becomes a challenge for the main character to overcome. Simon doesn’t say anything about water following two ways, he doesn’t question the spinning walls in stage 4 because they are not his challenges to overcome. They are YOURS. We are the ones that have bloody tears from frustration while trying to master the game and we are the ones that hopefully will be the vampire killers. For me Castlevania IV is one of those perfect games. Not because it is perfect.. but because it is very much a game and it keeps you feeling important all the way.
This weekend there will not be any blog posts as I am getting the key of my new flat Saturday! Which means the entire weekend and most likely the entire next week I am either without internet or doing stuff! Next week I will have a few posts scheduled ahead of time to wrap up Halloween month with a two day Pokémon post and some blog tags. If I have time I will try to visit your blogs with my phone! Otherwise I will see you all when I get back! Enjoy next weeks post and see you all soon! If you want to help with creating a pc corner for my blog check out my Kofi page!
Hello again dear Mortals, Halloween draws closer, so of course the mystical forces that might be rise! Now of course they would not stay away from the fictional island of Paradise. So today we visit a small story about what happend for Halloween on Paradise. Like always the manager is hard at work when stuff suddenly turns strange! Can she survive a night of terror find out in this little story!
The Broomcloset
Manager Pinkie was sitting in her office. Working on her Pink Little Laptop to make sure she had plenty of cocktails to distribute to her guests on the lovely island of Paradise. She didn’t like working late on Saturdays but due to her moving to another Cabana on the island she had to spend quite a few extra hours in a day! She looked at the callender.. 31st of October.. time was going so fast. She looked at her laptop and saw a half finished blog, plus some of the fictional work to be done on her island on her fictional computer… and sighed. Almost done! She would get a hot bath and an early night sleep…well as far as you can call it early. It was already getting close to midnight. Just as she was about to wrap up her work, suddenly all the lights in the office went out. Even her adorable Jigglypuff Light. By the glow of her laptop she looked out of the window and see that the entire resort was out of power. That was so strange. She opened a drawer of her pink desk to look for a pink little mobile phone. She called Indigo but no one answered. Was he in the Dinosaur Suit again?! Maybe Sunny could help her find the fuse box. So using her little pink phone as a little pink Flashlight the manager set out in the hotel to go find her janitor person who loves to be called a cabana boy.
“Why are these hallways so empty?” she wondered while her heels clicked on the marble like hotel floors.Their echos bouncing around the luxurious hallway filled with Pokémon paintings. Through the window she could see the outside lights that would provide light to the front of the hotel were out to! What was going on here? Did all the fuses blow at the same time?! Then the ground shook as the hallway was bathed in a pink silver light. Shadows of some of the Yu-Gi-Oh statues lengthens as it were lang shadowy figures trying to approach her. A loud clap followed. A thunderstorm! That must have knocked out the power. Yet she never heard the first one. Could it be that she was so sucked up in her blog that she missed it?! No she was loafing around right?! This was so strange! Having encountered no one she encountered Sunny’s broom closet… she had an awkward experience there once. Thinking Sunny wanted something from her and screaming while he actually just wanted to show her some yellow caterpillar with a horn he found in Pokémon Go asking her to identify it! This time however she suddenly heard clear moaning noises from the closet. Did he have another person in there?! Her guests needed her though so she would apolgise to Sunny later. She gave the door a brisk but clearly audible knock. In the tempo of Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing on Rainbows!
No answer.. just moaning! She would have accepted a.. “be with you in a minute” or even a “not now” but this was just plain rude. The moaning continued. She knocked again, this time knocking “Space Unicorn” ! The same thing happened though! No answer! What in Arceus’ name was going on. Annoyed Pinkie pulled open the door and there she saw Sunny! In his hand was the lantern he so often carried around.. but blood seemed to be dropping from it.. and a head shaped object seemed to be inside. Her eyes glanced over to Sunny, his hair looked even more sloppy than normal, his normally so sunkissed skin had a pale quality even blueish.. his mouth mask was not moving up and down at all.. as if he was not breathing! He moaned… and then uttered a single world. BRAINS! With a new lighting strike very close by her phone dropped to the ground as she yelled .. staring into Sunny’s much more dead eyes! Z-Z-ZOMBIE!!!! YEEEE AAARGH!… Pinkie Ran out the broom closet tripping over a Yellow bucket! With a loud smack she landed on the floor.. but the adrenaline rushing through her kept her going.. tossing her shoes at Sunnies head she managed to dash off .. she had to get Indigo! He could help!
The Security Office
The manager had to go to Indigo but she also had to keep her guests safe from this zombie! That did not seem to be that much of an issue though! As she approached the lobby no was there. Zombie Sunny slowly waddled after her and could not keep up.. A new flash of lightning made her scare and hide between the reception desk for a while. She was pretty sure she saw a presence. Zombie Sunny kept chasing.. he would soon be here and her lungs already felt like they could burst. She could not keep running forever; she wasn’t built for it. So she looked up the administration book and found a yellow marker on the desk. She quickly ripped out a page and folded a plane out of it! She began to colour it yellow as fast as she could.. She was just about done when a cold bluish hand slammed on the reception desk. He was there.. just before he could grab at her Pinkie tossed the yellow paper plane down the hallway to the staff rooms again. With a slow look behind his back Sunny turned around and shambled back into the hallways. That would buy her a few minutes. How did he become a zombie?! Did he get bitten by some weird mutated fish?
As Pinkie got up right to dash to Indigo’s hut. She noticed that zombie Sunny left a blue streak on the desk! Weird.. it could be dangerous though She would not want people to get infected by this. Even if it put her at risk. A bit of blue got on her hand and she felt sick to her stomach! She had to prevent herself from being infected.. so she ran into the kitchen. The chef wasn’t there .. which was weird..there should be some chefs to prepare midnight snacks! Did they go out to fix the power as well! Without a doubt Pinkie took the sharpest knife she could find and cut her ring finger off! She bit on a spatula to prevent screaming and drawing attention. Using some kitchen towels she made herself a bandage. She had no time to waste. She had to go to the security office. Using the emergency exit she left the building. Knocking on Indigo’s door.. in blind panic. As she knocked some organ music seemed to play inside.. and another thunder rumbled the area. “Come in.. Fleshy Mammal” she heard from inside. “What an annoying greeting” Pinkie taught before she opened the door. Inside was Indigo..but his leather coat ..had been replaced.. by .. a cloak! He turned around and looked all pale, his eyes red! “I smell blood,” he said. Pinkie gasped and screamed!Vampire!! Indigo is a vampire! “Pinkie look in my eyes” Indigo said.. but she was too smart she would not be hypnotised.
Pinkie dashed away ..now chased by a Vampire and a Zombie. What happened here?! Had she crossed over into the Twilight zone?! Did it have to do with the blue goop she found? What is with this weird thunderstorm! She saw flashes but no bolts.. and the sky seemed without a cloud! This seemed like some occult stuff! Wait! Occult! Maybe her horror expert Kuro could tell her more! Slightly woozy she began to ran towards the pool bar, the vampire in hot pursuit. As she look behind her to see if he was catching up she saw Vampire Indigo reaching out his arm .. then she suddenly fell.. as if tripped by telekinetic powers.. sparks shot out around her. and a sharp burning sensation in her knees. When she got up she realised she lost her glasses! Everything was blurry.. What happened. Did she just get hit by a spell?! Indigo drew closer! “I am not dying today,” Pinkie said to herself as she crawled back up. In an attempt to get away she took a dive through one of the hedges.. surprisingly it worked! She realised her entire weight just broke the branches as she stumbled off.. it seemed to have shook off Indigo!..Which makes sense she guessed.. wooden stakes and all. She outsmarted a vampire! But she pretty much ruined her dress.
The Bar
Tears began to well up in Pinkie, was she gonna die?! I mean she would rather be a vampire then a Zombie.. when suddenly she saw Sunny Shamble near the pool area! She had to go the long way around to reach the bar! Could you sneak past Zombies?! Her bandages smelled like a freshly defrosted steak! If she went through the gardens she might avoid Sunny all together and reach the bar via the beach. So she ran into the gardens. Huge Spiderwebs were everywhere. There in the bushes she found the cook! Motionless his white outfit stained in red liquid.. at least she thought it was the cook! He had a chefs hat on! Having -5 in both eyes she was fairly blind without her glasses. Whoever this man was .. and she assumed it was the chef! He was dead! She wasn’t sure who killed him. The bottle of cooking wine.. used for their famous Coq au Vin was the weapon he made his last stand with! Suddenly she heard “Pinkie” behind her and Irina stood behind her. dressed as Ghostface from Scary movie.. but the mask was made up instead! So she could still recognise her! In her hand bloody knife glistend.. Pinkie screamed and hit bonked Irina on the head with the Winebottle. It was empty so it did not make that much of an impact.. but enough to give her a window to dash away.
From the gardens Pinkie ran onto the beach, her feet struggling on the star-shaped sand! And yes star shaped sand is a thing! It is difficult to run in! Irina chased her.. and she looked angry! No way Pinkie would let herself be taken down by a slasher villain that isn’t even an Island OC. It gave her strength to run again. Still half blind! Maybe she recognised Irina through the alcohol smell! Why was she wondering this right now?! Eventually she reached the bar.. out of breath. Kuro looked at her and said. What’s wrong Pinkie you look terrible?! Do you need a drink. Pinkie nodded..while trying to catch her breath. As Kuro poured her a Hibiki.. a purple hand put the glass in front of her. Pinkie looked up and saw two horns on Kuro’s head.. teeth very sharp and a skin totally purple. They wore a demon red and black Yukata. Before Pinkie could take a sip she stumbled back.. tripping on a barstool. She fell.. and she kept falling. She felt almost as if she was sinking. Kuro was an Oni..she had no chance.. now she fell and was sinking.. did she knock herself out?! She was dead anyone she would just let herself sink. It was all over. She opened her eyes.. and saw a black shadow looming over her..as she took a breath a sharp pain filled her lungs! Then two strong hands grabbed her and she was being dragged towards a big dangerous looking presence and then it all went black.
Paradise
Pinkie woke up with a shock! “Stay off my body” she yelled wildly swiping at her environment. Kuro the demon stood before her. “That’s it I am cutting you off for tonight” they said. Pinkie gasped in terror! “What will you cut off?! I already cut my own finger off you don’t you think that is cruel enough?”. The face on the demon changed from Malice to concern. “You did what?” Pinkie began to see everyone more clear again.. she was surrounded by monsters .. even the chef Irina murdered was back. “Didn’t you die”. The Chef looked at her and grinned “Wheeen …Didz.. Eye..Die..?! *Hic* Isszzz.. Spilled…..wine…all over.. me.. Rini…brough…goood… booze…*Hic* I had.. a bit much…and…all over..my stuff..*hic* fell in the roses’. Pinkie looked confused. “So Senpai is not a slasher villain?” The woman showed Pinkie she had a plastic knife and said “No.. the only thing I butcher is my spelling sometimes” Pinkie coughed up a bit of water , still skeptical. “Then why did you chase me?” Irina looked a bit shifty… “I kinda felt bad that I got your chef so drunk.. when he passed out in the bushes I wanted to tell you it was my fault not his..but you looked so upset I thought he would get fired because I forced him into a drinking game with me”. Pinkie felt like a Pokémon she was so confused it hurted.
“But if you are not evil, then why doesn’t the demon attack you” Kuro grinned. It’s the 31th of October! It’s Halloween… it’s a costume! All the staff dressed up! Look Indigo dressed up as a Vampire and Sunny is a zombie. Pinkie once again asked why she was chased then Indigo replied that he saw her distressed and possibly injured so he chased her.. but when she tripped over the electrical wires that caused the lighting effects and spooky music on the island he had to fix that first..or it would be a hazard for guests. Sunny was just having a little fun and did not think Pinkie actually believed he was a zombie. He could not bite her anyway because he was smart and still wore a mask! Pinkie looked at the wrapped up hand and was afraid to ask. “Then was that blue zombie goo?” Sunny shrugged..”I had a lot of fun colouring myself with the body paint so I might have added a few extra layers.. I tried to make myself a Yellow zombie but that did not work too well.. so that paint was very thick”. He smiled sheepishly while Pinkie unraveled her bandage. “So I cut off my finger for nothing?”
