Apartment Cthulhu – Housing Complex C Spoiler Review

Housing Complex C (sometimes “Apartment Complex C”, or by the Japanese title, C Danchi) is a four-episode ONA. Airing in 2022, it presents as a Lovecraftian horror story, perhaps with a creep kids angle

When it comes to a month dedicated to Lovecraft in Anime, any show that can have its first line stand as “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu” – a fragment of Lovecraft’s most famous alien-speak chant – at least deserves to be here.

In the dead of night, we see some little girls fleeing from a Cthulhu cultist before the father of one comes in and bashes in his skull. We get a flashback to ancient times with soldiers trying to kill a priestess girl only to get melted by magic.

Cut to presumably earlier on the timeline than the night escape. It’s a fine summer day, the locals are practicing what seems like a weird and harmless ritual, somebody spots a Deep One through binoculars. You know, normal stuff. One of the little girls, Kimi, approaches a group of old-timers, looking for a way to beat the heat. This leads them to an underground storeroom with a shaved ice machine to retrieve… and a bunch of other stuff that Kimi and one of the old-timers poke through, including a stone marked with the Elder Sign (a glyph in Lovecraft’s lore with warding properties, here rendered in its “wonky star” form made popular by the Call of Cthulhu Role Playing Game) that of course gets disturbed and removed from the area.

Setting that aside, it seems the titular complex, where Kimi and the old-timers live, is getting quite a few new move ins. One is a large pack of foreigners. They say they’re hires for a fishery, but their number includes the apparent Cthulhu Cultist from the opening so one might think the fishy smell is less professional and more personal. There’s also a small family, including the other little girl from the opening act, Yuri. She’s a year older than Kimi, but comes off as drastically more mature. The father of the family is managing the group move-in, but he seems to be an outside manager.

We’re also obliquely introduced to one other apartment resident, a somewhat younger man, a shut-in artist type who has the Mythos on the brain.

Oddly enough, things seem to start off well, the big guy of the foreign band even saving Kimi from a childish misadventure and seeming like a really nice dude. That night, after Kimi spies a horde of Deep Ones on the shore and thinks nothing of it, Kimi and Yuri meet up and Kimi takes her new friend to the underground storeroom, discovering a secret room there where the artist has hidden a wall full of mythos sketches. They also find his pen and return it, in a sequence that seems to suggest despite him being a seemingly nonverbal and creepy looking fat otaku type, he might not be bad news.

The next day, strangeness intensifies, as dead fish are found washed up all over, and Kimi visits the shut-in only do discover something… quite odd. The shut-in and his mother have disappeared, with the only hint being that, in the shut-in’s room, there’s a heap of black moss in his suspicious shape.

But enough of that! We see more of the girls getting along, and even learn that the local peoples seem to be derived from the ancient Cthulhu cult, though its ways and practices are supposedly nearly forgotten. We get some more creepy set dressing, with fish and animal carcasses being left around, until the day of a shaved ice party organized by Kimi where one of the old-timers is missing (and discovered in more of a mossy form, if at all) and the home-made sauce is discovered to be a bit off for reason of something horrible deep in the pot, which causes people to start accusing each other rather than bonding. There is much hostility.

The folklorist of the old-timers figures out that the housing complex is on the site of an ancient temple. Later, Kimi and Yuri go down to the undergound storage room and find a secret passage opened by the Elder Sign stone, leading to a room with Cthulhu myth art all over the walls and a moss pile that Kimi seems to recognize as the folklorist. Outside, Kan, the gentle giant of the foreigners who has borne the brunt of the local hostility and who seemed like a baddie in the opening of episode one, discovers that while our show appears set in 2000, many of the artifacts in the store room are from later, including a yellowing newspaper clipping from 2011 and a mummified dog that died in 2003.

The time abnormalities continue with the end of episode 3, where Kimi returns to her mother. Throughout this show, we’ve seen Kimi talk to her mother before, and conspicuously mom has never entered the frame or spoken back, and now we see that Kimi seems to be addressing a fetus growing in a pot of water with an artichoke.

Between this and her seeming knowledge beyond her normal childishness, one might suspect that Kimi is not as innocent as she appears.

Thus, we launch into the final episode. We use the departed folklorist’s notebook as a way to introduce another Mythos concept and disambiguate the spookiness, which is very fitting with Lovecraft’s stories. It seems that the Cthulhu-worshipping founders of the local area turned to the worship of Yog-Sothoth (the name isn’t said that directly, but the stand-in is obvious if you know your lore) in the hopes of resurrecting their god, involving a lot of sacrifice and blasphemous rituals, and also gate symbology. Add in some rainbows and the weird scene earlier in the show where Kimi was introduced with a storm of soap bubbles and things are very Yog-Sothoth coded, especially given the time abnormalities introduced.

