Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004)

 

Director: Richard Ayoade

Screenplay: Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness

Cast: Matthew Holness as Garth Marenghi/Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D; Richard Ayoade as Dean Learner/Thornton Reed; Matt Berry as Todd Rivers/Dr. Lucien Sanchez; Alice Lowe as Madeleine Wool/Dr. Liz Asher

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Series)/ An Abstract Candidate

 

I have never exploded. But I know what it would be like. Don't ask me how. I just know.

Garth Marenghi - author, visionary, dream weaver - is a prolific horror author, and in the eighties, he worked on a TV series which was never broadcast except for in Peru. That was until Channel 4 in 2004, desperate for content, asked him to resurrect the project, with new interviews with cast members who have not disappeared in the decades after. Breaking kayfabe, with the premise even sustained with the DVD released, is that Matthew Holness created Garth Marenghi originally in 2000, as part of a Richard Ayoade co-written horror parody stage show Garth Marenghi's Fright Knight performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Brought to this series, he is a parody of the likes of Stephen King, who had his real Marenghi moment when he directed Maximum Overdrive (1986), and also the likes of Dean Koontz or James Herbert¹, fellow prolific horror authors. Marenghi is an egotist, a sexist, and has an episode of these six where he exposes his racism against the Scottish, the definition of a man with his head up his arse, thinking of himself as the messiah of horror who can even have profound insights to help humanity but is a tawdry author of terrible ideas and dialogue.

Darkplace itself is a disaster in terms of wooden acting, cheesy props and using slow motion to pad out episodes. A meta-textual work, the actual show is Marenghi directing himself and starring in the main role, as the former warlock Dr. Rick Dagless M.D at Darkplace Hospital, who with side characters encounter increasingly weird and horrifying events. Marenghi in the series-within-the-series was allowed to shoot interviews, mainly with his publisher Dean Learner (Richard Ayoade) who starred as Darkplace Hospital's administrator Thornton Reed too, and later on Todd Rivers (Matt Berry), an actor on the show that visibly became the stereotype of the older star reduced to drinking a lot. When I first saw Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, I found it disappointing after all the build up. The episodes came off as slightly amusing but average altogether as I marathoned the entire series. A lot of the humour is the absurdity and ridiculousness of this set up, both Marenghi's ego, and the pastiche of a badly made horror series where he let his ego run wild, where he is shown as always cool and virtuous to the children in the wards, sexier than even Todd Rivers' heartthrob character, and always right. This time, I appreciated the show on its own terms, when the first scene introduces female lead Dr. Liz Asher (as played by Alice Lowe), who when starting at Darkplace Hospital is introduced to a cat, visibly placed on the hospital set by hands, telling her to "just leave!" in a dubbed over voice.

The show's structure could be a paradoxical one to work with; to create a technically awful programme could lead to making a dreadful show because it is too accurate to the dreariest of this type of programming. My initial issues with the show was that it was too deliberately broad, which leads to an ironic tone I found tedious at the time, growing when this became more common as a form of parody and becoming unbareable at the time onwards for a good few decades in cinema and television. With hindsight, I was too harsh on this, now that common trait has not become as prevalent. Though a version of this which fully depicted some of the strange programming coming from the likes of the BBC to ITV from the eighties would have been just as interesting for me, I just have remind myself I have seen some ridiculous special effects and incidents even in that type of programming which has won me over for their sincerely good parts. Then there are things, admittedly not a Dr. Who viewer but aware of this and seeing it with my own eyes, where you can have Bertie Bassett, the mascot of a British confectionary company, terrorised Dr. Who actor Sylvester McCoy in his sci-fi candy lab² and think that is the kind of insane moment you could have had in a hypothetical second series of Darkplace, if on a deliberately lower budget, and not bat an eye in standing out as too weird.

The central joke is established around how Garth Marenghi is clueless to how bad he is, and the six episodes we get are entirely focused on this, the first episode contrasting the madness of a man exploding into tiny pieces but Dagless still asking if he is all right afterwards. There are the scenes hastily put in to show Thornton Reed with a shotgun out-of-nowhere, in an entirely different field, when this man, the result of having tried practicing a demonic ritual with Dagless in the lunch hall, refuses to stay in his casket at the funeral, or how Reed himself is so wooden, to the point they have to shoot his scenes usually by himself even in two person conversations. A lot of my growing warmth to the series came from that initial negative reaction, developing a fondness for the production as time went on to its goofy tone as I thought about the series for a good few years, suddenly growing into a person who got the humour entirely. A lot of this is in mind that this is not trying in the premise to be a pitch-perfect parody of this type of television horror, which was the issue initially, but that this is exaggerated around Garth Marenghi's qualities as a creator being central to the joke. The one exception is where the final episode feels like Nigel Kneale's Quatermass mini-series if someone turned into alien broccoli rather than a blob. Instead, it is a very broad mash-up of medical soap opera and horror story where people being attacked by floating staplers, on noticeable strings, as in the second episode are so bad on purpose. The barebones nature of most of the episodes means you cannot really have a plot trajectory, so the humour has to come from the silliness. Also the interviews as integral to this punch line where the actors we have show their bad or misguided sides, such as how the cat somehow died on set or how two technicians died on the Scottish Mist episode, or how Dean Learner even hit a child for criticising how bad his dialogue is.

Cast wise, it is mainly the core four members who dominate the series barring a few surprise cameos, like Stephen Merchant or Julian Barratt as the hospital priest, emphasising that even before his role in Peter Strickland's bizarre horror film In Fabric (2018) Barratt could add gravitas even to the silliest of material, or add a much needed sense of absurdity to even serious material. Matthew Holness as Garth Marenghi, both the writer and star, is interesting, and there are times he is lovably charming as he is actually indefensible, which makes the comedy work especially when it can lead to the abrupt reveal that they added comical amounts of slow motion to the second episode, where Liz goes on a rampage with her powers, or the Scottish Mist episode being about Dagless learning to overcome his intolerance to the Scottish only to expose, as he dodges the accusations of racism in his interview footage, that Marenghi shoot both feet off with his depictions of said Scottish. Richard Ayoade as his publicist hits the right tone and is a highlight - off the show he is a sleaze but in a subtle way that is funnier, whilst as the administrator of the Darkplace hospital, Ayoade inflects perfectly a man who cannot act. Matt Berry likewise hits to the right one too, as a hammy actor who adds w-e-i-g-h-t to his vocals in a way that's memorable, sounding like it is dubbed.

Sadly Alice Lowe as the sole female character is undercut by one of the major running gags, and is one of the moments where the show has flaws, in a show that does try for some social commentary in its humour, such as the final episode explicitly is a parody of terrible programming trying to metaphor AIDs is tasteless ways. The second episode especially, but throughout in her character's depiction, reflects how its author Marenghi has incredibly sexist dialogue and views of Dr. Liz Asher, playing her off as the simplistic female staff member, or in episode 2 going full-Carrie to the point people are menaced by furniture on string. It presents an issue especially as Lowe's character is later revealed to have disappeared, likely dead and buried in a random place in Eastern Europe. It is to the show's credit, whilst arguably the weakest episode, it was deflecting this sense of biting too hard at a difficult subject, sexism in older horror storytelling, with Marenghi coming off ridiculous from the get-go to get around this, as he is a dolt with very stupid ideas, and that we have Matt Berry in this episode having to fight off a homicidal egg whisk. My views on Darkplace have aged well due to seeing another parody of horror pulp, Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001), which is likely to one Steve Coogan project people may have forgotten even exists, where you had the issue of it parodying problematic issues of pulp fiction like Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, done with earnestness to still point out this was all racist as a joke but still having an actor in yellow face playing a Manchu pastiche to get the joke over. Episode two here is in the same issue of dealing with gender politics by having the sexism be so over-the-top, which may put people off or even just cause them to roll their eyes at the broadness of the pastiche, not actually dealing with the subject with enough to justify the satire and be comedy at the same time, so this does count as one of the weakest episodes if thankfully with a defter hand than Dr. Terrible.

