Let’s finish the spooky season strong with some ghosts and ghouls ripped from the rumor mills and brought to horrible, horrible life upon the screen. Let’s talk about Dark Gathering.
At its heart, Dark Gathering is a show about a little girl, Yayoi, who is determined to make a ghost buster of herself in order to hunt down the spook that took her mother’s soul. Her methodology is pretty unique, though, as she captures lesser ghosts, stuffs them in mystic substitute dolls so that anything spooky that tries to hurt her will damage the dolls instead, and ultimately trains them up to fight for her, making Yayoi basically the ultimate Ghost-type Pokemon Master.
However, Yayoi is not the main character.
That, instead, is college student Keitarou. He’s spiritually sensitive such as to be catnip for ghosts. In the past, this caused an incident where he and his close friend Eiko both received a lingering curse from a spook that they encountered. In the wake of that, Keitarou shut himself away from people and ghosts alike so that no one else would need to get hurt. As of the start of the show, he’s coming out of his shell and taking a job as a tutor, which sees him assigned to Yayoi, who is Eiko’s little cousin and lives with her due to that whole dead parents thing.
And I’ll shortcut several episodes of reveal and say that this is exactly as Eiko planned it. Eiko, you see, is both something of a horror fetishist and a crazy Yandere stalker for Keitarou, being shown to track him with GPS bugs, plant cameras and listening devices all over his home, and generally try to manipulate the two of them together, along with spooky things. There are honestly times when she’d be scarier than the ghosts if the ghosts weren’t so consistently delightfully gruesome and horrifying. However, Eiko’s obsession is mostly played for laughs (and the occasional plot convenience since she’ll always know where Keitarou is if he gets in trouble). It helps that Keitarou is totally in to her, and makes his interest fairly clear reasonably early in the show. No significant drama nor challenges hinge on this, they’re just allowed to be a couple for most of the running time. It’s mostly an honestly wholesome little relationship. Mostly.
So, how about those ghosts? I’ll be honest, Dark Gathering is a long show, and it gives every haunt its own story, as these entities deserve. However, if I recounted them in full detail, we’d be here all day, so I’m going to hit the major arcs and highlights.
The first arc is pretty much getting Keitarou to accept the premise of the show. He comes to tutor Yayoi, but she’s incredibly smart and doesn’t really need a tutor. What she needs is ghost bait, since most spooky things are quite reasonably scared of her. Keitarou gets dragged into some circumstances that terrify him out of his mind, largely against his will, but ultimately talks it out with Yayoi, learning both her own conviction and the fact that if they hunt down the ghost that cursed him and Eiko, the curse (which is currently a painful scar for both of them, not that Eiko minds) can be lifted.
Thus, for the sake of his girlfriend and his student, Keitarou finds his resolve to face the horrors of helping Yayoi bag ghosts and bring them to her room full of ghosts sealed in plushies. During this arc, pretty much every spook is a single-episode affair, and neither their powers nor their lore is all that impressive. Their designs are still exactly as gribbly as you’d want, basically being full-on gore monsters with creative individuality and no constraints on what visuals can be achieved.
The second arc introduces another student to Keitarou, the effervescent and somewhat airheaded Ai. But since nothing can be normal around this cast, Ai also has a problem that isn’t part of the world of the living. She attracts trouble from pretty much everything supernatural, but unlike Keitarou, she is protected from it. Personally, at least – those around her, including people she cares about, are not, and whatever malice comes for her is highly likely not to be stopped but simply shunted off to another victim. Yayoi helps rid Ai of some ghosts, but along the way they learn the nature of her protection: she’s been chosen by a certain god to be his bride, and he does not allow lesser spirits to touch his things. And by “be his bride”, I mean this god is going to reap Ai when she hits twenty and then, if his current image is anything to go by, devour her soul in a slow and agonizing process until he’s ready for the next girl down the line of her extended family to take her place.
In Yayoi’s opinion, this can be dealt with via violence. Gods in Dark Gathering are supernatural entities not unlike ghosts, and Yayoi is convinced that she can pull together enough spectral firepower to make this one cry uncle and give Ai a proper life. Thus, the challenge is issued and the game is set, and our creeper god seems eager to see just what some plucky mortals can bring to the table.
