A Rushed Horror
- Episodes : 4
- Genre : Horor, Drama, Shounen
- Airing Date : Oct 2022
- Producers : Akatsuki
Contains Spoilers
Contains Spoilers
As a storytelling medium, anime covers tons of themes and genres. If you can think about it, then there’s likely an anime version of it somewhere out there. That being said, there is one genre that definitely hasn’t received the same amount of love and attention as the others. It’s Horror. And we’re talking about anime that are conceived to be pure horror, not stories that have horror elements in them, such as Parasyte or Tokyo Ghoul. We’ll be lucky to find a handful of horror anime in one year. Thankfully, we get a new horror anime before 2022 comes to an end. It’s called Housing Complex C, and here’s our brief review of this new series.
Discussion Time
Apart from the cheerful little girl named Kimi, Housing Complex C is filled with old people and pensioners. Each day goes by slowly with nothing interesting going on, but Kimi always manages to bring smiles to their faces and brighten up their days.
One day, a family of three, the Koshide, comes along with a bunch of foreign workers. They are the new tenants of Housing Complex C. They are the new employees of the nearby fishery companies. As a small seaside town, the people in Kurosaki have never met foreigners before, much less lived together with them. That goes double for the old people who live in Housing Complex C. And that is pretty much the core of the problems that are about to happen.
Everything is fine at first. Even Kimi loves the fact that she now has a girl her age, Yuri Koshide, as a new friend. However, it doesn’t take a long time for a seed of doubt and conflict to take root inside the heart of every resident. One day, a family who has been a tenant in Housing Complex C for a long time suddenly vanishes without a trace, with only lumps of moss scattered in their house. A seed of doubt finally bloomed into a full-fledged conflict.
1. Interesting Ideas
Despite its many problems and shortcomings, there are actually quite a few interesting ideas presented in Housing Complex C. The execution may leave much to be desired, but the potential is clearly there. Out of several great ideas presented in this series, there are two that stood out from the rest. We try to avoid mentioning any major spoilers here, but if you really want to watch Housing Complex C, then you should skip this part.
The first interesting idea is using a single housing complex as the setting for the entire story. Horror needs a strong story and concept as its foundation, that’s why using a simple setting is usually a good idea. That is especially true if you have a limited time to present the story. That is why you’ll see countless horror movies that took place in a haunted house, a cabin in the woods, a train, a ship, etc. So using an old housing complex as the setting for the whole series enables the showrunners to focus solely on the story, without having to worry about world-building.
The second one is the idea of a powerful entity secretly using the housing complex as its playground. As you can read from the summary above, there are mysterious deaths happening in Housing Complex C. Well, as it turns out, it has something to do with the ancient history of violence and human sacrifices that happened in that town ages ago. A being that is involved in that bloody conflict is now the one who turns housing complex C into its personal playground. The contrast between the contained space of the housing complex and a larger-than-life entity makes the story so much more interesting to see.
1. Pacing Issue
Housing Complex C is a four-episode-long mini-series, with each episode having about 23 minutes of runtime. Three episodes are used for the setup, while the final one is where everything suddenly happens and we get the explanation for everything that has happened thus far.
It's clear that Housing Complex C wants to present itself as a slow-burn horror, but what we get at the end is simply a series with a pacing issue. You spend the first three episodes just strolling around your neighborhood, and suddenly you’re in a rocket ship to Jupiter in the last episode.
The problem is not only the vast difference between the slow pacing of the first three episodes and the super fast pacing for the final one but also the amount of information that we get between the setup and the climax. A good horror story scatters the information throughout the story, with a couple of red herrings here and there to spice things up. In this series, however, we barely know what’s going on in the first three episodes, and suddenly we get super dense information dumped on us in the last episode.
2. Over-Reliance on Exposition
Speaking of super dense information, after deciding to take things slow and let the story slowly unravel in the first three episodes, the showrunners suddenly decided to dump the information all at once to us at the end through a series of long expositions from its characters, explaining everything that has happened thus far. “Show doesn’t tell” has been the mantra for storytelling for ages because if you want the audience to lose themselves in the story, then you should show them what happened, not tell it to their ears. Unfortunately, Housing Complex C prefers to talk to us about its story at length, rather than letting us find out about it through some carefully crafted scenes.
3. Plot Holes Everywhere
As we’ve talked about in the previous section, Housing Complex C has lots of interesting ideas that it wants to show us. Creature features, cosmic horror, deathly cult, serial killers, and so many others. The two mentioned above are just some of the more successful ones, there are plenty of others that fall flat and end up becoming nothing more than plot holes.
Naming those plot holes one by one will only increase the number of spoilers in this review, so we choose not to do that. However, this particular issue, along with the other problems mentioned above, would not exist if only there were more episodes in this series. If only the showrunners treat Housing Complex C like any other regular anime, which have at least 13 episodes in a season, then all of these problems could've been easily avoided. But alas, they decided to make a 4-episodes mini-series and ended up with this disappointment instead.
Final Thoughts
Housing Complex C has quite a few interesting ideas, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Most of its problems stem from the lack of episodes that prevent the story from being fully fleshed out. That is why despite having the potential to be a good show, a series of bad decisions ended up turning it into a gigantic waste of time.
Have you watched Housing Complex C? If you have, what do you think about it? Let us know in the comment section below.
Author: Harry
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