Episode three clears the palette with probably the most eyebrow raising moment, a male patient being impregnated by an eye creature (with pixelated out genitals to the annoyance of Dean Learner) and immediately dying in childbirth conceiving an eyeball child. Here the humour of both the interviews and the story itself works, as Marenghi's obsession with never having male child but only four daughters, and a eulogy to a dead pet dog, are contrasted by Dagless' past trauma of losing his half-man half-grasshopper son which leaves him trying to protect a potentially dangerous eyeball child. Episode 4 imagines contaminated water turning the hospital into primordial ape people, effectively Planet of the Apes if with a bicycle chase final with an "apeazoid" that briefly turns into an episode of The Krypton Factor, a 1977-2010 game show which emphasises legitimate Mensa-like brain teasers, puzzles, and as the reference became evoked, an obstacle course with rope pulls as here.

By Episode 5, we get to the Scotch Mist, which is John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) if with kilter Scotsmen instead of pirate ghosts, who leave Scottish oats by their victims. Alongside the tangent about using high street bought batteries over cheap ones from markets, it is a story about overcoming prejudice but so prejudiced in the depiction, even subtitling the Scottish ghosts, it undercuts itself, Marenghi thinking Daglass can earn the name of true Scotsman by just apologising and appeasing the ghosts with shortbread. Episode 6 is the other time the series takes a risk in terms of more serious nods, being a tone deaf metaphor for the AIDs scare, which is explicitly talked of and is the one other time Darkplace is in danger of stumbling. Thankfully, it is also the story to contrast this which has the right balance of almost taking itself serious whilst being ridiculous to prevent this undercutting itself with the metatextual commentary taking too broad a scope on this subject. The humour found in Lucien Sanchez falling in love with a female patient slowly turning into alien broccoli due to a highly contagious mutation, that does feel like soap opera, Nigel Kneale and a healthy dose of sex humour in a blender prevents this issue of tackling a risky subject for satire because it is one of the stronger stories in its jokes. It allows Matt Berry more material to work with, which is for the better; it also has the one actual surprise where the episode abruptly turns into a synthpop music video for the character, and does one of the superior metatextual jokes in which a fight scene that breaks out, to save Lucien's life, was lost and had to be reconstructed from photos shot on the film set.

The first time I saw Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, I thought it was a case of acquired taste, because I had always taken an issue to ironic humour at that point. Nowadays, this is not the case, and instead I wished there had been another series to just stretch this premise from that initial set-up, forcing it to have to take risks with the construct. Garth Marenghi never came back barring a cameo in Man to Man with Dean Learner (2006), an in-world talk show hosted by the Learner character which had Marenghi on as the first episode guest, and it would have been interesting to witness how the second series of Darkplace, having established the set-up, could have forced this broad parody into his own discomfort or stranger humour as we could elaborate on the premise of the Darkplace show, or in the interviews. Any more series beyond this might have capsized the premise and become that ironic-for-the-sake of irony I thought this show had, and even with its flaws as is, you would have lost the magic I finally appreciated after time to soak myself in Marenghi's dream weavings.

Abstract Spectrum: Absurd/Ironic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

 

==========

1) Not in the slightest a knock against either man, but they are the apt comparison points for authors who commonly appearing second hand book stores in the United Kingdom, least in my neck of the woods, and how Herbert's blunt titles and covers does really evoke the absurd, crasser ones Marenghi's has as seen in the series.

2) Kandyman befittingly comes from the 1988 era of Dr. Who, emphasising how actual eighties television, though Darkplace is meant to be the early eighties, could really be as ridiculous as the parodies of that era.

Hellsing (2001–2002)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Series)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

For a tangent, I return back to an anime series I had not seen until the 2000s when I got into the medium. Naturally, there was nostalgia in this one case, as the likes of the original Hellsing come from a specific period of anime which I got into by the mid-2000s and no longer exists. ADV Films, who released this in the United Kingdom, no longer existed by the end of the decade due to financial problems, and Gainax, the divisive anime studio who produced this, were a prolific studio whose titles came out at the time I was getting into anime, and also suffered from severe financial problems by the end of the decade too. They still exist, but they are not the same big budget studio who divided people in terms of the quality of their work. This was also the era, for whatever bizarre reason, someone thought releasing three to four episodes a DVD disc, at full price as separate releases, was a good idea until sanity prevailed and we just got box sets.

Hellsing is an action horror about a secret group of vampire hunters in England, with the really cool choice to cast actual British voice actors (or try for proper regional accents) in a rare moment of English dub acting where, even notoriously as with certain Manga Entertainment dubs, even British recording productions pretended to have American accents. The issue comes with the knowledge this was the "original" adaptation of the source manga. Gainax, as the review gets into, were seemingly cursed with an inability get stories properly finished, and this one was struggled worse because said manga had barely started with material yet to reach when the show was in production. It tries its hardest with wrapping together the plot threads already there into a new story and having to bring in new series only content. Sadly, one of the most interesting inclusions in terms a new villain, for a 2000s production, touches on problematic stereotypes in horror fiction of African mysticism, and it still struggles by its end. Now it also has been entirely wiped from the slate due to Hellsing Ultimate, a more faithful adaption for straight to video which had a high budget, the manga fully to work from, and didn't need to censor the gore whatsoever for television.

The virtues are here, least in style, and I learnt a long time ago, I can find things to appreciate even in really bad anime, but this is exactly the reason, for all the things I think are great, I don't believe in having nostalgia. I would rather return to these productions of my memories as new again, strike that nostalgia dead, and find virtues even in a work like this I admit has huge crippling flaws.

For the full review, follow the blog link here.

The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police (1997-8)

 

Studio: Nelvana

Director: Steve Whitehouse

Screenplay: J.D. Smith, Steve Purcell, Hugh Duffy, Marty Isenberg, Robert N. Skir, Bob Ardiel, Jamie Tatham, Tim Burns, Dale Schott and Tracy Berna

Based on the comic book series by Steve Purcell

(Voice) Cast: Harvey Atkin as Sam; Rob Tinkler as Max; Dan Hennessey as the Commisioner; Tracey Moore as Darla "The Geek" Gugenhee; Patrick McKenna as Lorn the Friend for Life

An Abstract Candidate

 

It might not look much, but in two weeks they put me on fries. Then they’ll pay!

By episode two, this show has parodied 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), when tuning the monolith to stop it causing suffering leads to the simian people living around it to discover roller disco for the better. This is somewhat appropriate for this title, a one season adaptation of Sam & Max, originally a comic book by Steve Purcell, adapting the characters his brother Dave started in their youth, apatly being the result of Steve parodying his brother’s own comics just to annoy him¹. Most will know the videogame adaptation by LucasArts, the point & click game Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993), as Steve Purcell became a staff member and brought the characters with him. From their golden age of these titles, Sam & Max was a strange game as much as a funny one, a touchstone to weird Americana which this series gets into, a franchise which would see a reboot in 2006, when with Sam & Max Save the World, Telltale Games would bring the characters back in a series of episodic games. In the midst of this, was this Canadian animated series that I actually saw an episode of on Fox Kids on satellite television in the UK, the episode about a “glazed McGuffin”, so I have had an emotional investment to track this series down.