The God’s appearance, though, hurt a lot of Yayoi’s dolls beyond their capacity to sustain damage. This triggers something Yayoi knew of, a feeding frenzy and subsequent death battle in her room that will leave but one survivor, having slurped up the strength of all her other ghosts. This has happened before, and Yayoi refers to the resulting super-ghost as a Graduate. In order to challenge Ai’s god, they’ll have to both recover Yayoi’s previous Graduates and use their powers to capture exceptional spirits that are on the same level. This kicks off, in essence, the second half of the show.
In the second half of the show, the pattern changes to a loop of “Retrieve a new graduate, then challenge a top-ranked haunt”. Each of these cycles takes multiple episodes, typically one for the Graduate and a couple for the Haunt where it will be the trump card, which much more detailed lore and much more impressive ghostly powers than the majority of the ones in the first half.
For instance, one of the ghosts that menaced Ai’s general surroundings was a rather impressive creeper that extracted the brains of its victims and bound their souls to act as minions, but we don’t really know what that guy was or what his story is. We don’t even really get an explanation of its powers, leaving them vague and scary. It’s just the brain ghost (no name given in-show), and essentially a random encounter.
The first Haunt we face in the second half is the spirit of “Old H Castle”. It has a well-defined backstory, which is told over the episodes it appears in. Though ultimately found to not be an evil spirit (instead, it was being corrupted by an evil artifact, and after that’s solved lends Yayoi a token to summon its aid willingly) we hear how the haunt was formed and see how it took its victims. The Graduate used to beat it (the one formed in Yayoi’s room at the end of the previous arc) is named as the High Priest of the Evil Sutra, and while this one isn’t given a history unlike the Graduates Yayoi retrieves, we do get a very detailed run-down of its powers and nature.
From there, it’s on to retrieve the Imprisoned Martyr, the ghost of a Japanese soldier from World War II who willingly signed up with Yayoi in the hope she could help him finally pass on and escape the war horrors that caught up to him in death. With him, they go for the spirit of the Old F Tunnel. We get less history on this one, but we see its behavior, creating an inescapable space loop, stalking people, milking their fear, ripping them apart with systematic agony and binding their broken souls as more part of the trap. It’s even more gruesome than it looks, and it looks pretty gruesome
From there we get a haunted house to act as the “Graduate Dorm” (a multi-episode affair without Keitarou that almost gives Eiko a ghostly chest-burster of a baby), and have a segment that catches up with that spirit Yayoi is really hunting for, a powerful fetal monstrosity (resembling at once an egg cell being impregnated, a fetus, a yin-yang, and a black sun to bring an evil dawn) that can even devour gods. They call it the Specter of Death, and I’ll talk about it more at the end.
Following that, we have our third and final top-rank haunt, and this one is both quite impressive and the gateway to another subplot.
First, the Graduate recovery takes place at an abandoned love hotel, as the sealed Graduate is Otogiri, the Soul-Sucking Oiran… and her seal is imperfect, meaning her influence has corrupted much of the haunted realm. Keitarou manages to bag her despite her best attempts to manipulate or kill him, but perhaps more critically one of the other ghosts in the love hotel made an attempt to take over Keitarou’s body, swapping with him. This opens up the idea that some living people may, in fact, be replaced.
At the proper haunt, the Old I Watergate, we meet one such individual, a famous spiritualist who has been overtaken by an evil ghost, and who is working in league with other replaced people to feed and grow the Specter of Death, as well as being behind the cursed artifact that was at the castle before. She doesn’t last long against the Watergate haunt, but we’re clearly digging more into this.
Said haunt is a little boy who lived a very tortured life, including such things as his mom and her lover making his father into meatballs, which the boy ate. His grudge, executed with a warped perception and child’s comprehension, manifests as a suite of powers around making meatballs of people and devouring, which is ultimately brought to heel thanks to the dangerous release of the Oiran.