Everyone stared at Pinkie’s missing finger and suddenly people began to laugh. “Oh Pinkie that is so you” Indigo offered to bandage it up more properly. “Let me wrap that up for you a bit nicer and then we will go enjoy the party you silly girl” The manager blinked. “This isn’t that funny”. Kuro looked at her and said “Well at least now you can do a very cool Assassin Creed cosplay” Pinkie grumbled “I don’t like any game but the second” Everyone laughed again. “Time for drinks” Irina yelled and as she opened the little first aid tent Pinkie saw a huge beach party going on. Everyone was in a costume. “I was so busy working I did not even notice it was Halloween” she thought to herself.. still her friends all took this cut finger very lightly! As if they are characters in a story that was wrapping up and the writer did not care about the details.. and suddenly everything goes all happy! Kuro gave her a pad on the back “gotta get back to work…i’ll make you a pink cocktail.. and hey your final girl costume is pretty genuine now” Pinkie looked at her dress as everyone went out to party. Pinkie looked at her destroyed dress, felt her dishevelled hair and looked at her hand one more time.. “Final Girl huh…seems there are plenty of people here still.. I guess I will party for now..but next year..I will be the true final girl! The only one left alive” Pinkie laughed like a maniac in her tent. She would know what her friends did last Halloween……next year!
Greetings once more from the island that lies beyond the twilight of make-belief and nightmares!…Well this month! Normally it’s always sunny and happy! This month it is a very scary place! For realsies! So far we covered my close encounters, we came up with a way to fight off zombies..and we have seen plenty of supernatural spooky stuff on the blog! So for a change I would like to talk about the mundane. These are my TOP 5 fears!
Fear #5 Phone Calls
I really REALLY dislike making phone calls. Getting calls is a hassle already and I get super anxious when a number that doesn’t know me calls me. With a hidden number that fear is even worse. I try to answer to the best of my ability but people tend to ask me if I am cold as there seems to be this shiver in it. I could also really struggle to find words and I get an absolute mess on the phone. Like the day before I wrote this I had a phone-call to relocate my internet to my new home location but the cue was too long so they offered me a callback. I had all the papers I needed needly spread out in front of me, yet when they called and began to ask me questions I lost it completely. I forgot my own zip code I forgot my ATM card number and did not get through the security check! So I had to beg them not to disconnect for making a prank call and that I was really me! I just was moving and making lists and my brain was cluttered… I know that is a lie but it is better than “I am scared , I don’t remember” I managed to get it done but barely! I am better at getting a phone call than making one though if I have to start a conversation panic strikes me even more.
This goes further than just “on the phone” as well. I hate Discord calls without camera’s as well. Normally I am very good at reading people and I do that by body posture and facial expressions, it is a “talent” that compensates for my social awkwardness. I can fish and adapt and I know I usually need to “tune” my conversation in real life. So when I lack that cue I feel super weird and am super afraid people might hate me or are not entertained by our conversation and think I am a bother. This goes as far that I get panic attacks when I am in a discord call with friends and a person I know less joins in as well. From super confident I become super flustered and confused and feel like someone is clenching my heart. I am so afraid of choosing my next words that all that remains in my head is this intricate gameplan in the hope to draw out audio cues to give me some guidance and make me understand this person. This goes for phone calls as well.. if someone sounds stern or unhappy.. I crash and burn fast.My phone is almost always on silent so I miss your first call so I can prepare a bit more for the next one!
This fear is fed because of a few things. First of all I hate my voice, it is weak and sounds unpleasant and doesn’t fit me at all. I sound like Cher or something.. while I kind of wound to sound like Wolfeychu (yes I bet it would annoy people but it fits much more with my persona). I don’t sound like me, and while I am trying to train to shift that a bit my weak vocal cords make that very hard. The moment a call has an echo I feel as if I hear a stranger say my words… you know as if a demon would be in me and speak my words for me. “Zuuul .. Mother-duck.. Zuuul”. It ties in with another fear that is higher on this list. The second reason is that I got bullied from the ages of 7 till 16 for something I chose to say. One single complaint about people mistreating me caused 8 years of torment and in a way I never got over it. I am always so afraid that I say something new that will cause the same effect. So I don’t like speaking all that much unless I know how to handle a person.. and for that I need to see you first.I knew the people who started the 8 years of bullying and had I read them a bit better then.. I could have known this would happen.. so I can’t make that same mistake again. A phone ringing even if it is somebody else’s is enough to give me slight goosebumps! So yes I do not like phone-calls. From friends and family I am sorta okay with them..but I still prefer some prep time! Look at me being all weird.
Fear #4 Stairs
I don’t think a fear of stairs is that uncommon. Yet it is such a mundane object. I’ve fallen of a fair few of them and due to my motor skills being odd and my foot not always landing where I want it to go I think it makes a fair bit of sense why I fear them. I am one of those people who will never walk down a stairs without support because of it. Sometimes I risk the biscuit at train stations to give the arm support to the elderly but only on the tiny flight of stairs so I fall down like .. 10 steps at worst. If I can’t guarantee that I will take the elevator or wait for the armrest to be cleared. Moving up a stairs is less scary than down but with my stiffened limbs it is a bit harder for me. I try it from time to time and my new house will have stairs I HAVE to climb and decent but weirdly.. there are gradations in what steps I fear and don’t fear.
Carpeted stairs for example are “safe” Open stairs are a lot scarier but are manageable if they are made for a single person and in a house. One of those artsy white shiny glass like stairs you see in office buildings is terrifying to me. My psychologist has a smaller variant of that and it gives me some serious heebie jeebies. I descend that stairs so slow! I feel like Peter Griffin in that episode of Family Guy where he keeps falling off the stairs. I even a chance to work for the Iphone call center ones.. which had the huge variant of that stairs. While the interview went well they saw me struggle with the stairs on my way down and that was me shaking on my boots. They needed more “spunk” and walking up and down those stairs would be fairly common if I got promoted so I was out. Metal stairs are even creepier though! I climbed the Eiffel Tower because on the one day I was there, the escalator was out. Filled with confidence I strudded upstairs ..just to realise the metal roster indefinitely peering down was something that frightened me a lot. Once you get to the highest level the metal stairs become spiral and Spiral stairs are the worst.
I can’t walk spiral stairs (down). During school trip to Italy, not sure if it was in Venice or Verona..but we visited both during our trip we climbed this old belltower. Because it was cheaper than going by elevator. However on our way down their was spirally stairs and I could not I got so dizzy! I started to hear screams in my head which was my own fear manifesting I think. I tried to hide it from everyone and not be a bother but once we decended one out of 17 stairs my teacher stopped me and told me to go up again and he convinced the elevator operator to take me down for free. Apparently I was so pale that the operator asked if they needed to call an ambulance or doctor, at least that is what the teacher told me later. I just heard screaming and after that day I never visited another belltower again. At best there is a bell up there! If I want something to ring in my head I just think about the look of those stairs again.
Fear # 3 Sports Balls
So this might be a weird one but yes I am quite afraid of sports balls. This can be anything. Hockyballs , Golf Balls, Tennis Balls, Basket Balls, Soccer Balls but worst of all Volley Balls. I am not really afraid of them when they are just laying in the grass or in the stores.. but I still don’t trust them. I like plushies shaped like a ball or beach balls, but if a recreational sports ball has over a bar of pressure or doesn’t go “squeak” when it hits me.. I rather stay away from it. This fear goes pretty far. If I see kids play soccer on the streets I go out of my way to head through another street. I once took a 15 minute detour to avoid a five year old kicking one of those super bouncy soccer balls against a wall. I skipped an evening of cooking and did not eat because there was a fair with a basketball game next to the entrance of my supermarket. I would just eat crips I found at home instead and the next day I set my alarm clock early so I could go before the booth opened.
Why? Because I always get hurt by balls.. (maybe that is why I am into women as well) . On this blog I oftenly identify with the Dojiko anime type, the adorable clutz. Yet I am not that much of a clutz.. I am.. but it is more as if luck bends in my disfavor. All those balls I mentioned before caused me a pretty nasty injury. So let to explain my fears let me explain what happend. The Hockey Ball hurt me during hockey practice at school. They did not use those tennis-like balls you often see on tv but these more solid white ones which felt almost wooden in texture. By then I already hated spherical sporting goods and due to my motor skills I was made a goalie. When trying to stop the ONE ..coming to me I braced myself when I felt my legs slip onto the wet grass.. my legs got further and further and I ended up doing a perfectly horizontal split my legs and my pelvis aligned.. which hurt like heck.. I can’t bend that way. I did manage to stop the ball though.. but it ended up with a 50km per hour crotch shot. WHich did not feel pleasant either. So as I groaned in pain the force knocked me backwards and I hid my head on the little wooden goalboard that functioned as a goal and my head was slightly bleeding. I could not get up cause my legs don’t bend that way so the match just got cancelled and people dragged me under a tree and bent me back so I could move again.
During a single basketball game I managed to bruise all my fingers one by one (well the first one hit 2 and the thumb was safe) flipping them over backwards till near breakage. The teacher forced me to play on saying i was not hurt and just pretending so I ended up bruisng the pinky on my other hand as well. At the end the gym teacher was yelling why I did not catch a ball and I showed 5 purplish black rings around where my fingers are connected to my hand and said my fingers don’t bend that well anymore. He told me I should have told him and that I should go find someone to check it up at the hospital. No one wanted to do that so I went to my other classes for the day and had a panic attack when I realised my fingers were so bruised I could not ride my bike home anymore. Luckily I did not bruise my writing hand too much so I could still go to school the next days.. but no more basketball.
The soccer ball was fired in my face so hard that it knocked me unconscious for a bit.. though I am pretty sure I was slammed into something and that knocked me out I don’t remember that I remember falling.. and then it fell as if I fell into another room. I took a golf ball to the eye and once during adventure putt putt golf I nearly lost my ball and had to pay for it so I went out of bounds to pick it up.. just to realise I stumbled into an area there was a flamethrower effect…I dodged that but the people of the course were NOT happy. The volleyball also knocked me out once, it also broke my glasses at that time and before I had glasses a Volleyball once bruised my wrist when I was little. When I went to run to Daddy crying I tripped on a door stopper thing from a garage door and got a huge head wound. Even recently this summer I was visiting a pool late august when a group was playing soccer next to us I got a shot in the ribs. At first I thought it wasn’t so bad.. but then I noticed I had a bit more trouble breathing and I noticed a very big bruise around my ribs.
Fear #2 Being Forgotten, Being seen as something not me?!
So this is a fear I hardly am able to put into words but I fear this a lot. After that bullying I was a nobody, I had no one left. My relationship with dad was strained at best, my sister hated me for not endorsing her toxic relation and mom while sweet always saw something that wasn’t necessarily me. Wanting me to do the normal things like go out and go shopping and stuff like that. I did those things to see her smile but it was never really for me. When I got sick and confronted with an imminent early demise I thought no one would remember who I really was. Then I got better.. but that fear never went away. I do not know how long I lived , I might equal you I might croak early given how many things are wrong with me on a health level. I have come to accept that.. but what I can not accept is the idea of me going and people remembering that person I am not. “You are a sweet person” .. “You are a hardworking part of society” .. “she had it all. .husband, children and a pet” I would hate to be described in a way that applies to millions of other women. When someone describes me like that I imagine myself laying in a coffin with no face. I have that as nightmares.