Wondering why the series was cancelled, effectively thirteen episodes with twenty four segments, I would not be surprised alongside how precarious television is in general, where even a good show will not be continued with, that a work which feels more inclined for adults to appreciate it more was not going to succeed. It feels barely like a children’s show, disguised as such when it is more a dissection of one, where in episode two, going by each being ten minutes stories, the leads are looking directly to the camera and breaking the fourth wall among many times, saying that they will not have commercials only to cut to one. Even the music is eclectic as it goes – the title theme is jazz verging on avant-garde, and eventually with the Apocalypse Now parody in a later episode, when the leads are in central park in New York City, a literal jungle here searching for the commissioner’s lost keys, you get psychedelic rock in the score.

The premise is scatter shot on purpose aside from the fact that Sam in an anthropomorphic dog in a suit, Max is a bordering psychotic “rabbit-thing” and both are true best friends forever. As “freelance police”, in a world where New York City is even more rundown to the point you get a joke about a rat literally carrying a baby on its back away, they are the only sane thing to bring in for the weirder cases if they do not get into their own mischief along the way. The original videogame was already unpredictable, getting into a secret tribe of Bigfoot, as this show gets into for an episode, and an apocalypse to be averted, so this is not strange ground for the franchise. Even with prior awareness of this, however, this show is still legitimately strange, the kind of show which does not try to explain why it has shifted into a parody of the night Mary Shelley devised the story of Frankenstein, set in the period past, to allow a story of Max’s tale being resurrected and developing sentience, or how episode fourteen involving them having to deal with a giant robot which has done its job, even if that means taking it over to Japan to fight a kaiju sized baby.

Probably more striking before you get into the plots or the visual look of the series is how verbose the dialogue is. Likely to go over some adults’ head, and even referencing Aristotle at one point, it is hilarious at times and shows how the series is able to get away with pure disregard for logic, in how this show finds ways to be this gleefully witty even when it is weird. A lot of the experience is just viewing the series and not expecting what will transpire, but there are good episodes just by themselves – a Die Hard Christmas parody is funnier because you have Sam’s grandma, an awesome one-off of a woman who apparently survived the Korean War and put most of the prisoners away she now visits and gives gifts too on the series, even if being a stereotypically lovable grandma, and armed with fruit cake both likely to be bulletproof and proven to break a whole foot’s worth of bones when used as a defensive weapon. And it is amazingly twisted in a lot of its humour as well, where the sense it is merely pretending to be a children’s show is clearly obvious at times, in how the Frankenstein parody gets into the idea of desecrating graves, only to get a Victorian era drive-in fast food place to provide fake body parts, or helping sentient rats on the moon avoid being used to stir into coffee by giant cockroaches. There is one entire segment, about the practical uses of a pancreas, such as being a door stop, which is just an excuse to get body organs onscreen without being too gory.

There is also stuff in here I wish, as original concepts from this TV series, returned into later videogames, such as Darla "The Geek" Gugenheek, the sole female character in the cast but a cool one as the most sober figure in the leads’ circle, as their gadget creator and friend, cool in the sense of the straight man in their comedy who still has the appropriate cynicism for the tone as a teen prodigy able to accept the lunacy that transpires in this world. Some may not be as fond, in his two episodes, for Lorne “the Friend for Life”, one of many ways these shows were perversely mocking their own obsessive fan bases, something you see even in the Comic Book guy in The Simpsons, a super fan for Sam and Max whose enthusiasm is too much even for them. That he willingly breaks the law, and eventually ends up hijacking a Swiss tourist blimp to for his heroes to save the day in, is an ultra-cynical joke contrasted by how potentially annoying or insulting the character could be, as he really cuts down into the bone with hindsight about fandom for pop culture. (The blimp episode would also not be acceptable, in its jokes, post 9/11).

A huge portion of the show, and these characters included, is a fixation on weird and “lowbrow” Americana, the world of the largest balls of string attractions, which was a prominent aspect in locations in the first game, alongside junk food and general pop culture, be it the bigfoot episode, explosive corndogs as a single episode joke, a Jerry Springer parody required to settle the marriage problems of Greek Gods Zeus and Hera, or that one of the villains’ plans, only evil because he has the brains removed from the locals to turn them into zombies for his lair, is to create sea monkeys which actually live up to the years of false advertising. Said villain, Mack Salmon, also has to be a hyper intelligent fish in a robot suit which, like Bob the Goldfish in the Earthworm Jim franchise, is general weirdness that can also be found throughout the nineties in general. Fast food employers, unwisely, are employed by a super villainess who wishes to extract all the worst traits of tourists and use it as a biological viral weapon, and like the game, Sam and Max clearly like their strange on the road attractions as they do junk food and television. The glazed McGuffin episode I remember in fact, a reference to the “McGuffin” Alfred Hitchcock used as a term, is entirely of its era of idiosyncratic (and highly unhealthy) junk food full of preservatives and the streak of political correctness campaigners from the time, as someone gets their favorite snack taken off the shelves and, in their attempts to hound him to change his mind, ends with him snapping and trying to murder them. Mocking fifties pop culture, at a time when nineties culture reflected on the past, you get an entire episode, if slighter than the premise could have become, about a figure from a children’s TV show named Dangly Deever being brought into the then-present and being forced to accept a world worse than Rudy Giuliani’s worst nightmares.

As for the leads themselves, they nonchalantly take most of this in, with the show having a streak of post-irony to it all, the pair blasé no matter how dire the situation, such aliens running a diner where they feed customers other customers, effectively riffing on Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987)  in as child friendly form as they can. They do not act like cartoon characters in fact, as in possibly one of the issues a viewer could have, they never go off-model as anyone else in this world, a concept for comedic timing in animation of distorting your characters for moments for emphasis in the moment, instead the two figures appropriate for this highly details and vivid world standing back and commenting in the absurdity until they need to get their hands dirty, even in reference to being a fictional show. They are capable of nobility, such as getting an artificial heart as quickly as they can to the President of the United States, but they also willingly mess around with time travel and change it, giving a caveman a rocket launcher, to see what happens in the future. It is not with surprise these characters, in this version, were not going to take the show over more than one season, for they seem as much reflections to their writers, gleefully stepping on clichés in the medium, rather than making something which is meant to have adventure and fill space between advertisement.

I have nothing but admiration for the show. It dangerously gets close to being too weird for the sake of it, but the level of humour is so consistent that it succeeds, with how many jokes land and even when something is so abrupt, in strangeness or just kneecapping expectations, to cause me to laugh. The show is helped simply by the fact that it is one season and cannot outstay its welcome. As much as I am fascinated by the idea of how they could have continued this, a one-one season which knew it was doomed, ending on a final episode which, in another inspired touch, is a clip show using scenes that are newly animated from stories we never saw, there was as much chance it would have been compromised if it managed to be hit. I think, truthfully, its home in videogames where the big success came from was where these characters can rightly stay, with this instead the tangent that we really just need to be more readily accessible.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric / Metatextual / Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

====

1) The History of Sam & Max: Part 1: The Early Years. From Telltale Games’ site, archived from the original on January 3^rd 2008 and preserved on the Wayback Machine.