From there, the final real arc of the series is dealing not with Ai’s god (the Manga goes on, so that and anything to do with the Specter of Death is for later), but rather with the Replaced as their conspiracy has become aware of Yayoi while Yayoi (with the help of the replaced spiritualist’s twin sister) becomes aware of them, leading to a dangerous game of hide and seek at school with Yayoi’s classmates at stake, and finally Yayoi’s best attempt to trick the replaced little girl investigating her into believing that she is also an evil ghost, rather than their greatest enemy.
With the setup done and the team ready to go after Ai’s god, Dark Gathering ends, at least for the time being. It may not be much of a whole-show conclusion, but each arc is compartmentalized enough that it’s not as though you feel cheated.
So, since I gave a fairly cursory summary this time, it’s time to talk about the show.
For one, the ghost stories are solid. The backgrounds when we get them are exactly what you want, and even when we don’t get backgrounds the ghosts are spectacularly creepy and threatening. But… perhaps not as threatening as they could be, because of the construction of the show.
Dark Gathering is a horror-themed show, and I would even say that its genre is horror as well. But where many ghost stories focus on victims, Dark Gathering is about ghost busters turning these awful spooks into pokemon. While the horror is still present, there’s a good deal of relief in the fact that the horrors can be and will be defeated.
Frankly, though, this just lets the show get away with more. If you put some of these ghosts in a more traditional setup it might get a bit too miserable to watch at times. At least here you don’t expect the intense gore to happen to the main characters, and indeed it doesn’t.
To that end, I feel that the action subgenre, which normally works against horror, is leveraged quite well here. It’s a rare blend to make effective.
Another element that helps the mix work is Keitarou. Keitarou is pretty much perpetually afraid, even when he’s willing to fight through that fear, and he doesn’t really have any offensive capabilities, unlike Yayoi. Because he’s the focus character, the show feels more horror-like than it otherwise could, since we’re following someone who’s usually running or cowering in fear, or at least who wants to. At the very start of the show, he can be a little annoying, but he finds his conviction and his fear is both extremely natural and in service of a purpose to the show.
So, with that taken care of, let’s have that little chat about the Specter of Death.
I love this thing. It’s horrid, and always has some new angle of being horrid that you notice when it shows up. It’s gloriously uncomfortable imagery and one still does not do it justice. But I don’t want this to just become a screenshot gallery, so I’ll leave it at one good shot.
And the thing is, all that imagery is very deliberate and intentional, not just creepy and psycho-sexual for the sake of it.
Let’s start with the infant imagery, the egg and embryo bits. It’s repeatedly pointed out that the Specter of Death is a monstrosity that is yet to be fully formed. It’s doing evil things, sure, but it’s still incubating, and will eventually (if the baddies have their way) come into full form. This isn’t just a visual thing either: when it takes on a god, it does so because the deity in question is bound to childbirth and the unborn, and cannot harm anything that is conceptually a child.
This is also used to help work with the theft of Yayoi’s mother, whose tormented soul seems to act as a surrogate for the monstrosity.
Then there’s the solar aspect. It’s not pronounced yet, but the idea of its advent being a new dawn exists. The suggestion of yin and yang also brings in the concept of energy.
I think, when looking at horror, there’s this temptation to say “well if it’s gribbly and scary that’s fine”. But one of the things that Dark Gathering is exceptional on is instead choosing what images best fit the story and character of the spooky thing.
Pretty much every ghost in Dark Gathering, not just the Specter of Death, has its horrible nature deliberately and carefully chosen to evoke a specific brand of horror. Imagery is more powerful when it’s intentional, and it is here.
Lastly for the Specter, there’s its role in the story. It’s sort of the expected end boss, but it doesn’t have a lot of thought and personality. It is unborn, after all. It ties back
So, what about the final grade for the show at all? The story is solid, but unfinished and noticeably so, even if it is at least a bit satisfying. The individual sub-stories are great, as I’ve gone into, as are the visuals. The story gives itself enough time to build characters that could have been very basic. It is, all around, incredibly solid.
I will, for my part, give it an A for that solid profile. There are weaknesses, especially given that it’s an incomplete adaption that doesn’t try to hide it, but it’s a very good show. If you want to see some messed up ghosts do their things, this show is very satisfying and strong. Go ahead and check it out.