It is also a reason why I could not visit my demented grandpa a lot in the end. He did not remember me, he did not remember my sister either and mom the same. My sister became a cake girl.. as she used to bake a cake for him, mom remembered occasionally or otherwise he would call her nurse. Grandpa would try to make him remember me over and over again when we would visit and be like “you remember Pinkie right” and I could see the pain in his eyes of not actually knowing. Searching his head and if she would ask more than three times he would just say yes.. but I saw he did not. I had no real gimmick so I was forgotten a bit more , I lived further away so I could visit less anyway but for some reason I also spurred some violent tendencies in two of the others there.. it was a very scary experience for me. Seeing someone they really disliked.. some sort of singer I think because sometimes they would ask me to sing songs I did not know. Yet I am mostly concerned about my future with this fear. I do not blame grandpa but I do fear the idea .. of people remembering me..like him.. an illusion ..twisted by static .. or like those other two identifying me with something negative I am not.
I share a lot with you all on my blog as do I share a lot in real life. Sometimes works out great, other times it works out less. One of my best friends moved away and plans to stay away simply because I used to go along in his alpha energy a bit, pretending to be that more “normie” person.. spend money on drinks I did not care for, but it did not make me happy. I wanted to be me, drink the drinks I would like to order.. but it made him feel less classy. He wants to look cool with a glass of expensive whiskey and if I sit next to him with a glass of cheap wine or cherry beer they see through the high class act of his. In the end when people less and less could put up with those fake shenanigans he just left us all behind. Which is fine, we are still friends just on different terms, I need A he Needs B.. the thing is however, he keeps imposing his values on the group.
He keeps seeing me as someone who likes everything he does, like shoving Kingdom Heart stuff down my troat. I told him I did not like the series because I do not like the way the story is told and the gameplay is just not for me either. Yet he keeps forgetting.. creating a me in his mind that loves the game because it suits him better. One the one hand it is sweet but who he is friends with its not really me. Somehow the thought terrifies me that I will be misremembered and that people in the end talk about a false me..an importer instead of the actual me! It keeps me awake sometimes and I am super scared of fading away. There was one episode of Buffy where a girl was so ignored that she became invisible.. that idea terrifies me.
Fear # 1 Wasps
I fear wasps so bad that once I spotted one closeby I have zero chill until I know it is absolutely gone, can’t reach me or preferably is dead. I don’t just kill wasps! I kill them dead. I poison them, squash them, cut them in pieces and burn them.. preferably I dump the ashes of my balcony as well. There is nothing I fear more than a wasp. As soon as I see a wasp everything the buzzes send me into a state of hyper paranoia. During a family vacation we were once trapped in the car with a wasp while on the interstate. I went into a near catatonic state of fear where I can’t account for over an hour of driving. We could not swat at it because it was busy in traffic and dad had to focus. I remember that.. and then I heard it buzzing really close and I could not move and then nothing. The next memory is mom handing me a cappuccino and it was suddenly dawn. In a waterpark near Barcelona I cried in fear when the line ended up with me having to stand between two garbage cans that had wasps buzzing around them. I wanted to hold up the line until I could pass it.. so just one or two sliders in between but I was forced to stand there. It never seemed to end.
The reason I fear wasps so much is my bad luck! Dad was a wasp swatter and well he would always swat them onto me. Once under me while I was sitting down.. once he set a wasp on fire with an electrical swatter and it landed on me and stung me.. before it finally died of the fire. I went to a fairy tale theme park near me just to be stung in both ears on the same day and the teacher yelling at me for not listening to her.. (but I could not hear her due to the swelling … well unless she screamed) I also got stung on my nose that day. I got stung under my fingernail.. in that soft flesh between my toes. Even when I am not swatting at them in an attempt to get some piece of mind and even if I zone out.. for some reason they target me still. They look so evil as well. Not a single creature in nature I think looks as creepy as a wasp (if we would give them a universal size) sure a Hippo should be scarier.. or a tiger.. but honestly I would rather jump into a tiger den and punch my way to safety and being shredded .. possibly than walking the same distance trough a wasp infestation. For some reason I am the perfect wasp snack.
One time I left my balcony door open .. the summer of 2018.. when a HUGE wasp got in somehow. It was like the size of Fat Alberts thumb! It kept buzzing around so I could not go to sleep. I set a light trap for it hoping to capture it in the hallway. But I had to find some materials so briefly would have to use the kitchen light as well.. it crawled into the light fixture there and now was in the lamp.. but I know he could crawl out. ..so I could not sleep again. For a brief moment I considered flooding my kitchen with gas and tossing in my lighter to explode it.. that is how much I was panicking but instead I deactivated the light and made another one.. as soon as it crawled out.. it looked like something out of a horror movie. I almost emptied and entire can of hairspray on it then dove into my hallway and closed the door.
I got into the bathroom and took a shower.. also closing the door.. believing that if it crawled under the door the downpour or water would certainly kill it. I hid in that bathroom for almost an hour before I slowly walked back and I saw it on the floor.. it was still alive. Too afraid to step on it with my shoes I jumped over it, dropped my heaviest book on it and trapped it and put the remains in an empty wine bottle. I filled that wine bottle with some aggressive corrosive drain clog stuff and boiling water, closed the bottle and put it on my balcony … in a double trash bag. I could finally sleep after that.. even if it was already 6 in the morning by the time I had that all done! Even then I was still scared it would somehow return or have spawn! When a wasp is around I feel like there is a vice around my entire body!
What are some of your fears?! Do you fear something mundane? Any fear you know is silly but you can´t help it? Let me know in the comments! If you happen to fear money.. I have the perfect solution for you! Support my Kofi and get rid of some of that nasty cash you don’t want! It would help us both out!
Hello there mortals! As per our pact, during this month where humanity is closer to the realm of the spirits and monsters than any other month this year.. I have swore to provide you with the strangest Horror movies I could find. The dictionary defines strange as Surprising, Difficult To Understand or Explain. Something not Previously visited, seen or encountered, something unfamiliar or alien. All these ring through when I watched.. what might be the weirdest movie I ever watch! Join me today as I review 1977’s: House!
Surprising
House is a 1977 movie of Japanese origins and was directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi! With the story written by Chigumi Ôbayashi and adapted into a screenplay by Chiho Katsura. It stars Kimiko Ikegami, Miki Jinbo, Kumiko Obha and Ai Matsubara. It is labeled a horror comedy and has a runtime of 88 minutes. It’s IMDB score is a very nice 7,4 and on Rotten Tomatoes it even has a 90% critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 80% audience appreciation. So it seems like we are dealing with a good movie here for once! Do I agree?! I don’t really know to be honest! This movie is really out there! A part of that probably has to do with the fact that it is written by a 13 year old! That is right Chigumi the writer is a 13 year old girl and while she had help from a sort of professional screenwriter, the entire acting cast of the movie, which also includes Chigumi in a minor role, had no experience acting. Only the “old lady” has some real prior acting experience. Funnily the old lady is not played by an old lady! Do I notice?! I don’t know.. characters in this movie are weird I can’t exactly tell if acting slips up! I can tell they act abnormal but in everything this movie leaves me puzzled.
Maybelline Melon! Stuff your face with youth!
The plot revolves around a girl the sub calls Gorgeous or Oshare in Japanese..but she and her friends don’t really have a real name; they all get nicknames. There is Fanta, the best friend of Gorgeous, who tends to be the girl who cried wolf. She sees stuff and fantasises a lot. The subtitle names her Fantasy. Then there is Kung-Fu.. the girl whose life attitude is.. if at first you don’t succeed.. Kick it! Then there is Prof.. the smart one she is called Gari in Japanese. Melody is the musical one of the group and Sweet is the always helpful one. Finally there is Mac.. who is the fat one. And yes she is actively called the Fat one of the group .. her friends call her fat all the time! Different times 1977! These friends go on a vacation together to visit Gorgeous aunt. Reason for this is a training camp. Gorgeous would have gone with her father on a vacation but he has a new gorgeous girlfriend and she found it disrespectful to her mother who has been dead for 8 years. So instead she goes to her mother’s sister and provides her friends a training camp..after the original location became unavailable.. however it turns out that this house might hold more than the girls have bargained for. This time we do not face a tire or a condom.. this time our villain is a house…..kind off.
Hey that’s how my flat looks at night!
Difficult to Understand or Explain
There is no way for me to describe the weirdness that is this movie without going into detail about the plot so be warned, for spoilers! That being said, this movie is so weird that I don’t know what actually happened! I can only describe what I see and if that is real or some sort of allegory. This movie is so nonsensical and filled with weird events that I doubt my spoilers are even called spoilers. Still you have been warned! This movie is weird in every single sense of the word. Straight from the beginning we see weird things like a painted set.. standing in front of that actual scenery. For example when we see the girls arrive in the country we see a painted set of a mountain in the back.. however when the shot pans out we see that set standing in front of the actual sight.. in a blink and you missed it moment! Yet straight away it is clear this movie is not your average movie. The new step mother of Gorgeous is filmed in an angelic light, her clothes are always billowing in the wind.. even indoors. When the name Gorgeous is said we hear some sort of echo. There are parts of the movie that are shot in limited frames per second, we drop in and out of colour filters and visuals are often extremely confusing. In a way it at times feels like Jojo’s Bizarre adventures with it’s shifting colours text posing and with certain characters having their own musical themes. If two characters shine at the same time their musical themes ALSO both play. It oftenly reminded me of the PlayStation game LSD Dream Emulator and it has the same appeal that game has.
Rimmel Volume Boosting Lipstick! Have the biggest lips in the Hausu!
The movie is hyper stylised but doesn’t really follow a three act structure, it kind of does.. but the whole “We are in trouble now let’s fight off evil” discovery doesn’t really come until the very last minutes of the movie. So we get a very strange flow. The movie does begin with two high school girls being the best friends in the world. Fanta and Oshare are seen walking out of school together. When they are shot from afar and in the distance rather than zooming into them the movie instead blacks out everything else on the screen. They talk about a teacher getting married.. which shows us these girls know the gossip around town! We also discover Fanta has a crush on her coach.. I do not know what he coaches.. but we never see them train for anything either.. nor pack any form of sports outfit so it doesn’t really matter. The coach tells the girls training camp will be cancelled because his sister is rebuilding her inn so this summer it is not available. Gorgeous wouldn’t even go anyway because she has a vacation planned with her dad as mentioned before. But the billowing stepmother shows up and it pisses off Gorgeous so she finds a location for the training camp instead so she doesn’t have to be with the new happy couple.
Channel Number 5: So vibrant you will billow!
She writes her aunt that she hasn’t seen in 8 years for this and that woman agrees and sends a postcard and her cat! That is right! The cat her auntie has is sent along with the mail for some reason and it seems to have delivered the mail as it barely got stuck in the mailbox! Now Gorgeous has to bring the cat back so she HAS to go to her auntie! Not wondering how a cat she knew as mature already is still perfectly the same cat as it was 8 years ago. Oshare is from money and their house is super shiny, she wears pretty white dresses and constantly fixes her make-up, which causes her to almost be late for the train to her aunt’s house which will function as the new location for their training camp. Well that and she lost the cat.. the cat however boarded the train by itself and found a seat it is on and everyone thinks that is super cute. Disaster strikes when their coach has an accident at the shoe store. He falls off some stairs and gets his butt stuck in a bucket! He has to get that out before he can travel! So he decides he will join them by car later. As the train sets off Oshare begins to tell the story of her aunt. This is shown as an old silent Black and White movie.. that the girls react to as if they can see it. They are on a train.. but somehow they can see the black and white silent movie the director plays to us. Once they are done with this.. we see a cartoon train zip through the lands.. and we end up in the countryside.
Now that is a city I would want to live in!
Auntie.. who also doesn’t have another name except for that lives up a hill. She has one helper it seems as he calls her Mistress or Master and of course an old Wheelchair bound lady has no use for help in the house.. so instead this help/minion is a melon farmer and seller. Mac , the fat girl really wants to buy a big melon because she is hungry. She was also hungry on the train and she wants to head to the house quickly so she can eat! The girls travel to the house where the gates open magically and an not so old lady..with a very fake white wig is sitting in a wheelchair. The cat is returned to her and she tells the girls she is happy to see them. A sentimental music theme plays as well as the movie’s theme song…which almost always is playing. It has a very simple quality. A bit Zelda’s Lullaby esque or something youn find in one of those “my first piano book” things. It plays constantly! During scary moments, during heartfelt moments and during frolicking moments. And frolicking is something these girls like to do a lot. The old lady invites them in and for some reason everyone claps for her as she flicks a light switch!
