Tokyo Scum Brigade have now posted 4 out of 5 parts of their long-waited Umezu Kazuo (classic horror manga artist: Drifting Classrom, Orochi Blood, etc) interview.  You have to check this out!: http://tokyoscum.blogspot.com/search/label/Kazuo%20Umezu
Read the rest of this entry Entry meta

Yeah, these bento look cute, but that’s just a device to lull you into complacency.  Truth is, they’ve come straight from the depths of hell, intent on subverting you through nefarious gastronomical means. Scariest of them all, Krausser from Detroit Metal City:
Read the rest of this entry Entry meta

Gaap, one of the 72 demons of hell and currently in the service of Lord Goldsmith.  Her fighting method seems to mostly rely on opening yawning holes in the ground, and on high kicks. Measurements unknown, but surely quite enormous!     Chesty Morgan, star of the 1974 sexploitation flick Deadly Weapons, in which she [...]
Read the rest of this entry Entry meta

I found these adorable and well-executed yokai illustrationsn in the midst of prowling through a Google.jp image search (my favorite pastime!) for yokai  I’ve got no idea who the illustrator is, but there are tons more on their site, and you can sort of understand it with Google Translate.  It’s really worth a look around!: [...]
Read the rest of this entry Entry meta

           A new thing I’ll be doing is a series of posts about Ukiyo-e master Yoshitoshi Tsukioka’s (芳年月岡) New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts series.  When I see ukiyo-e prints, I always wonder about the story behind them, so I did a little research on these, to see which kabuki play or folklore they’re from.  It [...]
Read the rest of this entry Entry meta

  I’ve had high hopes for this episode ever since I saw the preview, and I think it lived up to those hopes pretty well.  Kinzo gets his star turn as Lord Goldsmith, the badass-est grandpa around, announcing that his children are all failures, and he will test the grandchildren instead, to see if any of [...]
Read the rest of this entry Entry meta

A new documentary film entitled Gwashi! Kazuo Umezu Desu, about the strange and wonderful manga author/artist Umezu Kazuo, started a limited run in Tokyo theaters on 11/23.   This trailer is untranslated, but still gives a good idea of how great it will be: Umezu  has been a pioneer of horror and sci-fi manga, and his influence [...]
Read the rest of this entry Entry meta

   I find that I’m usually disappointed by newer deathrock*-revival bands:  they often don’t have the right scratchy-spidery guitar style, tribal drum beats, and distinctive bass-line driven melodies that made the original deathrock/Batcave bands so great. Not so, in the case of Japan’s †13th MOON† : the music sounds just right, and totally fantastic.  My particular [...]
Read the rest of this entry Entry meta

Rokurokubi (ろくろ首)  are monsters (usually female) who appear as normal humans during the day, but whose heads can travel long distances from their body at night, due to their long stretchy necks.  They are usually not content to merely scare their victims, and often murder them by drinking their blood or life-energy.  On days [...]
Read the rest of this entry Entry meta

Well, I have to say that this was one of the more underwhelming entries in the Umineko catalogue.  There’s a lot more backstory on Ange, but little of it is anything you couldn’t infer from the last episode, except exactly why she was expelled from the Mariage Sorcière.  And even so, I think the scene [...]
Read the rest of this entry Entry meta