a review of 尸体派对OVA：被暴虐的灵魂的咒叫

Friday the 13th, Saw, Final Destination - these are just some of the wildly successful horror franchises that have built their empires largely on graphic displays of blood and guts. Are they scary? No, but they are a lot of fun. This is because they're able to hide how sickly perverse it is to watch a bunch of people get murdered in gruesome ways with their tones, while also removing the sting of death by never developing the victims any beyond their generic archetypes and making them mostly unlikable. Corpse Party on the other hand has made a (much smaller) name for itself by not letting you become detatched from the characters while it revels in showing every fine detail of their strewn innards. The majority of the protagonists make enough of an impression that you actually care about whether or not they make it through, and with all of the violence occurring against legitimate children instead of a cast of 20-30 year old actors trying to pass for high-schoolers, each tragic demise carries real weight and is all the more disturbing. That's what has been so brilliant about this property across all the mediums it's covered; it makes gore horrifying again. If there's one problem with this mini-series it's that at only four, roughly 30-minute episodes in length not every aspect of the story is as fleshed out as it could have been. For example, there are two characters, the teacher and the girl who's transfer situation is inadvertently responsible for everything, that receive next to no attention at all despite the fact that they seem like they should have been fairly significant members of the group. Also, there's an aspect or two of the killer's backstory that never gets explained and kind of makes no sense as result. The deficit between the amount of content that needed to be covered here and the actual running time starts to become noticeable in the second episode as that's when the scope of the tale expands and all the players are introduced. The first is its own more self-contained thing working with fewer pieces and might just be a masterpiece as it captures so much of what makes Tortured Souls so great right from the get go. One of the most interesting aspects of the game this is based on is that each chapter/level has a variety of potential endings that will play out based on your decisions. Some of which will lead to whoever you're playing as at the time dying in some particularly grisly fashion. This adaptation was clearly made with those worst outcomes in mind as it kills off characters that are alive in the main canon. This may anger purists, but it allows for this particular telling to be as grim as possible. Something that ends up being a huge strength in my eyes. This a dark, twisted, and even mind-bending work of hardcore fiction that transcends the very format in which it is being told. I feel like I could show this to genre aficionados regardless of their preference for Japanese animation with just as much confidence as I could the latest Mike Flanagan or Andy Muschietti movie. It's just that good and would arguably be more effective in some cases. What I'm saying is don't let the fact that this is an anime fool you, it's grade-A horror all the way through.