Wow Blowfeld really overdid it with the plastic surgery this time!
Sweet is almost killed by a chandelier but Kungfu kicks a lizard into the spikey piece of glass instead so Sweet is saved and the cat begins to eat the lizard..which the girls think is cute. Then everyone goes do their own thing and get settled in. Sweet offers Auntie that she will clean, while Mac wants to chill her mellon, for which she has to use a well. Melody goes to the piano room and Gorgeous hangs out a bit with her aunt. Prof , Kungfu and Fanta think about starting to make dinner. Auntie seems to go sick from being in the sunlight to much so the girls have dinner on their own! Having a lot of fun and calling Mac fat again. Being called fat makes Mac hungry so she goes to find her Mellon.. but she doesn’t return. Fanta goes to find her so they can have the melon as desert and when she goes to the well she is mesmerised by the sunlight! She is so mesmerised that when she is fishing up the Melon she doesn’t notice the Melon has been replaced by Mac’s head! The head flies and bites her in the butt then vomits a bit.. and Fanta flees. Prof and Kungfu go check it out but they only find a Melon so they decide Fanta had another daydream and they fish out the Melon.
There has to be a comment that is more witty then.. She got eaten so now she gives head here!
Auntie joins them to come eat the Melon but Fanta feels uneasy and rightfully so it seems as auntie shows her the melon she is eating has eyeballs in them.. just to Fanta though! Who still believes she is stressed and making this up! The group saves a big part of the melon for when Mac returns and abandons the search for her to go do other things. Gorgeous goes to take a bath, Sweet starts cleaning and Melody plays some more piano… the other three don’t have traits that allow actions so they just show up when something goes wrong.. Which quickly it does. Sweet while cleaning encounters the cat named Shiro.. or Blanche in the subtitle and when her eyes glow green Sweet is attacked and seemingly killed by mattresses and blankets. Fanta of course notices this.. as Sweet calls for help. Melody however is also crying for help so Prof and Kungfu go to her instead.. only to find out Melody broke a nail! When Fanta tells her she just saw Sweet get killed by feather filled objects no one believes her. When they search they search the store room together, they do find all of Sweet her clothes laying around a naked doll that has the same ribbon in the hair as she did! So they draw the conclusion that Sweet must have gone to take a bath several doors ahead in the house.
This is like the least fashion cordinate group of people ever!
Melody cries out for help again… so Fanta goes to investigate.. it turns out Melody needed toilet paper. This quest allows no one to notice that Gorgeous has gone upstairs to do her makeup after a bath! Shiro the cat shows up and uses his magic on the mirror that Gorgeous is using.. this results in her seeing her aunt taking over her body.. but she thinks that is just a figment of her imagination. So she continues to do her makeup! Even when the cat casts a second batch of magic and the mirror begins to shatter she doesn’t seem to react. As she stares into the shattered mirror suddenly her skin comes off in shards.. only leaving a red glowing presence… which apparently kills her.. We are reminded the coach is on his way by a very weird jumpcut that shows him stuck in traffic. Since traffic is so busy he decides to go eat noodles instead. Fanta goes to search for Gorgeous and she discovers her in full bridal makeup in her aunties room. She acts very strange and when Fanta tells her she isn’t feeling safe here, Gorgeous says she will call for help. She uses the phone and then says it is out of order. No one questions this and to calm Fanta down they decide to let Melody play the piano again to calm her down. Gorgeous goes outside and juggles with some orbs of light which apparently takes her so long that Kungfu and Prof go to find her. Prof now suspects something is wrong but doesn’t want to share it because it would scare Fanta too much! So Fanta is left with Melody alone!
Olay facial cream really took a hit after it gotten all Catwoman like..yes the Halle Barry Catwoman!
This of course leads to Melody being killed. The piano glows in all sorts of colours of the rainbow and Melody notices she can not stop playing anymore. With a wild and trippy shock effect we notice some of her fingers have gone missing. She giggles a bit when she sees this and tries to play the piano again and this causes the piano to eat her. She gets sucked in and ensnared by the wires while the little hatch in front of the keys chops bits off her. Her arm is flung inside a fishbowl and as Fanta tries to process what she sees she grabs the arm.. and faints by the sight..pulling the fishbowl with her to the floor. Prof and Kungfu could not find Gorgeous so they try to punch a door open before returning to Fanta and Melody now missing. They worry about the fish in Fanta’s dress more than their missing friend..but now do conclude something is wrong. This time Kungfu decides to phone for help.. not trusting Gorgeous realising that she too has become a “ghost” But Kungfu is attacked by the telephone and defeats it in a fight. This however leads her to be kicked into the garden by Gorgeous where they have an anime fight!
She might be Gorgeous but she wil blue ball you!
Kungfu ends up being kicked back into the piano room, where through a journal they found earlier Prof realises the way to fight off this evil is to beat up the painting of the cat. As Kungfu wants to kick it she is eaten by a lamp! All hope seems lost as we see trippy visuals of all the dead girls and their body parts floating around an abstract background.. we also get Visuals of Sweet’s body.. being in a clock being grinded into just blood by the gears..so she might not have been a naked doll killed by mattresses after all? Luckily the girls once again can see these animations meant for the crowd and they react to it. This causes Kungfu to return from the afterlife…. well partially.. just her legs return.. she kicks the cat painting and with lighting the painting vanishes along with Kungu! The evil seems vanquished.
I said PiaNO! Don’t eat her. But I guess I did my cries did not strike a chord.
We cut back to the coach who has arrived at the plot of land and the Melon guy tells him the girls are dead! Showing his true colors as an evil minion of the woman! He wants to prevent the coach from going up the hill and he does this by……. trying to sell him Melons. Coach Togo says he doesn’t want to buy a melon! This upsets the farmer guy and he asks what fruit the coach likes! The coach says he only likes bananas. The farmer is so shocked by this that he is defeated and her turns into a pile of skulls and bones… however.. for defeating this evil coach Togo has to pay the ultimate price… he says bananas are everywhere.. and he turns into a pile of bananas.
I’m a Chiquita Banana and I am here to say.. “If you don’t buy a melon, you’ll become me yay!
Back inside the cat painting is now back on the wall having recovered because something in the diary was misinterpreted and the cat painting begins to vomit. The room begins to fill with blood like cat vomit and Prof and Fanta now on a raft try to paddle away from it , trying to get to safety. Prof however falls in the cat vomit/blood because she lost her glasses and can no longer see. This makes her clothes disappear and she suddenly begins to smile widely as she happily lets herself drown in the red liquid.Fanta paddles into another room and encounters Gorgeous who helps her off her raft. Tired Fanta cuddles up to her best friend and says she wants to rest. Just giving up and allowing herself to be eaten.. or well that is the term used for those who died. They all got “eaten”.
Acid! Using the right kind versus using the wrong kind!
The movie ends up with the billowing step mother showing up to befriend her new daughter in a tranquil environment. We get an explanation for what has been going on that I am not going to spoil .. you can discover what this was about by yourself.. but of course it does not make that much sense either. That plot has no resolution as everyone dies. Gorgeous tells her billowing stepmother that her friends will be awake soon and that they will be hungry..hinting that her friends are ghosts now as well and that the billowing stepmother will be fed to them.. but no! Gorgeous eyes glow like the cat and the head of her fathers new girlfriend catches fire and sort of melts off. Which cuts off to a character/credit roll featuring the girls frolicking in the mountains.
The hills are alive with the sound of a confused audience!
Something not Previously visited
I haven’t even come close to capture all the weirdness. There is an odd dancing scene where Auntie zooms around like a witch on the ceiling! Auntie stops existing at one point as she becomes more interwoven with the house and so does the cat. It goes so weird that one point Gorgeous as a ghost can manifest as a mouth or eyes inside the house just showing random body parts. There is a dancing skeleton as well and so much more! There is so much random stuff happening all the time that it feels as if we are watching a story that is free from the restraints of sanity itself. Dialogue flows odd, people can break the fourth wall but sometimes can also not. There is a scene where Kungu is attacked by random burning objects that she just kicks away and then wonders… well that was weird.. Anyway I wonder where the rest of the group is. Nothing follows common logic, it is a combination of bizarre scenes mixed with a very thing overarching narrative.
I fell into colours once.. .it was not fun!
By going through the plot in the way I did I will admit I omitted the one link with the sane world it still has to make it even seem more odd.. but to be honest..even knowing of what this ghost actually is relates in any way to what is happening. In a way it’s a story about eternal despair and the girls are just nourishment for the suffering of the entity to go on longer. While Auntie sort of is the ghost.. the cat is also a part of the ghost..but it can travel and he is also established as a Witch’s cat implying auntie is also a witch.. but she is not. Also what we see as auntie might not be auntie it might actually be the entire house.. but it is all very unclear. Even when all the answers are given to you! Yet strangely that is this movie’s strength.
See this is what happens if you fall into colours!
This movie is like a fever dream, they are impossible to explain to people yet we can not help but be entertained by our own strange dreams. Rhyme and reason are cast aside for entertainment and it does result in both hilarious as well as kind of spooky scenarios. The comedy in this movie is genuinely funny, the silliness, the bizarre choices to play several soundtracks trough each other, the pink filter that comes across the screen. The fact that the old lady isn’t even an old lady it all is super light! The guy turning into bananas had me in stiches! He did NOTHING in that movie but it was amazing. Yet at the same time I can still see the horror part of it! We aged out of that but for the time that movie had some very spooky visuals and without knowing what is going to happen.. not even having a clue, there a lot to like. There is no real movie like this in all it’s strangeness.
One of these faces will be your expression while watching this movie!
Something Alien
So how do we rate this?! I do not know! I really liked the movie but there is also SO much wrong with it. The characters are more 2 dimensional than most of our Waifus. There is no real plot and dialogue can seem more random than your random Lucky Star episode. The movie is written by a thirteen year old girl and by Arceus it shows! This movie in a way feels like one of those meme things where a comic book artist or a painter or whatever draws their children’s drawings as proper cartoon characters but leaves the nonsensical in it. Is it a good drawing?! Sure?! Is it a good creature?! Uhm.. tricky! I loved watching this.. but do I love it as a movie? Do I love the experience?! Once more I compare it to having a dream! There are very weird dreams and I love telling people about them and that my brain can work in that way, do I love the actual dream?! I am not sure.
Best kill of the movie!
There truly is nothing to compare this movie to, the acting is very uniquely directed, the sound design that is a mix of weird 70’s music with classic tunes and character music playing trough one another is also not something I have really experienced and as for the story… <Mind Explosion>. Giving this movie a grade feels about as right as grading a super market customer or a shopping cart as a grocery store product after it fell into a fridge or was accidentally labeled with a price. Sure it is there in the same realm and you MIGHT be able to enjoy the customer like you enjoy your chicken fillet..but would you?! I would be super entertained by seeing a kid fall into one of the fridges at my super market but after facebook ask me to leave a review I will never say 10/10 kid fell in the fridge! Worth a watch.. but extreme weirdness warning!
Greetings once again mortals! Pokémon is a tricky subject to put in a Halloween context, I could talk about Creepy Pokedex entries but I have been over those several times already so it is time for something a bit different. A creepy story surrounding Pokémon. A Urban Legend if it were. A legend called “Lavender Town Syndrome”
A mysterious event
In the year 1995 Junichi Masuda was working on a track for a spooky town in the game of pokémon. However his hearing doesn’t pick up certain frequencies that are in this mix. Little did they know this would have serious consequences. February 1996 Pokémon Red and Green are released in Japan and everything is great, the game is a huge success. Yet in the spring of that same year the country is suddenly terrorised by a string of suicides of young children. They have no real connection or so it seems.Many of these suicides came completely out of the blue with some of the childerens having never even displayed somberness before.
