English Dub Season Review: Dark Gathering Season One

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Keitaro (Clint Bickham) takes a part-time job tutoring the child prodigy Yayoi (Natalie Rial).  Little does he know that she’s a gifted medium hell-bent on finding the spirit behind her mother’s vanishing, and she’s gravely determined to drag Keitaro into a terrifying supernatural world.

Our Take:

Dark Gathering is an anime adaptation of a manga series written and illustrated by Kenichi Kondo.  It is directed by Hiroshi Ikehata and produced by OLM Team Masuda, with Shigeru Murakoshi writing the scripts.  Shinya Segawa handles the character designs, and the music is composed by Kohta Yamamoto, Shun Narita, and Yusuke Seo.  The opening theme song is “Kakuriyo” by Luz, while the ending songs are “Haiiro” for the first cour and “Intaglio” for the second cour, both by Kana Hanazawa.

You better step aside, Ghostbusters, because the world of supernatural anime has a new spirit-hunting team joining the fun, and they ain’t afraid of no ghosts.  Well, one of them is.  Regarding horror anime, my experience tends to be hit-and-miss in terms of its frights.  Some shows involving the yokai I have watched so far haven’t done much to impact me with their scares, although they often compensate with their presentations and imagery.  Then again, a few I’ve seen were more light-hearted than horrific, such as Natsume’s Book of Friends and The Demon Prince of Momochi House.  But then I watched Dark Gathering, which finds a way to prove that horror anime can be both scary and fun.

Consisting of twenty-five episodes, Dark Gathering chronicles Keitaro Gentoga, a young man who, along with his childhood friend Eiko Hozuki (Karlii Hoch), gets cursed by an unknown spirit.  As a result, he becomes a shut-in throughout his childhood, with Eiko rehabilitating him for years.  In an effort to resocialize himself, Keitaro assigns himself as a private tutor for Eiko’s cousin Yayoi.  However, he later discovers that Yayoi has a spiritual sense that allows her to see ghosts due to the polycoria she received from a childhood accident.  She’s also been collecting dangerous yokai to rescue her mother, who’s been abducted by a ghostly embryo.  As a result, Keitaro is unwillingly drawn into Yayoi’s quest to rescue her mother and tame the dangerous spirits lurking around every corner.

In a way, the concept resembles Ghostbusters regarding the characters hunting and capturing ghosts.  However, the difference between the two is its tone.  While Ghostbusters is scary in a fun and light-hearted way, Dark Gathering will make you wish you didn’t watch it with the lights turned off during the night.  This series isn’t for the faint of heart, as it has plenty of disturbing and even violent content you’d seen in any other supernatural horror movie, but two times creepier.  Fortunately, it wasn’t all doom and gloom, as it also offered some comedic moments from its characters to balance its tone, including Keitaro’s freak-outs and Yayoi’s obsession with the supernatural.  At points, it could risk undermining its frightening appeal with its eccentric and random humor.  However, it wound up working in its favor due to Ikehata’s direction.  Not only did the comedy collide seamlessly into its darker tone, but it also provided some pretty decent laughs amid its effective frights.  It delivered a fun and adventurous experience that isn’t afraid to push the limits of its scare factor.

Regarding its narrative, Dark Gathering has an interesting concept of a young girl hunting spirits and a sense of world-building exploring the ghostly beings and their locations.  However, it also has a sense of repetitiveness in the plots’ formula.  Each episode delivers the same narrative, involving the protagonists encountering spirits and breaking their curses or capturing them in different locations and scenarios.  This mainly happens in the series’s first half, especially with Keitaro being the victim of the ghosts’ curses.  Fortunately, it didn’t reach the point of boredom since the episodes serve a purpose in the overall plot and character development, mainly Keitaro’s, who learns to face his phobias to help Yayoi achieve her goal.

The second half of Dark Gathering was where the show takes a surprising turn for the better.  The remaining episodes have Keitaro, Eiko, and Yayoi collecting Graduates and S-rank spirits from dangerous locations to help them confront a powerful god who brands Keitaro’s second tutoring student, Ai Kamiyo (Alyssa Marek), as his bride.  These ghosts are more savage and frightening compared to the yokai in the first half, and it shows.  They provided more intense stakes for the characters but also accomplished something most modern supernatural horror movies failed to do: terrorizing the viewers.  

It also helps that the protagonists are likable, thanks to the English cast and their personalities, adding to the urgency of their spiritual adventures.  Clint Bickham was a solid choice to portray Keitaro’s fearful yet determined persona, and Natalie Rial’s approach to Yayoi’s deadpan personality was a flawless blend of joy and satisfaction.  Karlii Hoch also made a surprisingly strong impression regarding her role as Eiko despite a few forced deliveries in her dialogue.  Her dark, twisted side was delightfully creepy, but it was also her petrified nature that sold her as a voice actor, especially in episodes involving Yayoi and Eiko encountering the “House of the Virgin Conception”.  Finally, we have Alyssa Marek’s Ai, who’s surprisingly not as terrible as I feared.  Upon her introduction in “Betrothed to Divinity,“ I was concerned about Ai being a disruptive and overbearing presence within the group. However, her ability to seamlessly interweave comedic instances with her poignant backstory resulted in her being as likable as the protagonists. 

OLM, a renowned animation studio, has showcased its exceptional talent in anime adaptations with well-known titles such as Pokemon and Summer Time Rendering. Tasked with the adaptation of Dark Gathering, OLM faced the daunting challenge of faithfully portraying the manga’s most chilling and unsettling moments through meticulous attention to lighting, visual presentation, and intricate designs.  The result is a remarkable and riveting display of discomfort and horror violence that elevate the show’s stakes and straightforward plots.  From the terrifying yokai designs to the nightmarish settings, Dark Gathering is a stellar example of animation emphasizing the horror elements in ways most live-action ones struggle to replicate.

Overall, Dark Gathering gathers many elements of the supernatural horror genre and effectively combines them to provide a delightfully creepy experience for horror fans and newcomers.  The season’s first half periodically got bogged down by its plots’ repetitive structures. However, the second half involving the Graduates and Ai’s god husband turns the horror factor to 11 and never lets up until its finale.  The stellar animation style and characters also help elevate the show’s discomforting yet entertaining quality, making this one of the best, if not the best, horror anime I’ve seen.  If you’re a fan of both horror and anime, do yourself a favor and put this on your watchlist.