, it’s horror in bite-size form. The series is faithful to the spirit of the author’s finest, full of sagas in which the supernatural emerges out of the blue, innocents are plagued and persecuted for no reason, and salvation is a commodity that’s rarer than grim abuse and fateful tragedy.that’s in tune with their Ito source material, and they all run under a half-hour. Moreover, many feature two separate vignettes, bringing the show’s total number of stories to an impressive twenty.
, but the creepiest visages are found in its third episode, “Hanging Balloon.” Based on a 1998 Ito short, it concerns Kazuko, a high-school girl who’s introduced cowering in her bedroom as a nearby voice cajoles her to come outside and eat before she perishes from starvation. How can this be? What does it mean? How can it be stopped? “Hanging Balloon” doesn’t bother with such questions, instead following its baffling premise through to its forlorn conclusion. Searching for answers to the unholy events depicted inis the wrong way to enjoy the anthology; only by giving oneself over to the insane can its memorably morbid wonders be properly appreciated.
A brother and sister strive to cover up the accidental murder of a friend’s sibling in a village where corpses are buried in the exact location that they perished in “Tomb Town.” A bizarre sea creature washes up on a beach, its intestines full of people who went missing years earlier, in “The Thing that Drifted Ashore.