A link with these children however is made when more and more children start showing up at the doctor’s office complaining about serious headaches. As it turns out, all these children have been playing Pokémon Red and Green! By the time a link is found over 200 Japanese children are said to have committed suicide. All of them have their game files saved in or near Lavender town. The theory was made that in a high frequency register there were a few tones that could only be heard by the untainted hearing of your youngest. On a binaural level their little brains were harmed. Nosebleeds headaches and various mood swings were detected in the children all across Japan, and Nintendo and Game Freak rushed out a fixed version where the tune had been changed into a lower register, cancelling the effects of this cursed song.
A risky test!
A creepypasta that came out in the year of 2010 dubbed “This the Lavender Town syndrome” While this disease was confirmed to be a hoax there might be more to this story. The song actually does seem to wors on a binaural level. As tested by several people, standing long enough in Lavender town with the original rendition of the song leaves people with a mild sense of dread. In some cases with more troubled listeners it is even said to have provoked anxiety attacks. This song has since leaked to YouTube so of course I decided to listen to this song for an extended period of time. I can feel rather somber, and I have over the past year on several occasions considered self harm or even beyond. So obviously I would be vulnerable if I had perfect hearing! Would it affect me?! I could post the link here, but just in case there are very sensitive person with a compulsion to click on every YouTube Video.. I rather not!
When I started this test I did not not believe the myth. It has been more or less busted already, yet something did not sit right about me about the theorie! But more on that later. I listened to the song while I was doing other research for this post. About twenty minutes in I started to experience something! No it was not melancholy or headache, in fact it might not even be dread, instead I began to feel rather vulnerable. I was super grateful for my can of diet coke.. glad I still had that and that it was properly cold! I also really loved my little snack I had with me. I did not experience a forced emotion but I felt slightly amplified in my own. That was still pretty weak though! I could just be under the influence of my own body craving something sweet. So I took a risk and I looked up an edited version which claimed to have an amplified effect.
Once more up until the twenty minute mark nothing really changed..except for the fact that since I appreciated my snacks so much they depleted rather fast and I was upset about it. Yet 21 one minutes in I began struggling with my internet research, I did not remember what search prompts to type anymore. I forgot the existence of some of the simplest words. I began to feel a vague feeling of dread but as it progressed it almost seemed as if I was experiencing sleep paralysis while I was awake. For some reason I felt I was going to die. The enhanced track is 11 minutes long and after the fear set in I finished the track but after that I had to turn it off. That certainly was an odd experience.
The explanation of Lavender Town Syndrome is rather wrong but the creepy pasta is cleverly developed. The Version of the Pokémon game we got in the west, is basically a 2.0 or 1.5 version from what Japan originally got. The first version they had was quite a big mess filled with even more glitches, ugly sprite work and other flaws. This let to an update being published that did include a slightly altered version of the original lavender town syndrome. This already creates a credibility that there was something wrong with that song. It was something that had to be fixed. Yet there is no real clear explanation of what happened with the real song. It seems some complaints were shared between the real reason and the fake one.. but we do not know for sure. Yet why would you release an entire new game that just has some slightly better sprite work?! In 1995 the Virtual Boy was a thing and those complaints about headache induction were also never fixed.
My grandpa used to be a hypnotist and while I never really had the audience or the patience to read trough the dry material that he had on how to practice that he told me that we can make people do just about everything if you can set up a suggestion well enough. For example he would do this act where he drew a circle on the floor and put people in. He would tell them they could not exit the circle. He experimented a bit with that and found out that a black or red circle.. or a white one worked more consistently than if he used other colours. Green and Blue were less efficient. Red means stop.. so it is much easier to convince the brain to stop! This to an extend can explain “validation” of the Lavender Town Syndrome as well. We KNOW something is wrong with the song.. so it’s not hard to be fooled into thinking it is more harmful than it actually is. Could we be hypnotising ourselves into these effects without knowing it? Or is someone else trying to hypnotise us?
The Science of Sound
The issue with the legend is that it only seems to apply to kids! This is where things go wrong. It is implied that in the high frequency range subliminal messages are hidden. Soundwaves CAN affect the body, however when it comes to sound the higher the frequency the easier it effect is “scattered” and lost. What is inaudible to us most of the time means you have to touch whatever is causing the sound. So already can see the chance of it having an effect being decreased. However Pokémon did appear on the Gameboy, a handheld device. Making range.. improbable but maybe still possible. If ever played a Gameboy in the dark you know how close you need to hold it to your face or how you have to play with it. The second problem is that in my research I never found a documented proof of high frequencies, being used as tools to induce depression. So the myth that kids here do something that tells them to kill themselves seems busted. It is most likely something to make the story a bit scarier! As it targets something so innocent as a kid! If we assume that Lavender Town Syndrome could affect to everyone though it strangely becomes more realistic.
There is a counterpart to Ultrasound sounds in the form Infrasounds. These are tones played at a frequency of below 20 hertz and are outside of our hearing range. However these tones have a big range and can reach you more easily. It seems that these sound waves can affect the gasses in your lungs and to a lesser extend the liquids in your body as well. Turbines or certain engine sounds are known to have these types of low tones and these can result in people getting headaches and experiencing nausea. Prolonged exposure can also produce feelings of anxiety and confusion. These symptoms are all very similar with the beginning stages of Lavender Town Syndrome. Could it be that the original Lavender Town song did not use high tones but instead got it’s effectiveness from it’s low tones? Could they have accidentally put in these sounds that make people anxious and can give headaches?! Well a little more research shows it might not even have been accidental. While an engine/generator or a Wind Turbine creates sound as a byproduct there is one fairly well known entertainment source that in fact uses Infrared for it’s anxiety inducing effects. Infrasound is fairly commonly used in haunted houses!
Lavender Town is the haunted town so it makes sense and even seems that they probably designed their song like one in a haunted house. It hits that brief for me as well. So maybe they just overdid it and a few sensitive kids got sickish. Yet could it drive people to suicide? Unlikely.. at best it might be able to push people over the edge. Which is much more likely to happen from something constant like a Turbine than a limited area song such as lavender town. Can sound make you depressed? Well .. I did not find any documented causes of a song or sound causing a full on depression however.. the counterpart of Infrasound.. the earlier mentioned Ultrasonics have gained results in combating depression. People exposed to high doses of Ultrasonic sound can get cheerier. With these two sounds basically being counterparts I think it is fairly plausible that in high enough doses the opposite can occur as well. It will probably require serious extended time that is unlikely to occur but it might be possible.
Over the Edge
Now for a possible hands on experience with what I shall refer to as “sound poisoning”. It occured about 11 years ago. Over my life I have experienced a few times where I wanted to end everything.. but never did I have difficulty to fight off that compulsion except for one time. I was on a vactation with friends! I knew I was prone to seasickness but my friends really wanted a boat trip and did not believe I would get super sick. They wanted to have a fun day with me.. so I took some travel medicine and hoped for the best.
We decided to sit in the middle of the boat as much as possible as a compromis so I would not get sick.. however since my motor skills are clunky I was slow in navigating the ship and the bow spots were taking So we had to move to the back. We were sitting close to the motor and this boat had the engine basically right beneath us. Just 10 minutes of shore I began to feel queesy and before we even began to talk about the stop at the “secret” beach.. I was sick as heck! I was so sick and nauseous that I just wanted to stop feeling like that .. at any cost. I REALLY wanted to jump headfirst into that screw so this horrible feeling would be over. It wasn’t THAT long of a boat ride either just about an hour…and by the time I was giving up the ghost we were already halfway there. Still even a minute seemed to long! I wanted to end it all right now just to stop feeling so increddibly sick! I have never been AS sick on a boat.
In actuality , I should be in a rather favourable spot! I had taken medicine to alleviate travel sickness and I knew I was prone to this so the night before I even went light on the drinks and the partying. Yet for some reason.. I felt so horrible to the core that I still remember that feeling as the most misserable I have ever been..and I’ve been trough a few other things. It got to a point that I asked my friends to go deeper in the boat with me and not sit by the screws or things I could harm myself with because I needed a way to stop myself. My friends told me to fuck off because they wanted to look over the water and did not feel like moving to a spot with less view, one friend saw how bad I was and decided to come along though. We looked for some crew and in my best Spanish I tried to explain what happend..he helped me to an English sailor who took me to an off limits cabin in beneath the bow that the crew would use to get away from the annoying drunk people on their boat and have a little moment of quite. It also doubled as a lot of other things… but there was at least a table and some chairs in there.
My friend went back and I had a brief talk with the sailor who got me some water, as by then I was full on crying and so colour shifted that small kids on the boat were scared of me. I spend the most of the remainder of the trip there alone, and later on the way back I was completely alone.. but within a minute or 2 of being in the room and sipping my water I began to fell better. The secret day at the beach was wasted for me.. there was free barbecue and booze but I may have drank two small bottle of water and other than that spend the day recovering from my feeling horrible.
On the way back I thought. .. I am gonna die again.. but while in the cabin I felt was less sick. Sure I just lay on the floor of that room with my eyes closed waiting for the trip to be over.. but when I emerged as we were docking.. all my friends were sick. Except for one. They came to check up on me and after they took a stroll across the boat, spending some time in the front. My friends who sat above the engine all felt sick and one even glum. Could it be that our negative feelings were amplified by the Infrasound?! I can’t confirm it.. but while I have been forced on a boat after that.. I never felt THAT horrible! I did not even feel the same on return trip when I was “less” exposed to a source of Infrasound. So while I did not end up jumping to my death.. I am fairly certain that IF it was “Sound Poisoning” that day.. prolonged exposure can definitely push you off that edge. There are also sound devices that make you sick .. as some sort of prank device.. and my friends who never get sick plus some other people in the back got sick as well…so I always assumed it was plausible.
Theory
In an extrapolation of that let’s take a look at the Lavender Town Syndrome again and make it sound a bit more probable. From experience I have experienced anxiety and a crippling effect to my mental fortitude by a prolonged exposure to the original and enhanced Lavender Town Song. It triggered a need to escape from it and after which within minutes my fortitude returned to me. It also was nothing strong enough to compel me to any acts.. it just made me feel significantly worse. More so an amplifying effect for the negatives than creationary. However from first hand experience I have also been pushed very close to that edge with similar complaints with or close to a possible source of Infrared sounds. So the myth is not without ANY merit. While playing through the game however the song isn’t played long enough to really receive a high enough dosage of sound to notice any effect as they only become apparent after the 20 minute mark. The way the town is structured no one will be out that long and exaggerated effects only trigger after 40 minutes.. which makes it near impossible.
However if we apply a simple modifier to this story things begin to make sense again. You see Pokémon released in February of 1996.. and in the early spring of that month the suicides have been registered. So these suicides happened somewhere in between February and the end of April. So I wondered.. could people feel bad in that period?! A little research does show that those months are within the Japanese flu season. It would account for the increased amounts of doctor visits as it already is flue season more people will go to the doctor. “Sound Poisoning” enlarging your complaints seems possible so that kids felt sicker than with normal flu sort of makes sense. My dad told me switching a device on and off uses more battery power than letting it run for a bit so if I took a five minute break I would often leave my gameboy running. When your sick you play more sluggishly and eat soup in between and maybe watch some tv as well… shiver in a blanket who knows. So if we assume these are just sick children staying at home playing video games and idling about a bit .. I can see their symptoms get worse. For those very susceptible to these things I can see them get VERY sick and hopeless.
