You know how sometimes you start an anime thinking, “Okay, I’ll just watch a couple of episodes before bed,” and then you find yourself at 3 a.m., lights off, hugging a pillow like it’s your last lifeline? Yeah. That was me with Another.
It is not only horror. It is that dread-of-the-slow-moving, horror of the cold-fingers-down-the-spine type. The one in which the air is thick even when there is nothing going on. It hooked me in the first episode not because it leapt out at me with gore, but rather it said, in a low voice, “Something is wrong here” and left me to simmer in that unease. And how it was delivered.
The setting? The small-town, quiet school atmosphere that people know something but are not going to tell. You encounter the transfer student Kouichi: typical horror premise, huh? However, rather than screaming and running, he gets entangled in this treacle of half-truths and sidelong glances. And Mei Misaki. That girl with an eyepatch. The manner of her just being there, calm, unemotional, almost standing half in another world, brought me forward in my seat. She was not scary in the cheap jump-scare sense; she was scary in the sense that you could tell there was a story there, and it was going to hurt.
It was not the deaths (though, believe me, some of them made me grab my chest). It was the silence. When characters gazed a second too long. The anticipation of terror even before you knew what was ahead. And then- bam- someone dies in the most outrageous irreversible way possible. No sugar-coating. The other does not simply kill characters, it steals them in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a smile in the middle of a life. And that.. it goes to the bone.
The episode that hit me like a punch? The one that has the staircase. Once you have seen it, you know. Afterwards I just sat there looking at the screen like, did that really just happen? My tea grew cold. My heart did not.
And yet in all the tension there were these little human things. Friends trying to laugh off their fear. Human beings crumble under the pressure of superstition. It brought back to my mind that the true horror is not the so-called curse but the way people turn out when in fear. That is what caused me to think about it even after the credits had ended.
Viewing Another was as though one was moving through a hazy forest. It is beautiful in its quietness, but one step further and you ask yourself whether you will ever end up the same. And honestly? I didn’t.
But when you watch it, don t go in just because of blood. Go in to the ambiance. The paranoia. The gradual disintegration of human reason. And perhaps--perhaps--watch it during the daylight.
Thumbnail is designed by me on pixelLab and other images are screenshot from the movie