Essentially, the story we’re given is that Yog-Sothoth’s power is peaking, and that’s why the Deep Ones are making offerings of all those fish and animal carcasses. Many of which were placed at Kimi’s door. The moss is also explained as being a relic of Yog-Sothoth’s power, since moss evidently relates to eternity so if you kill someone with time manipulation, you get moss. Sure.

The writing also reveals that the time abnormality is due to the local area being trapped in the past, with the outside world having advanced farther, and temporal flotsam occasionally appearing. Further, Kimi is implicated as being the avatar of Yog-Sothoth, with it supposedly being earnest how much she seems to like everyone and want them to get along, and that being part of why she’s stalled time around the complex. As for what’s broken the dream of an otherworldly god, Yuri’s family (who brought outsiders in) stands implicated.

It’s the last old-timer who reads all of this, and his account of Kimi’s mother, who was unwilling or unable to speak of any father when pregnant with her, recalls the Whately clan from The Dunwich Horror. As he tries to talk to Kimi, still believing that if she’s a god she’s a benevolent one, he gets axed by Yuri’s father, with a ritual blade that was seen in the background in the previous episode. Yuri’s mom is also involved with bumping off residents, which now seems to be in full force.

This leads us, in essence, back to Episode 1, but with different understanding. Now we know that Kan was not the danger, but rather Yuri’s father, who took him out. The recitation of R’lyehan was also not part of his faith (he, like most of the random foreigners, seems to have been a faithful Muslim), but more likely from the real baddies.

Yuri saves Kimi from her dad (along with her mom, the real Cthulhu cultist) and this begins their run through the rainy night. Kan defeats Yuri’s mom despite being ambushed and stabbed in the process, and runs to help Kimi. He encounters Yuri and her dad, with Yuri revealing that she’s in on the cult business too, clearly herding Kimi around for nefarious purpose.

We get more of the encounter, with Kan initially fighting off the mom and dad with the help of that Elder Sign talisman, while Yuri turns on Kimi and starts attacking her all-out. However, her pursuit is interrupted by a pane of violet light (recalling Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch House) that teleports her to inside Kimi’s apartment with Kimi and that mom-in-a-jar, which is undone as Kimi reveals her own true nature.

She declares herself bored. Yuri threatens to get her parents involved. Kimi produces Yuri’s parents, first as severed limbs, and then through a time-space warp as a torrent of gore the pours on Yuri. The cultists really had no idea who they were messing with.

In full Yog-Sothoth mode, she taunts Yuri and explains how the complex has repeated the year 2000 over twenty times, how she doesn’t mind most mortal fools be they cultists or not but that they actually annoy her, how she handled turning bodies to moss to keep her friends at the complex from feeling sad, and how Yuri’s dad was deluded about what he was calling up with his would-be sacrifices.

Yuri goes full groveling cultist mode before Kimi-Yog-Sothoth. Of course, Kimi just got done explaining how Yuri and her family ruined her fun. Kimi goes on to explain how this is the last straw in her assessment of humans, viscerally removes Yuri from the board, and begins to ascend to true Yog-Sothoth status in soap bubbles and rainbow light, declaring the doom of humanity is a step closer.

Kan, evidently still alive, manages to crawl topside to see the lightshow. He begs Allah’s forgiveness and then, with the Elder Sign talisman, recites a chant Kimi gave him in case things got really bad, invoking her by her true name.

This sends him into (or back to) the 2020’s, where it seems his injuries are just flesh wounds and the housing complex and area around it have been abandoned for at least two decades. He’s even got a modern smartphone, so it seems he’ll be okay in the proper time. Our final shot shows Kimi (now with white hair and openly mystical) standing atop the ruins with iridescent soap bubbles around, and she sings the old folklore song in its “true” lyrics over the credits to play us out. So I guess Kan’s basic goodness convinced her to stick it out a little longer in some form.

Housing Complex C was a real treat. It has all the tropes and most of the formula of a classic Lovecraft short story, but as an original tale it’s adapted properly for the screen format. There’s very little fat – we get peaceful times in the first couple episodes, but those serve to counterpoint the horror. At just four episodes, it is basically a movie, and a solid one when it comes to creating entries in the expanded Mythos for screen. It revels in the classical stylings of the multinatuonal and frequently violent Cthulhu Cult without forgetting that these beings are ultimately more alien than anything else.