Perhaps they semi doze off with their handheld besides them and take on longer concentrations of sound. The need for peace and quite in Japan is already a bit higher so there being little to compensate might be possible and given how stressful the japanese school system can be they are already more inclined to depressive thoughts, as a known statistic. It requires some unlikely change of events to occur but the myth might not be fully impossible. If we take the super gameboy into account for example, the SNES peripheral that allowed you to play Pokémon in semi colour..with pokemon having their correct base colour all of the sudden.. it makes a lot more sense on why you would not briefly turn off the device when you eat a bowl of soup. That is also THE way to play at home without draining your batteries. In a set up like that Lavender Town Syndrome would be more likely to occur. One does not simply get up when feeling super sick to turn that off.. you just go limp and wait for the strength to turn that off. as for how effective sound can be.. there are prank devices that use Infrared sound that are pretty crippeling. There are devices using it that are as effective as a bottle of Epikek and I have experienced how depressing intense nausea can be.
So while it is unlikely that there is a Pokémon induced string of suicides.. it is not impossible. It would be improbable enough that this could easily be covered up or discredited as a hoax. By simply helping spread the rumour that it is from high tones and making it exclusive to kids it becomes an impossible story. However! Pokémon back in the first generation was almost exclusively played by kids, whom are both under a fair amount of pressure with the school system an are much more prone to become sick due to flue season. Back in those days, consoles had no sign of stand by mode and often a game could not even save as amazing as Pokémon could! You would lose a lot of progress so by instinct we already let our game run if we could not play for a tick. Prolonged exposure is quite possible in the mindset of the time.
How Pokémon would look on the SNES
So if we explain the myth that way, let’s look at actual change it would have caused in Japan. If we look at the suicide rates in 1996 in Japan about 3500 people in the age of 10-19 (deemed kids) commited suicide in Japan. That equals 291 each month. Now it is hard to exclude teens here as those take the biggest chair. .but children suicide is a HUGE problem in japan. Let’s say teens take 75% of that figure that still would mean that somewhere between 140-and 210 kids would end their life in the period Lavender Town Syndrome was said to occur. This is within range of the myth’s 200! This doesn’t even include younger people still so even if teens take a bigger slice of the pie (and when I say teens I count 16 to 19 year olds) the number of 200 never fully seems out of reach. It’s on the high end of the estimate but if we consider that Lavender Town Syndrome simply makes you more likely to take your life rather then forcing you to do so.. it doesn’t seem that odd that suicide rates would be at that specific number. The numbers of the myth DO work out.
Lavender Town in the first game requires you to get a certain device to make progress, however this is the most cryptic part of your journey so far so I can see it as a bit of a bottleneck. It makes sense that children get stuck there for a bit. Especially in the first wave of players with no guides out yet. So among those unfortunate souls that were lost it would make sense in a way that they are in our around that part. Except for maybe victory road it is the most cryptic and tricky part of the game after all. So perhaps Lavender Town Syndrome could simply be a statistic that got interpreted the wrong way. Perhaps it is a mere case of unrelated events happening at the same time… yet perhaps everything did influence each other , more then we can ever know. In that case Lavender Town Syndrome would be less about killer cartridges and more about a freaky.. Final Destination like event…which would go mostly unnoticed.
So could it be that Lavender Town Syndrome is in fact real?! No.. most likely not. Yet there are situations surrounding it that make it simply less impossible than one might think! Given that a suicide in Japan is 3x more likely to be caused by a health induced concern than anything else only adds to this story for example! We might have misunderstood or told the story wrong but there might me more to this myth than we might think! Nintendo or the Pokémon Company if I have discovered something I am fine with deleting this discovery.. in return for a trip to Tokyo and visiting the Pokémon Café and Poké Center at your costs! .. After the world has returned to normal of course! Because I also want to hug Chef Pikachu or server Pikachu! Of course if you want me to investigate more Ghost Stories about Pokémon my dearest Nintendo I am also very willing to that.. same price!
Greetings Mortals and those who have ascendent to monsters this month! For the blog’s birthday back in July I got a lot of birthday wishes, a bit of help on Ko-Fi and one gift! That gift came from a man that is now known as Indigo! That gift was a Japanese horror game! One I knew I would review for Halloween month! See.. sometimes I do plan ahead!
The Night’s Watch
Yomawari: Night Alone was a game that was developed for PS Vita and Steam spread around the world in October 2016. Although the Japanese PS Vita game came out a year prior to the Steam version’s World Wide release. The game has since seen a release on Switch with it’s Sequel : Yomawari: Midnight Shadows as the Yomawari Long Night Collection, launching close to Halloween 2018. I got gifted the Steam edition and as such will be reviewing that version and that version exclusively. The game scores about a 7,5 on Metacritic. Getting mostly Positive to mixed reviews and only a handful of negative ones. It takes roughly 3 to 5 five hours to complete this game, depending on if you are prone to use a guide on what to do if you are stuck yes or no. I finished the game in about 4 and a half hours myself, which included about one hours of pointless searching, including me exploring for some hidden items. To gain all hidden items I’d say would take.. about two more hours depending on your skill and control scheme.
In this game you play a nameless girl protagonist who during the tutorial is walking her dog. It is shown we can toss items as well and when we toss a stone we just picked up our dog goes to fetch it and run under a truck. Left with only a big pile of blood in the road, a torn collar and a hole in the side rails.. the girl looks flustered and makes her way home. It is there that she lives alone with her older sister. When that sister asks where Poro is the little girl is too traumatised to remember and says she doesn’t know. The older sister goes to find Poro but doesn’t seem to be returning so the traumatised little girl has to search all over town for her dog that presumably died and her sister.. whom she claims will die if she is not found. It is a journey that is filled with mysterious and dangerous spirits which want nothing more than to eat a little girl.. or to exact their terrible revenge on those who took them from this earth to early.
A not so lonely Night!
This game is brought to life in 2d topdown anime like artstyle with the main character and her sister and dog having some chibi-like qualities while the ghosts and monsters take a more “realistic” detailed appearance. The town is more in style with the Main character, being made out of soft natural tones, while monsters usually take on red and black shades or look overly large or with “wrong” details. It helps convey the issue that what you are seeing on this night does not belong to this world and it is through this style of visual trickery the game really builds it’s tension. The game is set in a sleepy small Japanese town and it’s adjacent locations such as the rice fields, the factory, the school and the woods.
Each chapter pushes you to visit a sub-location that makes you traverse to a newly unlocked part of town. Locations feel both unique and generic at the same time which conveys a great feeling of being lost yet does clearly show you what chapter you are working on. If you are outside the school there are a bunch of straight paths, and sideways that all look alike but you very much know you are at the school. You constantly need to search for the most effective route for you to get a new item or clue and while the same looking path causes panic and disorientation , the unique looking location itself does limit your search area thus never making it feel too daunting.
The sense of dread is aided by the fact that this game lacks a soundtrack! Except for maybe the menu and some very sparing moments there is no music playing at all during this game. All you hear is your footsteps on the asphalt or concrete.. and some monsterlike growls and grunts. Here and there a dog will bark and you wonder if it’s your Poro or it’s some other dog. Cat’s will cross your path to fake you out but the game doesn’t really use jumpscares to be scary. Instead it builds up to this claustrophobic anxiety. The sound design helps with this! Most monsters don’t even make a sound but if the MC draws close to a spirit her heart starts beating loudly and the closer it is the more panicked that heart rate it becomes
The character has access to three tools to shake them off. She can outrun them by having access to a limit sprint, she can toss an item to create a distraction and she can hide behind a rose bush or certain signs. When you hide the main character closes her eyes in fear and hopes the evil goes away. Instead of monsters we see pink swirls of mist as our heartbeat races. While you are absolutely safe in these locations and even if a monster saw you flee inside the use of the heartbeat is absolutely fear inducing. The fact that a pink/red mist is used instead of enemies always makes it a gamble if they are far enough to come out yet.. is it that creature you just saw? Or is this something else? How will it react to you coming out of hiding? Sound.. and the light of your flashlight are in most cases the only thing that makes these ghosts appear.
The strongest element of the audio-visual design of this game is most definitely the monsters/ghost. They are all so weird and extreme. A giant spider that has no head but instead a very humanoid face on it’s back.. check.. A zombie-like creature whose head is almost alert like a flashing light.. you know one of those alarm light or flashing lights of a cop car. A ghost dog with a disproportionate head so it looks like one of those stone guardians? Check! And these are enemies we encounter in the first chapter! Later we encounter many many more.. and everything feels unique and special. There are even spirits of children.. who look like children except it is as if their sprite is poorly covered with a black pencil and their eyes and mouth are now light sources.
Some of the spirits won’t harm you but if you bump into the wrong one.. bam you are still dead, MC gets eaten in a single hit. My favourite spirit feels like Nina Tucker and Alexander.. but missing the lower half of their body! It crawls in a straight line towards you at lighting speed and the only way to avoid is is to sprint to the side on time. It has some qualities of Samara from the Ring as well. Spooky creatures. Each time you see something you wonder to yourself.. Oh My Arceus.. what the heck is that! Get it away from me! You are never truly alone on this night but you REALLY want to be!
A whole night of wholesome!
While we have control of the main character most of the time , there are some in game cutscenes that take away that control. Sometimes it seamlessly passes over into you playing again and requires split second decisions and reactions. This keeps a tension to them I don’t often see, they are needed to let the character react to things. She can for example burst into tears, fall to her feet in fear or just look extremely startled. The anime style makes it feel cute and sweet and you genuinely feel like a very young girl. She doesn’t dare to venture off the roads too much so invisible walls in front of patches of grass are explained that way. She just wants to find her sister but tries to follow as much of the normal rules as possible.
This is reflected in the way she handles ghosts. At many moments you can encounter a “boss” ghost of the area which is usually a tormented spirit of some kind whom the main character has to bring a little offering or distract , or even perform a little chore to put them to rest. She wants to do the right thing and will place flowers on peoples final resting places as she acknowledges them and hopes they can find peace. It is really cute! Not all spirits are just evil.. most are just lost and while we journey we see this girl come to terms with that. She isn’t happy they are so scary..but they do not deserve to suffer either.
The age of the main character is also reflected in your menus. Your inventory feels like it is drawn with crayon, just like your map of town. It’s all drawn by the main character. Her journal entries displaying your objectives and discoveries are all written in a very childlike manner as well. It creates an endearing effect , even though we do not know anything about this main character, she doesn’t even have a name. We want to see her safe. She is so sweet and innocent, yet she did a terrible thing.. although not intentionally! She made her sister pay for her mistake! In the end we will find out that this will not come without consequences either… yet this is one of those horror games that ends.. pretty well. At least as far as can be expected. Weirdly enough the game also doesn’t shy away from darkness. A girl being pushed from a cliff and finding her broken body happens all the same as a spirit staring at the flower at her grave and being happy. It doesn’t go as dark as the second game which big reveal made me super upset, but it does really do well to walk a very strange but believable balance of dark and sweet. The main character is such a good girl and I had a smile when she befriended another spirit on her journey.. but I had my heart pounding in my throat when I first encountered them.
This wholesomeness also extends to the collectibles. During your journey by visiting places you do not HAVE to visit you can encounter stuff the main character seems to call treasures. Which are non functional collectible items. These can be simply crayons, but also pieces of fashion of things that she thinks look cool or special. The final treasure she can collect are those which belong to people who met an unfortunate end or whom she at least things belong to other people. Throughout the town you find numerous billboards that sometimes have rumors or missing person reports. A description of them is given in text .. for example “wears a red cloak” and somewhere in the map in the last seen area you find a torn piece of red fabric. These relics connect to the bigger world for those willing to pay attention, yet you do not miss anything of the main story if you choose to ignore it. Most of these types of treasures are spirits you will never “really” encounter. You just find rumors and more often than not proof that they won’t be coming home. The main character logs all these treasures in her little notebook even making little drawings for them. Plenty of these treasures are hidden behind small sidequests, for example you can get an egg as a treasure if you find and bring home five chickens to a coop you unlocked but forgot to close earlier. That kidlike charm is in everything you do here and I love it.