School Days (2007)

 

Director: Keitaro Motonaga

Screenplay: Makoto Uezu

Based on the adult visual novel videogame by 0verflow

(Voice) Cast: Daisuke Hirakawa as Makoto Ito; Shiho Kawaragi as Sekai Saionji; Tae Okajima as Kotonoha Katsura; Chiaki Takahashi as Nanami Kanroji; Haruka Nagami as Otome Kato; Keiko Imoto as Setsuna Kiyoura; Megu Ashiro as Kokoro Katsura; Ryouko Tanaka as Hikari Kuroda; Yoshiaki Matsumoto as Taisuke Sawanaga

Ephemeral Waves

 

[FULL SPOILERS throughout; whilst a warning will be added to where significant plot reveals are shown, this is an immediate warning as this review has to talk about the full details of the plot in general, which may ruin a great deal of the experience for others.]

 

On the surface, School Days presents the stereotype of an anime, for anime fans and for outsiders to the media; in high school, Makoto Ito is encouraged by his female friend Sekai Saionji to start dating Kotonoha Katsura, a timid girl in another class. Sekai however has feelings for him herself, and at first, even as a fan of this notorious 2007 series, it shows the hallmarks of a stereotypical high school melodrama, including the hijinks of the early dates between Kotonoha and Makoto which are played fully as comedy, such as the decision of what film one should take a girl to or his ill advised decision to get guidance from a men's romantic advise magazine. The show also cannot be disguised from its origins, that this was based on an erotic game, something which may raise the eyebrows considerably especially in mind to the setting, as that means the original work was pornographic with explicit sex scenes (barring Japanese censorship laws). A multimedia franchise, this does follow a lot of the clichés of the seemingly charismatic but bland male lead, who manages to have a lot of girls suddenly develop romantic feelings for him, and the trope of the group of girls he could be with, as this is based on a visual novel, a video game genre narrative driven and based on choosing choices that determine the story ending you get. Add things from the cheesecake moments of slight eroticism to the token male friend whose desperateness for the opposite sex is played fully for comedy, and there are plenty of shows which likely exist which have these aspects and are forgotten. Thing is, there is a clear signal, in the first episode when the show's title appears and broken glass is heard, that something is amiss even if it could be missed. Makoto is not going to be your usual male anime protagonist, especially as three episodes into a light comedy about his awkward romance with Kotonoha, he too eager for her in wanting to be physical as a couple, he starts getting bored with courting her.

School Days was notorious for a good reason, though the appearance for this anime series can be deceptive. The visual novel, published in 2005, like others in this genre is an interactive novel that offers the aforementioned multiple narrative paths and endings, and like a choose-your-own-adventure story from the West, you can have good and bad endings. This presents an issue with adapting these to anime in how to tell them, let alone with manga, with only a few playing to their origins. Higurashi When They Cry, a 2002 visual novel by Ryukishi07, founder of the dōjin (fan made) circle 07th Expansion, plays to a Groundhog Day repeating cycle eventually explicit to its horror mystery story, which is something few of these titles have the ability to work with. Others either adapt the tale in one way, and others are more creative, such as how Amagami SS (2010), the first series specifically, is your stereotypical (if likable) high school romance which just envisions what happens if the male lead was dating a different female peer in a different time line, a few episode chapters devoted to each of these possibilities. School Days, after its initial light and cheery tone in the first three episodes, changes into a dark chimera eventually of interest, especially as when considering the source, which could have incredibly nasty endings, the production team of studio TNK decided to make this the really bad ending in anime form. I should have probably not been surprised as, when I first saw this series, I learnt the director was Keitaro Motonaga, who helmed Malice@Doll (2000), a work that I hold in high regard, though with the caveat that it is an odd creation as an early computer animated body horror sci-fi work which is truly peculiar. Obviously, that enough cannot explain in the influences behind the show, be it the production design recreating the visual novel characters, the source material itself, or screenwriter and series compositor Makoto Uezu, but it was apt that a man behind that particular piece of surreal nightmare fuel was here. Within a career that varies from porn (House of 100 Tongues (2003) for example) up to helming the 2010s Digimon Adventure tri. films, Motonaga's presence here with a show which gain a notoriety entirely because of unfortunate scheduling on Japanese television feels like a perverse cherry to how this production turned out.

The premise itself could have easily descended in something bad on just the synopsis though, just a de-eroticised melodrama if you never heard of the game. School Days, with its conventional (stereotypical) TV look of bright colours and conventional characters designs are matched by a stereotypically bland male protagonist and the close-ups of female characters' figures, far more lurid and questionable in terms of a problematic male gaze, and because these characters are still in school. Kotonoha, the girl he is initially pushed into dating by his tomboy female friend Sekai, is depicted as a voluptuous big eyed girl who is quiet and shy around men, all whilst Sekai herself spends her time arguing with him through exchanged notes in class, the tomboy who, as the cliché goes, has a crush on him too. So far, it is a stereotype of anime plotting that also is part of the "harem" sub-genre. Harem, originally a term from ancient Muslim culture of a separate part of a household for wives, concubines, and female servants, as well as eventually turning into a completely sexual term for a group of women with one male lover, is its own anime/manga sub-genre which usually denotes one male surrounded by multiple female suitors; there is the "reverse harem", one woman and multiple male suitors, and LGBT variations, but harem stories that are the most famous (and divisive) include the Love Hina franchise where it is one male, and many potential female suitors. The potential gender issues around this, which are right to rise with concern, are dashed in this particular anime as this is a melodrama where things get bleaker and sour.

[MAJOR Spoiler Warnings here]

And by sour, as in our male protagonist, eventually turning out to be a chronic womanizer with an ease in cheating on multiple girls, is murdered by one character, whilst another is disembowel. The diagram for the beginning to the ending, from the initial romance with light comedy at the beginning to where his head is severed and kept as a possession for a heartbroken suitor, is as jarring a tonal shift without a lot of context to how this happened, yet the show manages to make this work for all its faults.

[MAJOR Spoilers End]

Watching School Days again, the story for all its clichés does have virtues in how it makes the experience over twelve episodes, eventually like going through the meat grinder for a prolonged season, more tragic in how the circumstances come. An inspired decision to make a show the worst type of ending from the source material, on purpose or with unintentionally greater weight, turned this property into an anti-harem story and an even more tragic one due to how the characters act in circumstances. In a school shown to be full of cruel and sexually confused students, the mistakes at the worst time are dramatically more loaded as a result. Makoto is a true stereotype of the ineffective and bland male lead in a lot of these shows who eventually, in others, became a cliché anime were burdened with, as this trope was clearly seen to allow emotional investment to an audience. Here, he is horny and awkward like a teenager would be, too trigger happy with girls if dating to rush in to kiss as he had never been with someone before, and eventually, when he finds himself crossing the line with having physical relationships, coldness instead comes after instead of growth and maturity. He becomes instead of a calculated person who takes physically from girls, as he womanises and sleeps with multiple people, and hates the responsibilities that go with this. Sekai is tragically the friend who always loved him, made the mistake to confess her love to him when already dating Kotonoha, who she introduced him to, and is stuck with the anchor of this love even when he wishes to be with her, especially when he starts cheating on her too. Kotonoha is the tragic figure who placed all her emotional investment in Makoto, and will eventually suffer a nervous breakdown, and other characters find themselves stuck in this increasing awful web, such as Setsuna, Sekai's own diminutive female friend who wishes Sekai's happiness to be with Makoto but also has a crush on him. Even Makoto's horn dog but wholesome male friend Taisuke eventually does something in a later episode which is horrifying, least in terms of when someone is at the moment of an emotional breakdown he inadvertently takes advantage of without likely realising what he ever did.