By keeping humans as the real evil while one of the Mythos gods is effectively our protagonist, Housing Complex C deftly updates many of the core conceits, and shows that the writers knew their stuff when it came to working within the sandbox that Lovecraft provided. This is far from the first time that Yog-Sothoth, in particular, has been depicted as a more benevolent being, with the Lovecraft stories featuring protagonist Randolph Carter usually depicting it as more of a wise otherworldly being who doesn’t exactly get little things like mortals, Through the Gate of the Silver Key probably being the most prominent example.

There’s also some interesting address of how the rampant xenophobia native to Lovecraft’s work has aged and developed. Suffice to say, xenophobia is a strong theme here, with the rift between the ambiguously Arab new arrivals and the Japanese old-timers being a big deal. However, such divisions are meaningless in the face of the true Other… which isn’t really that scary in this. The Deep Ones seen throughout are just kind of there; the worst thing they do is leave some dead fish around as an offering. Cthulhu remains dead (but dreaming) in R’lyeh, and what personal stake Kimi has is mostly positive, thinking it would be fun to see a timeline where people actually get along. Housing Complex C uses this underlying fear, especially in how its choice to open with a slice of the panicked run in the last episode frames Kan, both as an in-character plot device and a cunning misdirect for the audience.

The handling of details is also something I have to praise Housing Complex C for. It carefully weaves things in to the background and establishes clues for the audience. I already mentioned the arc with Kimi’s mother being out of sight and out of mind, but there’s a scene early on (the one that ultimately starts to paint the image of Kan as a good guy by having him catch Kimi when she falls) where Kimi just appears very suddenly on a balcony, with the soap bubbles she’s been blowing as a dissolve, and the visual coding is on point enough that even going in unspoiled, with just a little bit of Mythos color, I was already thinking that Yog-Sothoth might be in play here, and thus it made all the sense in the world when Kimi was connected to that entity.

Yuri’s family plays nice very well, but once you know they’re the baddies, the clues were there the whole time and you probably would have picked up on some. The Elder Sign talisman seems repulsive to the father when he even catches a glimpse of it, which when the Elder Sign is usually depicted as being the one truly effective apotropaic icon in Lovecraft’s universe, does suggest that they’re bad news. At the time you might think that Chaosium’s “eye-star-Elder-Sign” is being potentially misused or that their recognition of it isn’t perfect, but in fact the only way it could be more on the money would be if they used the design from Lovecraft’s letters instead. Later, you see the ritual knife that the family is using to conduct all their murder-sacrifices in the entryway of their apartment. It’s sheathed and on top of a box that hasn’t been unpacked yet, but it’s large and ornate enough to draw the eye and make you question why they have something that looks so mythos-ish if they’re really innocents.

The biggest downside you might find to Housing Complex C is that it’s a “horror” anime, the length of a horror movie which usually works, and it’s not exactly scary. It’s frequently eerie, occasionally gory, and sometimes tense or intimidating, but it doesn’t really operate much like horror work. There’s a game of mafia going on where people are being steadily bumped off (one the “town” loses), but because of the whole moss thing it’s very understated. The characters don’t panic thanks to Kimi’s cover-up, so the audience doesn’t panic, and until the final episode we’re frequently relieved with pretty day scenes wherein folks get along, which do a lot to stomp on the horror mood.

But as I stated in my 101 entry at the start of the month, while we call Lovecraft the progenitor of Cosmic Horror today, he saw himself more as a writer of “weird fiction”, and that’s what Housing Complex C is. True, even Lovecraft’s own writing is usually bent towards horror, such that Cosmic Horror is a proper appellation for most of his stories, including the likes of The Dunwich Horror, The Call of Cthulhu, and The Color Out of Space, but the corpus of the Mythos also touches on scifi strangeness like The Whisperer in Darkness or The Shadow Out of Time and even epic fantasy in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, so the vibe Housing Complex C gives off really does fit right in.

Overall, I think this one is deeply underrated, probably because a lot of people, familiar more with modern horror, wanted it to be something other than what it is. It’s also only four episodes, which when viewed as a broadcast anime could be disappointing. It told a cohesive story from beginning to end with tight scripting and good beats, and I think it came out very well, but I have to admit there’s some temptation to start going down a rabbit hole of “What if?” in terms of the typical twelve-episode season. But that’s entirely divergent. It didn’t need twelve episodes, it told its story perfectly at four.

This one was a treat, and it’s one I can recommend without hesitation to any existing fan of the Mythos. If you’re not already a Lovecraft fan… well, I’ve kind of spoiled all the good twists in this one so maybe it’s a little late, but I still think it would be worth the watch as a supernatural mystery with a faint patina of horror. And for all that, I’m going to give the show an A. This is the ceiling of the show’s ambitions. It’s a constrained, smaller piece that wants to be a part of something bigger rather than an amazing independent work, and it deserves to be remembered for its place within the body of the Mythos.