A Long Night or a Short Night
If you rush this game and stick only to the main goal and NEVER explore you can finish this game in 2.5 hours or so?! Which caused people to complain about it, yet I feel that is a bit of a lackluster reason to shoot this game down. People also complained that if they rushed they could complain about Pokémon Sword and Shield within 8 hours which was to short. Yet these games are clearly made not just to rush. That would be the same as saying Mario sucks because if you use warp pipes it only has like 5 playable levels in my opinion. Just because you can rush doesn’t mean you have to. Plus people who say that finished the game that fast, I assume either had a walkthrough present on how to play or watched a let’s play because there really are some parts that require you to figure out some patterns or find well hidden items. The game makes it clear enough where you should go but if you don’t constantly use the map to walk the perfect route you get plenty of bang for your buck. Horror should not go on too long because you can not keep that fresh for 8 to 10 hours. You might with a jump-scare style game or some deep narrative story but not in this format. So I believe this game actually has a great length.
However.. I am not super fond of their save system. In this you use a consumable coin to make an offer to an altar that works as a quicksave point. From then on out using an altar can allow you to save ..for one more coin or it can work as a quick travel point to other shrines you have uncovered. Quicksaves do record your progress but not your location upon a restart. If you want to go to bed (I play this LATE at night) after playing this game for a bit you will respawn back at your home, then you have to find a shrine near you pray to it teleport back to the location you where at yesterday, which can be hard to read of a children’s map and thus make your way back. If you do not have coins because you tossed them as distractions or if you save too much you can not save. Getting killed usually respawns you at the last prayer too late.. with some exceptions after cutscenes or “instance” switches. For example in chapter five you will be able to transfer between the normal world and a red tinted one that houses a huge town-covering centipede… whenever you switch between worlds you gain a checkpoint there.. but not always. So it always feels a bit as a hassle to come back to the same chapter the next day which more than once forced me to finish an entire chapter before taking a break.
I do not mind the “ink ribbon” system they go for with the coins, I think it does add some tension in Resident Evil , however in the age of streaming and let’s play respawning back at home feels really outdated. As lazy as it may sound, I do not want to spend 10 minutes just to get back where I was before. Not only do I have to find a shrine to pray near my house I also must be sure that I have coins with me so I can pray to the altar I went to just so I get a respawn point up. So if I am out of coins I first have to venture into town to find a few, which are usually around vending machines and temples. Another issue I personally had was that I had a bad time with the controls, which more than once resulted in me tossing a stone at a shrine and that douses the flame of the altar and negates the checkpoint. Since a few first encounters with ghosts result in certain death.. as you have no way how they work yet or how to flee from them, this means a lot of backtracking.. or at least going through hoops to end up where you were before. So sometimes chapters felt too long for the wrong reasons. Encountering new ghosts or seeing new attacks of a ghost I had no clue on how to dodge yet. It can cause a few of the trickier parts to go stale or frustrating real fast. Especially if you are out of coins!
Big Sisters Advice
The controls on PC are very clunky, walk with the arrow keys interact with z is fine but then the sprint button is mapped to E, waving your flashlight is mapped to WSAD , tossing an item instead of cancel is mapped to X and item select is mapped to V while turning off your flashlight is mapped to B. So the C button isn’t really used. Then through the item select menu you can switch items by pressing the sprint button instead of the arrow buttons..because you can still move when selecting items but you can not sprint?! Arrow keys Z is fairly normal for any type of game that favours a controller but the rest here makes no sense to me at all. At a certain point I just remapped almost everything! It’s fine since it’s an option to do that.. but my advice is.. play this one with a controller it plays so much nicer. If you do not have a USB controller this game easily is worse for it. This is also a horror game I now prefer to play earlier in the evening. Just so I can go on for stretches of an hour or so to complete a chapter. It is more enjoyable that way mostly because your journal does not update whilst in a chapter. Your goal will not update so if you forget where you were.. you are pretty lost. So play this game when you know you have a few hours available that month and you can play each chapter with the old clues still in your mind. Making notes could also be great if you want to complete the game and get all treasures.
This game comes with a manual and it’s not the easiest game to pick up, it is quirky and relatively slow paced. Fear doesn’t come from shouting in your microphone or a big husky man chasing you. Fear comes more in the build up of this chase, because of the unknown. It causes a sense of claustrophobia in a sense. Will you sprint now to get to your location early.. or do you walk keeping and end out for that crawling spirit.. will you come out of hiding while the enemy is still that close? What way is his head facing?! These abnormal creatures are amazingly designed and you want to see them all, but how can you see them in all their glory without being killed. The game wants you to have fun, explore a bit of the areas you already know.. while strictly tunnelling you in new areas to keep them feeling nice and claustrophobic and it is a formula I can deeply appreciate.
There is however a feeling of distance you will need to be able to accept.. you aren’t seeing the adventure through the main characters eyes, you guide her, even the way you control her feels slightly less direct with a mild delay.. as if you are guiding her by her hand instead of actually controlling her. It feels unwestern.. which it is. This game really understands horror but it is very much its own brand of horror. It is a unique type of horror that I would recommend people to try out without a shadow of a doubt in my mind. The game built around it is pretty good as well, just at times it can feel a BIT too much like a Newgrounds game to completely put me under its spell.
Thank you Indigo for gifting me this wonderful game! It doesn’t rely on jump scares and more so has you actually fearing for this sweet innocent child that is one of the most adorable main characters I ever played with. For people interested in this game, you can check out the steam page here!Happy Halloween and spooky games to everyone!
Hello again mortals who dwell on my island! For the spooky month I have been watching this strange.. little anime made out of short stories. Season 1 was a banger, season 2 was so… and now I watched the third season. Is it better than season 2?! According to most it is. I think it is! It does something in its final episode that makes everything better… but that also kind of messes me up in the format I do these reviews… what is going on!?
The Twisted Season
The third season of Yamishibai delivers WAAAAAY more on the horror than season 2. While it keeps on the same directors as the second season and I expected it to be kind of bad it almost feels as if the stories chosen have since been adapted to the direction style. There is a sense of more randomness in this season. Where season 1 focussed on retelling the classic ghost stories, season 2 seemed to “set up” for classic stories this third season seems to go bigger and bolder. It seems more focussed on original creatures slightly inspired by folklore rather than borrowing from it heavily. In a way I’d argue these stories feel more like “Creepy Pastas” and that works out really well for me. I get everything much more! There is still the “what the heck did I just watch” vibe but never did I wonder “does this references anything.. am I missing something”. So one of my biggest issues with the second season and even the first season has been fixed. However this comes with a new problem.. but I am not sure if it is an actual problem..because.. later we see that stylistic choice connects to a certain story.
The Narrator of season 1 and 2 has been replaced by a young boy who hears voices from the other side which makes him draw. These drawings form the inspiration for the new stories. Stories have no more explanation on who the main character is and we are drawn in from the sketch. It is a stylistic choice I like a lot that can add some extra tension. We do not always know who the main character is and it offers that extra bit of insecurity in some cases. In others it requires the story to set up the characters just a tiny bit more which already makes them slightly more endeared to us. At the same time though this does take a bit away from the Kamishibai show illusion. In this season we also see a slight artstyle change. The Kamishibai like images that the show is famous for feel more colourful and cheerful! They lack the grim eeriness of the first two seasons. Almost as if these target a younger audience.. which makes sense because this storyteller is a lot younger. And just like his mind seems to be a bit distrubed so do these stories change in a similar vein.
The stories seem more focussed on body horror and blatant monsters rather than ghosts that follow a certain set of rules. No instead we focus more on creepiness of twisting necks, changing shapes and gruesome implications. We lose a tad of subtlety and cleverness but in return we get a much more intense dramatic build up.. where the crux of the show isn’t always at the end. Sometimes it even happens near the middle of the episode. A few stories had me pretty scared and there certainly is a lot less “missed” opportunities. However since the narrator is a young boy..the scares seem to reflect that mindset. What would an eight year old come up with as a scary story. This results in this being the season that has some of the scariest creatures you have seen so far, who are further away from any logic.. or stories that would really resonate with children a lot…but the end scares are often a tad childish.. so in a way this is the season of untapped potential. The idea is there but the punchline often misses.
The other side!
Yamishibai season 3 ditches the classical ghost-stories more in favour of monster stories.. while there are ghosts and spiritual forces, they are a lot less subtle about their ways. Where season 2 had people startled, cursed or possessed by the end.. in this season the forces do not inconvenience you here the forces are downright trying to get you killed or mamed. This makes season 3 a very different show as season 2. Where moral lessons seemed to form the core to induce the haunts of the second season here it seems more to be induced by over conconfidence seasons don’t feel as preachy and instead more like a classic horror movie! Like the past two blogs about this show I will discuss the plot synopisis after which I give each episode a micro review! Be warned if you think a synopsis is a spoiler.
Episode 1: Lend it to Me
A young man visits a bathhouse after work, he seems to be the only male guest when a woman asks him to lend him stuff she did not seem to get at the checkout counter. The two have a talk and she sounds cute! Then the requests the woman begins to make start to get stranger and stranger and she begins to ask more and more aggressively.
What a great way to begin this season! It is a very good episode that properly introduces the scares. At first you do not know why! Why does the girl ask for a pair of scissors or a razor! Why is she so upset he hasn’t got one! The way old gritty movie filter that shows gives the bathhouse a bit of a grimey derelict look and the disembodied echoed voice from over the wall makes you wonder what will happen. When it is time for the big creature reveal we get a very brief and surreal shot, that can easily leave you jump-scared. It does not come where you expect it either. The creature design is wacky and makes you wonder what you have seen and ends in some very weird end credits.. that leave you pondering.. we do not get an “end..” we get a sketch.. that looks like a horrifying cap off. A very strong start and one of the better episodes of the series even.
Episode 2: Tunnel
Two friends are driving through the mountains when a wrong turn makes them realise they are short on gas. Encountering a tunnel that seems the quickest way back to the interstate they drive in and of course run out of gas. Tired from pushing the car they take a break when they see two children just outside the car window…but is it really just two children?!
While the first episode crossed us over from the Old Yamishibai into this new one .. this completely embraces it’s new style. The way that it seems to reach it’s climax in the middle of the episode is quite strange.. but we see why when it is clear this show pays as much attention to scaring you with the aftermath as the actual event. Sometimes an ambiguous fate is not enough. This season is more like “Oh My God they are eating her, and then they are going to eat me Oh my goooooooddd!” .. but not in the Troll 2 sort of way.. you are told what these monsters are capable of and what you should fear… only to reveal the truth is even more hopeless. This season caters into the fear of certain death and in this episode it is down very powerful. The last show in the tunnel is amazing and the linke we can make to it is nothing short but dreadful! One of the seasons highlights for me.
Episode 3: Rat
A young couple just started to live together in a new apartment , to save some money they went for a very cheap apartment which has a rat infestation. The girl being afraid of the rats gets bitten by one. Her partner then has to leave on a business trip and leaves her alone with nothing to defend herself but a rattrap. He tells her she has to get used to the rats..and we see her being slowly pushed to the brink of insanity as she tries to follow her husband’s will.
This is one of the lesser episodes for me! The reveal in the end was quite predictable and feeling odd. This is the first story that really seems to lean into the younger and more inexperienced story teller scenario. Or I could just be justifying this while in the end the episode isn’t all that scary. The visuals are noticeably brighter here in that the two episodes that went before and while the visual style does fit some of the episodes I think for this episode it all feels too bright and too clean. Let us feel they live in a rat infested hellhole instead of a clean house with some adorable little critters. The ending visual is super silly and it doesn’t seem to end as powerful as most of the other episodes. No matter how I look at it this one is an odd one out! I do have to give it some credits though for the tense scene before the conclusions so it is not totally without merit.
Episode 4: The Noisy Hospital Room
A fairly young man wakes up in the hospital after a nightmare, seeming himself being operated on in a room he was told by a nurse not to visit. When his vivid nightmares have given him cold-sweats however he has to explore the hospital to find him some change of clothes or he might catch a cold. During his search for a new nightgown he learns some horrible truths of this hospital.