The worst thing, and why for how ridiculous and way too cruel the story can be School Days actually succeeds, is that it is not morally black and white, but with everyone including Makoto himself being confused hormone driven teenagers. Extremer tales have been told of romantic tragedy and death, and it was a curious experience first watching the show on the streaming service Crunchyroll and looking at their comments section at how people were not comfortable with the story progression, whether it was good writing or not, having to watch a show where the male lead is clearly not a good person. It was a curious tale in itself of viewers wanting to kill Makoto, slap everyone else and vile anguish whilst those in the know, who already saw the series, teased the horrifying climax of it all. I myself was aware of the ending, that Makoto would eventually be shown as a womanizer, and that the comeuppance was a nasty one, but not only did I not know the full extent of said ending, but my knowledge did not ruin the show but arguably improved it. This also sooths over the first three episodes, knowing where the story went bringing a sense of tragic finality to the proceedings; it added to the idea that a character like Makoto is not explicitly evil, even when near the end of the series he has a foursome with three female classmates when he is already sleeping around and betraying multiple girlfriends, but something worse in his banality. Far more disturbing, even if exaggerated, is that he is just an apathetic and dumb young man who thinks with his smaller head, and has little wisdom of emotions, more honest as a moral ground for the series to take as a result even if it is more agonising for a viewer to experience. Considering this cliché of the blandly likable hero is a common one in anime, it feels subversive, even if School Days came from a franchise which placated to the clichés too, that probably felt more uncomfortable for some viewers when usually these leads are meant to be sympathetic.

And whilst their all stereotypes, that helps because of this attitude; Sekai, complicating things as she still helps him to date Kotonoha, has a strange relationship including practice foreplay sessions which are just as problematic as they should be to a viewer, naturally leading to complications. Setsuna, Sekai's friend, has a crush on Makoto too, as does Otome, another female peer, all whilst the other girls in the school can be vindictive and backstabbing, all feeling less like sexist depictions but like many teenagers misguided behaviour. It is an attempt at least at complexity in spite of itself, even a character like Kotonoha in that her hesitance in a physical relationship, pushing Makoto away, is due to having been teased for her figure at a young age alongside the fact that she is an innocence, her ideal of romance taken from stories of being swept up by a man riding on horseback and being romanced, the fictionalised take of love stories. Taking up knitting and devoted to her younger sister, the character is meant for a viewer's perspective to have been a meek figure, the shy girl you cheer when she does muster a bravery to be bolder in her romance, only for Makoto to be an oblivious cheater who dithers, making her a really tragic figure. Add to this that her female peers in her class bully her, a mean streak made worse when they will even film other female students secretly in a "break room" at the school festival to humiliate them publically, and Kotonoha's turn in the end to madness, glazed look looking at her phone on the street, is the real tragedy of it all. Even if it is taken to an extreme, in the video game and this anime, her fate is the real gut punch returning to the series as with the first viewing.

The effect of this tragedy, the ending itself, gained School Days its notoriety as, tragically, it had the poor timing for the final episode to be about to be aired just when a real life murder took place. On September 18th 2007, a sixteen year old murdered her father, a 45-year-old police sergeant in the traffic division at Minami Police Station in Kyoto Prefecture, with an axe¹. Another series, part of the aforementioned Higurashi: When They Cry franchise², was also affected by this in terms of its screening on television, where the episode of School Days was delayed and even altered for multiples channels before finally being broadcast¹, but how TV Kanagawa dealt with School Days transferred from a legitimate tragedy, in terms of any murder ever taking place and the gristly nature of this particular one, to an accidental internet meme. Instead of the episode, they showed half an hour of scenery, including a lake with a Norwegian ferry on it, showed with Air on a G String playing over the images. "Nice Boat", as the meme came to be, was from a 4chan user commenting on the replacement material, and it became popular in Japan^3&3b. The meme even found its way into the Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi-chan, a straight-to-net spin-off of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya franchise, when the Kadokawa Pictures's YouTube channel uploaded a short montage of sailboats instead of the previously scheduled premiere of that ONA⁴.

Even without this real life censorship, its infamy does not detract the results; built up to over painful eleven episodes of miscommunication, cheating and broken emotions, the ending no matter how over-the-top it ends up, actually ending up on a sailboat in some perverse irony in the final shot, does have a weight to it from the tragic circumstances that lead to it. In fact, the idea that it is both an antidote to the problematic show trope of the harem anime as well as another example proves an advantage. The look of the show helps with this, the stereotypical character designs with big eyes emphasising the darker moments in vast contrast, and the leering fan service thankfully giving way to frankness about sex even in the dialogue. The series does, to lighten the tone and offer levity, have humour, reaching its crescendo as a last gasp of happiness before the ending at the school festival, where the mascots of the classes jostle for crowds; once it goes, so does the series manage to get even darker than before when the gloves come off completely.

The sense that the show does come from questionable production really comes when you see the bonus episode, for DVD release, School Days: Magical Heart Kokoro-chan (2008), a magical girl parody with the characters in this world. Seemingly banal, but the "fan service" of leering of the female cast naked is more apparent, legitimately uncomfortable as Kokoro is Kotonoha's little sister, which is evident that, truthfully, School Days came as much out of the clichés, even the problematic ones, which sell well to an audience of sexy school girls. Studio TNK for a lot of its existence makes shows about sexy young female characters to gaze at, such as the High School DxD franchise, so their bread and butter was in this aspect which creeps in with School Days but really makes itself more apparent with this bonus episode. The bonus episode even if some of the jokes land, like the magical maid cafe members stuck with a giant vacuum cleaner as their secret weapon, is not good in the slightest, but thankfully it is a one off curiosity, alongside a bonus Valentine's Day episode, School Days: Valentine Days (2008), which also qualifies as the hot springs episode (i.e. the episode at the hot springs resort in anime, designed to show the female cast naked and bathing even if the episode never shows anything explicit). The original series by itself, due to how it tells its story, is too powerful in its aura and what it actually succeeds in for a Magical Heart Kokoro-chan to make it seem as distasteful.

In fact, the entire aesthetic is perfect - "School Days" a perfect title that sounds innocuous, but develops a weight when it is the last episode title. The light pop songs used suit, and even the fact the end credits are centred on a mobile phone is absolutely appropriate, the latter an object which plays such an important part in the drama as a catalyst for drama (such as blocking someone off one or secretly conversing to others with). The result, aware of how it bruised and batted me around through the twelve episodes, was unique, like a necessary poison and incredible idiosyncratic in lieu of what was purposeful or accidental creative.

 

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1) Last School Days Episode Preempted by Real-Life Crime, written by Egan Loo and published for Anime News Network on 19th September 2007

2) Higurashi Kai Preempted "Due to Various Circumstances" (Update 2), written by Egan Loo and published for Anime News Network on 20th September 2007.

3) School Days "Nice Boat" Meme Has Been Sailing on for 12 Years, written by Kara Dennison and published for Crunchyroll on September 18th 2019.

3b) Nice Boat, taken from the Know Your Memes webpage on the meme written on April 15th 2009.

4) That's it, I give up: First episode of Haruhi-chan not finished, viewers get half-decent boat instead. written for Japanator on 13th February 2009.

