4 star

It’s a Spirit Eat Spirit World.

Horror anime changed in June 2019 when Kenichi Kondo‘s Dark Gathering hit the shelves, bringing the dark horror into the light as our protagonists head to the most haunted areas of Japan, to release a curse. MVM brings us the twenty-five anime episodes of this popular occult series, that gives you plenty of disturbing horror. Definitely not one for the squeamish.

Keitarô Gentôga has been shut away for two years, due to an encounter with a vicious spirit that left him and his best friend Eiko Hôzuki cursed, with disfigured right and left hand respectively. He has remained in his room because of the other effect of the encounter, that now he is like a magnet to spirits and that scares him. Unlike Keitarô, Eiko loves the idea of ghosts and scary stuff. Through her encouragement, he has come out of his shell and is now enrolled in college along with her, where he wants to make friends and be involved within the college. This leads him to becoming the private tutor for Yayoi, who turns out to be Eiko’s little cousin. This encounter will change all their lives forever.

Yayoi was changed after becoming an orphan, she now has two pupils per eye, and this gives her the ability to see normally and see ghosts clearly at the same time. The accident that killed her parents also changed her intellect, and now her IQ is 160, which will come in handy in the future. During the accident, she saw her mother’s spirit being stolen by a strange embryonic spirit, she wants to find this spirit and defeat it to set her mother’s spirit free.

This will involve all three of the friends, and take them to all the scariest places on the islands of Japan, as Yayoi needs to capture the strongest spirits to take on the evil that infests the dark and sinister spots on the islands. She will trap them in stuffed toys along with personal items from the three (i.e. fingernail cuttings or hair) to protect them from the effects of the spirits, and they will need a lot of them.

Dark Gathering is for the fans of the occult, spirits, horror and ghost stories, as some of this anime is out there with the gore and weird stuff that pulls no punches. Something to get your teeth into.

1. go to haunted places and catch evil spirits.

2. Create an army of spirits (and catch a god).

3. Defeat the Spectre.

With plenty of classic spirit types (axe wielding faceless monsters, haunted castles) to spirits that will get you (pregnant, and haunted phone booths) as well as some really weird ones, you have been warned.

Lets goooooooooo…

Dark Gathering 1-25 is available from MVM