A mid tier episode that is a bit bogged down because of the odd sound design that is present throughout this entire season. There is a lot of laughter, whispers and other effects that are meant to sound creepy that in fact sound rather cheesy. Like A Wilhelm Scream doesn’t really invoke fear anymore even if someone meets a gruesome end. The twist is deliciously evil in this episode but once again the entities seem slightly over designed giving it a slightly comical appearance. It feels more like something you show you kids in a picture book as a monster than something you need to be scared off. The strong dialogue that clearly captures the fear by the good voice acting can’t save the episode from mediocrity either as it is slightly drowned out by stock effects.This is the first episode that uses a number of fake outs to set us up for a proper scare but unfortunately fails to deliver a proper scare afterwards. Too childish for adults but a great story for a scaredy cat and wouldn’t you know it I have the perfect score for that!
Episode 5: Museum of Taxidermy
Taxidermy is that art of stuffing a dead animal and turning it into a “stuffed” statue preserved through the ages. Now that that has been explained for those who do not know .. or did not know the english word… this episode is set in a museum filled with stuffed animals. A couple staying in town runs in there to take shelter from the rain. Luckily the museum is free and they take a peek. The woman gets fascinated by how lifelike the animals look, particularly interested in a dog that almost seems to follow her with her eyes. Her boyfriend decides to prank her and shet gets mad and leaves.. trying to enter his hotel room later he finds her unresponsive and his own key missing.. So now he has to go back to the museum and search for it.
Where the sound design last episode was pretty shitty here it shines in telling a message. The fact that the hotel is called Hotel Otherside.. and the young boy narrator keeps screaming for things to happen on the other side.. hints at a connection between the stories and the real world which this episode really makes clear. Something is odd.. as if we are in a twilight zone of sorts. It banks heavy on that feeling and ends up with a satisfying punchline and amazing end visual. It is sick, it is twisted and it looks just silly enough to not be full of gross-out horror. It walks the fine line very well and we have a clear idea what happened on the other side..even though we never get to fully see it! Very nice with enough classic horror vibes form both the Twilight Zone and House of Wax to be deemed one of my top 3 episodes! Yet this time it has some competition and the third place spot!
Episode 6: “That Side” Festival
A festival is in town. Asako and Miki attend all sorts of fun activities together. They are having a great time until Asako gets mesmerised by a booth filled with mysterious masks. She loses sight of Miki and asks herself loudly where Miki went. One of the masks seems to respond with “That Side” suddenly the fair isn’t the same place it used to be anymore and everything goes extremely twisted and dark.
A mid tier episode that has some amazing visuals but at the same time it feels so over designed that it stands out a bit. The cotton candy vendor on the Other Side of things for example spins cotton candy by vomiting his own intestines on a cotton candy stick. While it looks gruesome it also looks like.. too much. It gets a cartoony quality. There are a lot of creatures here that look extremely silly and rudimentary. It is a great ride and I bet it would be awesome for a horror artist to check out these designs. This episode has some heavy Spirited Away vibes through it.. but then a darker take. It however misses the finality of the rest of the season and while I don’t need finality in all episodes I really wish here we would at least see the girl become bound to this new world or lose herself in it or something. It needed a nail to the coffin sort of speak. Without it.. it is nice but is exactly down the middle for me when it comes to spookiness. I can’t mark it as that so I will label it Scares without Nightmares…but if you can get past the odd designs you can scale this up one tier!
Episode 7: Behind
During Summer camp one guy insists on bothering the girls dorm even if his friends are too pooped to pop! When he keeps insisting his friends ask him how he has so much energy! He tells them he doesn’t but he has been having nightmares, people laughing and a creature then coming into the classroom and turning his head around on his neck but he knows that if he sees whatever is doing that .something horrible will happen.Later that night one of his friends wakes needing to go to the bathroom when he hears cracking sounds from his friends neck.
A very scary episode that is really hindered by a single really weird visual! It feels so silly it ruins the entire episode. Luckily I came to play Yomawari and I could accept the weirdness which gave me some appreciation of it. If you want to know how silly the visuals go…look up the game Hylics or Hylics two, a surreal RPG “series” and you have an idea on how odd it will look. I would have loved to see this episode go a bit more subtle myself but the combination of “have you heard’ and then seeing another effect occur is pretty cool. Is it linked together, are there dark forces at work here what will happen outside the dream.. what happens inside the dream. There is a light and a dark theme going on as well. That once again seems to be describing the existence of two sides. Had the ending not looked unintentionally comical this would have been my third favourite episode or maybe even my second favourite but now it has to do with fourth place.
Episode 8: The Empress Doll
Daphne, Fred, Shaggy and Velma travel to a haunted house and go to investigate it. Well it’s not really those four .. but still four meddlesome kids visiting a haunted house and encountering a presence. This one seems to be of an Empress Doll.. one of those stacks of porcelain dolls on a stair things you might have seen them before! While the house seems clear and safe at first a glance trough a mirror allows them to peer into a world yet unseen.
While the episode does start really suspenseful the end screen is yet again another very derpy looking monster. Which ruins the tension. What makes it worse is that the big “kill” makes no sense. We see someone suffer in a certain way. Making us believe either their soul was taken or they got so scared that their mind just shut down. Yet suddenly things completely shift and it makes no sense in the timeline of this episode. When did that happen?! Did they leave the person behind? If so that is rather poorly established. Once more the tension build up is great, reminding me a bit of the Amityville Horror series which I really like. It also is somewhat reminiscent of the Warner siblings horror series like Annabelle. It succeeds in once again establishing “another side” but fails to deliver another scare.
Episode 9: The Fourth Man
A girl in highschool overheard a rumor about an urban legend about “the handshake men” . These are people who will ask you for a handshake. If you refuse to give them a hand they will crush you into a meatball but if you happen to encounter a fourth one you have to refuse or they will bite off your hand. Later at night the girl is asked by her sister to go to her school as she left her notebook there and cant finish her homework afterwards. On their way back the girl encounters a strange looking man asking for a handshake.
This easily is the best episode of the season. It follows that Urban Legend feeling of the first two seasons but doesn’t require any prior knowledge due to explaining the myth entirely. It feels like a genuine Japanese ghost story, similar to Red Cloak, Blue Cloak, just a bit more tame. It has several jump scares, fake outs and misdirections and the conclusion it reaches in the end is satisfying! While we do not see anything gruesome happen there are some pretty heavy implications being made here that reminds me of some Goosebumps like novels I used to read. It has atmosphere, good visuals and nothing too silly to ruin the experience! This is definitely a story you can tell by the campfire or during a horror D&D campaign. If you watch anything be sure to check out this one!
Episode 10: Merry-Go Round
A young couple is visiting a mini theme park sitting on the roof of a Mall. They have only just arrived when they encounter a creepy clown, giving the girl a red balloon. Soon after it is announced the mall is already closing. Super disappointed the girl pouts when the clown offers her one last ride on the Merry-Go-Round for free. The girl gets on and seems to have a lot of fun but she might have misinterpreted the words “one last ride”
This one really benefits from the brighter visual style. Of course the clown giving away blood red balloons immediately evokes memories of It. Yet when the Merry-Go-Round goes round and round this episode seems to start to take more and more cues from the bad Nightmare on Elm Street movies. It delves into the absurd once again and so many elements seem to not play a role in this. There are a lot of creepy people around the Merry-Go Round but non of them really seem to have any correlation to what is going on. Maybe they do but the connection is not made clear at all. As a result this episode feels really disjointed. It does have some creepy visuals and I don’t even mind what happens in the end all that much but the dialogue, the set up and the result do not seem to match up. As if I am watching three different writers create a four minute story. While I do enjoy extreme random horror at times, in a four minute interval it is too much to make this enjoyable.
Episode 11: Cuckoo Clock
A young girl staying over at her grandma’s house with her mother for a few days discovers her Grandma’s clock and is immediately obsessed, wanting to see the Cuckoo pop up every hour she has some good and innocent fun. On her first night there the girl wakes up a few moments to midnight, very thirsty! She goes downstairs to drink when she notices the clock will nearly reveal the Cuckoo again.. when at twelve the Cuckoo doesn’t show up.. the girl goes to investigate a bit closer… she shouldn’t have!
This episode was okay! I really do like the episodes where people get obsessed with Mundane objects holding less than Mundane powers. This is another one that can feel insanely silly but this one still feels like it could be an actual ghost story of the orient. This is how you do silly episodes! It once again uses body morphing for a shock effect but this one is done kinda cool, even if it also looks very odd. The story beats the story hits feel logical next to each other and while it is not all that scary it is just a fun four minute watch. Reminding me a bit of those Goosebumps Junior novels! Safe for your kid! Fun for the family!
Episode 12: In the Water
It’s the competitive swimming season. One particular schools ace is put under a lot of pressure from his coach so now he has to train and train and train. Luckily he can train at night since he has been given a key to the school’s pool! Just after dark at 8 in the evening, the boy decides to go for a final training session. During this session he notices something odd in the pool! He thinks he is seeing things because he is put under so much pressure and decides to train anyway! He gets into trouble for this choice…. in record time!
This is one of those episodes that is a bit bogged down by cultural differences and plot convenience. Working to hard so you hallucinate seems to occur in many Japanese man according to this series though! Still it seems like a bad idea to jump into the water when something seems off.. it damages this horror experience for me. I doubt a semi-pro swimmer would risk jumping into the water if something dangerous might be in it. It doesn’t help that later in the episode the swimmer tries to flee the pool by swimming to the stairs.. while he could easily push him up onto the dry land way before that. How could he not push himself to saftey as soon as he could?! Fear?! In the end I doubt it would matter as the deed had more or less already been done.. but jeesz this man seems to tried really hard to win himself a Darwin Award. Also the creature/visual has no set up, no reason to be there and it is super ugly as well. As in.. it’s ugly..but it is also not very well drawn with very weird proportions that also lead to other visuals shown before not making sense. Bad episode!
Episode 13: —Drawings—-
Yes I actually did type what this episode is about! Well done in discovering it! This episodes ties all stories together as from the intro of the boy drawing we don’t cut.. we see the boy drawing! A teacher finds him and asks what he is doing .. he says nothing and walks off. She later finds out he is in her new class and tries to befriend him by asking him to draw her. He refuses telling her she is boring. As she discovers more he finds out the boy has been sketching all sorts of people who have gone missing… the boy shows up and finally agrees to draw her, and it is revealed that this boy would grow up to become the storyteller of the previous season and his stories turn kids into monsters for more stories in the future!
This episode is great for the scale! It really brings all the other ghost stories together but for that reason I have hidden the plot of this episode from you! It connects everything, intro, outro and episodes. Visuals shown in the intro of season two suddenly make sense, and the odd choices this movie makes in terms of narratives all make sense now. Some of these flaws in the stories described earlier were clearly put in with intention! While I commend them for this bold choice it also comes with a problem.. Did people make it this far? Since it is so episodic and stand-alone one could easily watch these episodes out of order yet this one SHOULD be watched last. It doesn’t follow the rules of the show but it is amazing. The ending feels disjointed but delicious. Appealing to fans of the series and making me excited for a fourth season. The story that is interwoven in this episode feels a bit short.. as a lot of time is spent on the epilogue but it still is deeply satisfying.. though I can not rank it among the other episodes.. This is it’s own thing and it is quite good! Yet not perfect.
Into the Darkness
This season to me is much better then the second one! Albeit a tad to obvious and odd at times, I think this is for me might even rival the first season. Yes there are more lows and the highs aren’t AS high but it was enough! Where season 1 over-achieved at times this one just does the job it needs to do and it does it well. I never felt that lost and the final episode was a little cherry on top of an already pretty good season. Even as a Gaijin you can understand all these episodes and never do you have to google something to appreciate the story. Watch these after midnight just when you begin to feel.. Oh I am really tired.. that is the perfect moment where the weirdness can get to you less.. but the scares can get to you hard! I will at least give the fourth season a chance now as well! So be sure to come back for more soon!
Pinkie's Paradise 