Mononoke (2007)

 

Director: Kenji Nakamura

Screenplay: Chiaki J. Konaka, Ikuko Takahashi, Manabu Ishikawa and Michiko Yokote

"Voice" Cast: Takahiro Sakurai as the Medicine Seller

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) / An Abstract Candidate

 

Mononoke originates as a spin-off, from a 2006 animated horror anthology named Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales. Both came from the Noitamina bloc, a syndicated time space on Fuji Television in Japan which, whilst have had more action and genre orientated anime shows over the decades, has however stayed with its origins, designed explicitly to cater to anime for multiple audiences and encouraging experimentation even with the more overtly genre productions. It is where Eden of the East (2009) came from, a conspiracy thriller about a young man possessing the ability to unlimited resources to grant wishes, or, for the perfect example, Masaaki Yuasa's The Tatami Galaxy (2010), an eccentric adaptation of a Tomihiko Morimi novel in which a university student, in a Groundhog Day scenario, finds himself repeating his school life in various clubs in an existential crisis, Masaaki Yuasa before he finally gained his fame in the Western helming series for this block beforehand. Ayakashi, for two of its three tales, adapted ghost tales from classic authors, whilst Mononoke comes from the one tale which was entirely original, contrasted by its absolutely idiosyncratic art style. This third tale was an original story also directed by Mononoke's Kenji Nakamura, which first introduced the world to the Medicine Seller, a figure in his own series here who follows the trope within a lot of anime of occult and supernatural figures, in episodic stories, who investigate and resolve paranormal scenarios, only in this case set in Japan's ancient past.

Mononoke itself is a series of five stories, all taking two or more episodes to tell, set between the Edo and Meiji periods of Japan, the nameless Medicine Seller found wherever there is a mononoke - when a supernatural spirit (an Ayakashi) is corrupted by the worst of humanity and starts to interact with the human world in violent ways. He can only exorcise them with his magical sword when he finds out their shape (form), the cause of their creation (truth) and why this was (reason in the English subtitles). The series, from the first (two episode) tale Zashiki-warashi, immediately stands out as a beautiful production. The tale is very obvious in plot, in which a pregnant woman on the run stays in a hotel with a sinister past, but the way Mononoke presents this is entirely unique in terms of its art style, and in terms of plotting, emphasising the sins of human beings as the cause of the mononoke. Whilst a beautiful story to look at, it is soon revealed this inn was once a brothel whose owner was the woman who did the abortions for the sex workers, hiding the foetuses in the wall of the room the pregnant woman is occupying, and not pulling its punches in this theme.

Mononoke is an exceptional looking show which appears to have been made with cut outs or even with paper used as animation cels, making the fact (as behind the scenes footage on its US DVD shows from Flatiron Film Company) that it is a computer animated production which layered this two dimensional look on top of computer drawn sketch lines a perfect marriage between the two styles. It argues the balance between the old hand drawn era and the digitised era perfectly, having aged without fault from 2007, and that some of the best anime of the 2000s onward made a conscious decision to marry the two sides or embrace the expressionistic. It looks like, as with the original Ayakashi story, that it was drawn using glossy paper, a tactile appearance which is contrasted by the use of colour, significant in how bright and vivid a show with such morbid subject matter becomes, drastically contrasting what is expected from the tropes of horror in what aesthetic palettes are usually used. Even with stories which had intentionally dank, dark looks, the visual and colour palette is significant with many of these stories in terms of aesthetic detail, even when with the absence of colour, used to signify details carefully.

The stories tread on well worn tropes but the unconventional look through the stories, alongside the time given to them over two to three episodes, gives them new personality here. The tone for Mononoke as a result is openly symbolic and surreal both for style and to tackle exceptionally grim subject matter, where the titular beings known as Zashiki-warashi in the first story are connected to the aforementioned unborn children, symbolic imagery blatant in meaning like red cloth being ripped, but allowing material that would be gristly to actually depict to be shown in a heightened, meaningful manner. Sometimes it is useful for the limitations of a TV anime production whilst presenting an utterly artistic flair, such as the final arc of the series replacing moving crowds of bystanders with mannequins in costume, all felt having be practiced with the Ayakashi episodes and perfected here.

A story like Umibōzu, in which there are a group of people on a boat in the midst of a haunted area of the sea, shows how all the stories are effectively chamber pieces, supernatural detective stories where the Medicine Seller is the judge of mortal sins. As he has to figure out the cause of the mononoke to cleanse them away, he becomes the auditor who usually extracts the truth from all the characters with him in each particular story, especially as many have a tendency to lie. Rather than laborious plot twists, its closure is equivalent of peeling away the layers of an onion and using the stories to depict human fallacies, Umibōzu particularly poignant for this as its about guilt, the masks people in any stature wear and how cleansing it actually transforms a person for the better. That story also shows how proudly strange these tales are, openly riffing on folklore from Japanese history whilst improvising around the lines, such as a surreal sight of a ghost biwa player, a fish creature with one leg, who forces mortals to experience their worst fears as if real, even if it makes you puke up your prized giant goldfish.

This could also alienate the viewers in place expecting actual monsters, the next story Noppera-bō about a woman who might have murdered her husband and his family which is instead an existential drama all within her own head. Constantly, however, in these tales they are using conventional plot structure to tackle human drama through these folk creatures. Noppera-bō for me is a great story, within a series of consistently perfect narratives in themselves, as this is an existential drama in which, whilst with an obvious twist, uses its artistry and symbolism perfectly to tell the story of a woman without a real self, helped to free herself, based around very surreal imagery of Noh masks and faceless beings. As with all three stories of Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, these are tales based on human behaviour and the acts we commit, and it feels more sincere to depict them as such than the (usual) Western model of such creatures being mere monsters outside our species.

Also as a result of this, openly existential and psychological tales using the wild and wonderful yōkai of Japanese folklore, the series openly embraces the strange even if it is by means of rewriting said creatures of Japanese culture for new meanings for the stories too. Nue, the fourth tale, is openly weirder than the others, a literal chamber piece involving two dead bodies, four people including the Medicine Seller and a mystery to solve...only that its surrounded by an incense smelling competition between the individuals where, for one game, the answers have to be named after chapters of Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji (1021), the first ever Japanese novel ever written. The oddest arc of the series, which includes visual clues that on future watches will immediately show the story showing its hand early, naturally it comes from one of the most interesting anime screenwriters I have encountered over the years by the name of Chiaki J. Konaka, who has made a career of this type of distinct writing. Both loved and notorious for his existential and abstract plotting, his work goes from fan favourite Serial Experiments Lain (1998) to frustrating viewers of the second season of The Big 0 (1999-2003), a legitimate candidate for an auteur screenwriter in anime who just happens to be in a production like Mononoke, one where the scripts by all the screenwriters involved are all strong too.

The only issue with Mononoke is that it could have been longer, but in 2022, a feature film was announced in production¹, making this a production which has all the ease in being able to be returned too over and over again. Mononoke for its finale offers a tantalising conclusion by jumping forward abruptly in time to the 1920s and the Taisho period, the story Bakeneko about a group of people trapped on an underground train that may have all been responsible for a death of a young female journalist. This jump offers an obvious realisation - our sardonic Medicine Seller is not human, clear as his real form when he can use the mononoke killing sword transforms into a golden gold-like figure - but it also offers the tantalising fact that, if this had continued, Mononoke whilst getting its personality from its Edo period narratives could have continued in various periods of modern Japanese history too. This three-part narrative does stand out for its bold style in this historical time period as well, with moments of legitimately gruesome horror by way of expressionistic imagery and the nihilistic tone it has for three quarters of its length. Even if it offers a happy ending, as argubly most do, that people can redeem themselves, it still has imagery of people scratching out the limb or organ which sinned, being mauled by cats, or that unlike others, where the mononoke punishes the transgressor, there is in this a macabre conclusion where the one truly guilty person (or two) who compromised does not get to escape their sins.  

It is a great way to have ended the series, with the obvious connotations, with the Medicine Seller ageless on the train, that it does leave one gasping for more episodes about the character existing in modern day Japan, standing out in his appearance but still have a cool, humorous air to him dealing with mononoke still. With Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales the bleakest tale, as a prototype, which is worthy of seeing too, they all together are among one of the best anime horror series in existence. The art style alone, alongside its use of symbolism, is truly a one-off, but the stories themselves are just as exceptional as ghost tales, the aesthetic and storytelling sides fully succeeding..

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Avant-Garde/Grotesque/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

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1) Mononoke Anime Gets New Film in 2023, Stage Play, written by Crystalyn Hodgkins and published by Anime News Network on June 18th 2022.

Nightwalker: The Midnight Detective (1998)

 

Director: Kiyotoshi Sasano and Yutaka Kagawa

Screenplay: Genki Yoshimura, Ryota Yamaguchi and Toji Gobu

(Voice) Cast: Takumi Yamazaki as Shido Tatsuhiko; Emi Shinohara as Yayoi Matsunaga; Maaya Sakamoto as Riho Yamazaki; Ai Uchikawa as Asami Akiba; Akira Ishida as Shunichi; Ayumi Kida as Miharu; Chiemi Chiba as Yuki; Eiji Maruyama as Shuzo Akiba; Hideyuki Tanaka as Cain

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) / An 1000 Anime Crossover

 

"Always a title I wished to get to, Nightwalker is especially a case of my tastes winning over some clear flaws with this thirteen episode horror show. It is also a curious chimera as, for four episodes, it is visibly clear this could have been a straight-to-video production if there was no success getting a television deal, a literal line between when it could have been and that which became the series, both in the look in little details of the show and having two different directors[...]"

 

Certainly, a flawed title, this nonetheless scratches an itch for an anime niche I am a huge fan of - that of horror anime about supernatural figures, or those who specialise in the supernatural, who deal with episodic narratives where they can merely be a bystander who resolves the issues, whilst characters specific for those episodes either find or doom themselves in how they act or fall into in the tales. Nightwalker has touches beyond this, and it's schism between the first four episodes to the last seven does offer a lot of potential, and some disappointment, but for a piece of late nineties anime, the mood is there in spades. And when this works, in those first four episodes as an increasingly more adult horror tale, and the best episodes of the latter half, like a family plotting to murder the patriarch only for his body to start wandering the streets, this can shine.

 

For the full review, follow the blog link HERE.

Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001)

 

Created by: Graham Duff

Directors: Matt Lipsey

Screenplays: Steve Coogan, Graham Duff and Henry Normal

Cast: Steve Coogan as Dr. Terrible / Captain Tobias Slater / Lester Crown / Denham Denham / Dr. Donald Baxter / Nathan Blaze / Captain Hans Brocken; Graham Duff as Josh / Norden / a Policeman / a Porter; Sarah Alexander as Beatrice Crown; Sally Bretton as Carmina; Julia Davis as Stephanie Wise; John Thomson as Sir Donald Tyburn; Louise Paige as Nurse MacReedy; Warwick Davis as Tygon

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

That day, I learnt an important lesson. Never eat your own chin. Had I feasted on my own chin, I'd be ill-equipped to introduce tonight's tale.

In terms of digging up a real obscurity, finding the time when Steve Coogan was co-writer and centre stage on a parody of horror anthology shows, and British pulp and horror stories, is pretty significant as a find. Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible is the creation of Graham Duff, an English writer/actor/producer. Steve Coogan, for those with no idea who he is, is an actor/comedian/screenwriter whose legacy includes Alan Partridge, a character of his and co-creator Armando Iannucci, over multiple productions and multi-media, who became a phenomenon alongside Coogan's extensive career in other productions such as his roles in 24 Hour Party People (2002). This, six episodes broadcast on BBC 2, was released on DVD, but has become an obscurity. He, alongside playing all the protagonists, plays the host Dr. Terrible, a horror show guide who, with his Count Orlok ears and fake teeth, contemplates in the first episode I saw his dreams of an erotic kind. He is a perversion of a senile old man who steals his deceased wife's coffin and has witnessed other macabre things like a man eating his own chin as his monologues suggest, alongside befitting that a show like this needs a macabre host.

Even the BBC DVD played a trick that, unlike the original broadcast order, episodes one and four were switched, leaving me with And Now the Fearing as the first tale, a story set in 1972 where Steve Coogan plays a sleazy businessman named Denham Denham, part of him clearly having it as part of the roles to have as many fake hair pieces, or hair stylists involved, per episode as he can. Denham, a feminist female reporter (Julia Davis) and an architect (Alexander Armstrong) are stuck in a lift which is heading towards a thirteenth floor which should not be there. A possible spoiler, but this is clearly Tales from the Crypt (1972), the Amicus anthology horror film, crunched into less than thirty minutes, including the punch line, whilst also being a parody of such Amicus and anthology films from the era.

It also presents that a) Coogan and the co-writers clearly like these types of films despite the piss taking that comes through all six episodes, and that b) unfortunately one of the clear problems, and likely why the series did not work, comes ahead in that this is a wildly inconsistent work. When this hits, it is funny, but when it misses the mark, this show has aged badly and is also broad as a brick. And Now the Fearing also sets this up with an alternative world scenario, if this had gained a cult audience and worked, of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) before Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness created it, and if interpreted by Steve Coogan, of pastiching cheesy horror tales of the past, which is bizarre to consider. For my reservations with Darkplace that it played to "ironic bad" for its humour, thankfully, we got the timeline with that series, and this makes a lot more mistakes. Here you see that, for half the episodes of House of Horrible, the broad tone in comparison does not land as well. Feeling strange as an early 2000s television production trying to replicate the nineteen seventies, stranger for an inexplicable reason than any of the older periods being tackled, the production feels like it is going for the obvious jokes which do not work. The stories themselves could have worked - one's drunken hit-and-run of a homeless man damning you in a cycle, why you never try to cheat gypsies from their land, and the most openly silly like a Darkplace joke, why never to purchase a haunted table. But the tone is off, and it is only by the end of the series the show hits the point of itself premise.

Curse of Tongs, set in Limehouse in London in 1910, is not an episode to help as it is a Fu Manchu parody, which even if played for irony to damn it, is damned in itself by playing to it. Whilst a broad parody of "Yellow Peril" xenophobia of the infamous Sax Rohmer character, I had to think about what the Chinese cast to this episode thought of all this, as this is still as a parody a Fu Manchu pastiche, with actor Mark Gatiss in yellow face as Hangman Chang. Kidnapping the love of Steve Coogan's Nathan Blaze, Coogan is also still playing the heroic white savour over the Chinese villains in something which, for the 2000s, really shows that ironically playing with these themes was not a lesson that succeeded at this time period, more so as, alongside the sixties films when Christopher Lee played the figure, Peter Sellers played Fu Manchu in a comedy in 1980 called The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Not even having a Chinese detective on the heroes' side works to undercut this as, not even a sidekick, the character barely appears onscreen.

The legacy of Fu Manchu is more uncomfortable in mind that, whilst Sax Rohmer was a good pulp writer for tales like Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918), he was also a figure ingested with the xenophobia of his time, and as a British writer, I cannot help but feel more uncomfortable, even as someone who has found enjoyment in Fu Manchu tales, knowing it stems from not only British xenophobia, but also our really problematic relationship to China into the 20th century beforehand. A character like Fu Manchu, whose first tale was published in 1912, stems from British colonial influence as much as the fear of the East coming to the West, after the likes of the Boxer Rebellion - an anti-foreign, anti-colonial, and anti-Christian uprising in China between 1899 and 1901 - and that, in mind to the scene here where Coogan is forced to become an opium addict by Hangman Chang, Britain is the villain for me as an Englishman in the two Opium Wars. The two Opium Wars, the First Opium War fought in 1839–1842 between Qing China and the United Kingdom, the Second Opium War fought between the Qing and the United Kingdom and France, 1856–1860, were the result of Western groups like the British trying to force opium trade on the Chinese. A parody in 2001 about this, ironically done, cannot work because I learnt this history in my university days in lectures, and even if I had not, as mentioned, it still involves Mark Gatiss in yellow face playing an Asiatic evil. Even the amusing special effects for the giant crab Tong has in the sewer, nor his secret crab claw hand, can help get over this.

Episode three, Curse of the Blood of the Lizard of Doom, can be argued to be as bad as an episode, in its many cheap jokes about red heads and the Scottish, the later likely as offensive just for the fake Scottish accent. It is also compellingly ridiculous. In Edinburgh 1880, Coogan plays a specialist burns doctor, Dr. Donald Baxter, who is experimenting with reptile plasma (at one point even gecko rectal fluid) to treat burns, even if it accidentally leads to patients developing webbed fingers and a need to crawl on the ceiling. There are more ironic sexism jokes as in the first episode, but for what is, frankly, an eye rolling parody, at least in this tale the humour is more about Coogan experimenting with lizards to treat burns, with a female doctor he begrudgingly works with, throwing caution to the wind in how silly it is. Chameleon plasma is experimented on, and alongside a man hanging himself with his own extending tongue, or trying to bluff around a conference with colleagues by incinerating a body of a man meant to have been a live patient, Coogan experimenting on himself leads to him turning into a giant chameleon, This is compellingly bad at least.

Episode four, in Upper Carpathians 1877 and the original first episode, is Lesbian Vampire Lovers of Lust, entirely based on Hammer's Karnstein trilogy. The trilogy - The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971) - are the children of the famous 1872 novella Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. It is a text which has gained greater weight as becoming an LGBTQ novel of gay desire between women, if in mind this period into the seventies, when Hammer were trying to sell their films on more sex, one should consider these movies from heterosexual film producers from the perspective they may have only included the content in a titillating way, not any possible interpretation from female scholars which could find more of note within the films, or the legacy of Carmilla as a story which gained weight over centuries in meaning.

This is again another premise which could pose problematic, as with a female vampire countess eyeing Coogan's newly wedded bride, the vampires are gay, even their human servant Rebenor, played by Ben Miller, a dapperly dressed and flamboyant figure who even makes a dress he stole from someone else look stylish. However it is fascinating it never touches the subject at all barring its source material as a parody, more interested in a lot of sexual innuendo as has also been common in the series. With the sense the series improved considerable by the halfway point, this is an openly silly pastiche, just from the get-go in having Coogan with his blue eyes and Hugh Grant hairstyle playing a heroic lead that is mostly useless. Sadly, the older female Van Helsing stand-in does not last long, but the tone, including the bombastic choral score, or the ending based around Steve Coogan playing tongue hockey by himself by a mirror, means this comes off as one of the strongest episodes.

In mind that was originally the first episode, the last two episodes of the series show the tone was improving. Episode 5, Voodoo Feet of Death, is also one of the stronger episodes too barring, however, it is parodying voodoo tropes in cinema, which is a huge issue as, with horror's longstanding history of demonising an actual religion, I do feel uncomfortable with even this parody. Even if I enjoy my old horror films - and will always think fondly of George Zucco playing bongos in Voodoo Man (1944) with Bela Lugosi - this is not woke for the sake of it, just admitting embarrassment at how narrow minded this area of storytelling can be, even accidentally as a parody of this narrow-mindedness. It also has no point in being included, barring the voodoo priest who demands Coogan returns his late brother's feet so they can be purified of the evil slowly corrupting their new host. The premise is strong enough as it is without the "voodoo" aesthetic, that this is The Feet of Orlac, or The Hands of Orlac (1924), which was remade as a 1960 British film, where Conrad Veidt, as a concert pianist, loses his hands in a horrible accident only to have experimental hand transplants that. To his horror, they may have once belonged to a murderer. This works with just parodying this, set in the 1920s, where there is a romantic triangle between Coogan, playing a dancer named Lester Crown, his wife and a trendy new tap dancer. An ill-advised scouting of possible adultery, involving a giant novelty barbershop pair of scissors, leads to a moment of comically levels of fake blood spurting and experiment feet transplants, taken from a dock worker who was crushed under a heavy crate baring those appendages.

The joke of sentient feet that kill is inherently funny by itself, and no one suspects that feet can strangle a person, or that extra long toe nails can slice a jugular in one swipe, which adds to this humour. It proves one of the funnier episodes, as does Episode 6, Scream Satan Scream, Coogan playing a Witchfinder General in 1645 Blackburn, who is burning witches and those who inappropriately use vegetables. Captain Tobias Slater is also a sex hound who is abusing his power, masquerading under finding witches to bed as many women he can within one location at a time. Throughout the show, there had been sexual innuendo, but Scream Satan Scream fully embraced this, to the point there is literally an inn called Fist Inn as a setting. With a curse over his head from a previous witch he burnt in the first scenes, this is a very funny episode, arguably the best as it embraces blatant sex comedy, Coogan playing a villain, and Warwick Davis makes a suddenly and welcomed appearance as his assistant Tygon, clearly a reference to Tigon British Film Productions, who released Witchfinder General (1968), the Vincent Price witch hunter film which this is parodying. Sadly, Davis does not have lines, but when the camera cuts to him in close up reacting to Coogan, it is perfect in itself.

Embracing its silliness, where Satan ends up looking like a Jan Švankmajer project, superimposed onto the screen when the Dark Lord is briefly summoned, this is what Dr. Terrible's House of Horror should have been. Not ironic attempts to mock racism or sexism of the past in horror and pulp cinema, the jokes tightened, just embrace the crude sexual innuendo, and just run with the silliest ideas possible, like The Feet of Orlock or Coogan reimagining Vincent Price's Witchfinder General just scrapping past being dunked in a river as a witch himself. There is a clear sense the people made this admire the horror cinema they parody, from the elaborate animated opening credits, and in how there is even a cameo in And the Fearing Starts of Sheila Keith, from Frightmare (1974) and House of Whipcord (1974). The show sadly faltered many times because, as I have found in other work, a lot of its humour was cheap ironic pastiches, and jokes, including enough Scottish stereotypes in one episode to fill a tin of shortbread. There was also content as well that show we did not really progress well in the 2000s in our humour as we thought we did, and other times where it did not work at all just as a joke. It is fascinating, and when it rewards, it is very funny. It is, as mentioned, that one Steve Coogan work, from a man who is an institution for many nowadays, which I have never heard brought up, as mysterious as that sounds.