C Danchi

As a fan of HP Lovecraft and not knowing anything about this show before going into it, I was delighted to find out how many lovecraftian allusions are present within the story. I was a little saddened by the rather rapid pace and somewhat haphazard approach to the story but these feelings of mine could just be due to my longing for slow burn horror fiction. The twist was interesting and gruesome but in the end I felt like there was something missing.

Overall, it’s definitely worth a watch especially if you’re a fan of HO Lovecraft. It’s a fun and gruesome watch that doesn’t ... take too long to get through

In a tiny community of elders, the arrival of young foreigners has the power to change their seemingly perfect lives.

With a nicely built set of characters and an interesting mythology, this show offers plot twists hard to expect in a child's playtime. The horror is quite reserved, focusing mostly on the suspense of the story and the psychological aspect of it all, keeping the viewer constantly on edge.

Overall, it is a compelling story, mostly hurt by its short runtime, most of which was spent on the everyday, even just two more episodes would have made the show feel more complete and cohesive.

It's a shame that the horror genre of anime is such a sparse one, as the horror genre holds plenty of potential for creative concepts and compelling stories, especially when paired with its natural companion genre, mystery. Naturally, the idea of a mystery horror anime based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, one of the more notable contributors to the horror genre, is a promising one. Alas, Housing Complex C can barely be called a horror or mystery anime. Its myriad strange writing decisions and nakedly manipulative presentation elicit far more questions than its barely-there plot and cast of barely-characters, and never to positive ... effect.

In terms of mystery, Housing Complex C offers a heaping helping of dead ends and red herrings, going to great and nonsensical lengths to obscure the nature of events and the identities of its antagonists. Characters often bend to the whims of the mystery plot, completely changing their personalities as required and putting on facades for the audience rather than each other. Meanwhile, the few actual clues the show offers are delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow to the face, to the point where one is liable to dismiss the actual answer as a possibility on the grounds that "it couldn't possibly be that obvious". This leaves the eventual reveals feeling cheap and unsatisfying, not helped by the show's reliance on meandering explanations and confusing infodumps

The series fares no better as a work of horror fiction, with tame and played out supernatural imagery, a complete lack of tension or atmosphere and no real scares to speak of. With only four episodes, the anime has little time to establish and develop its characters, so there's little cause to mourn their eventual offscreen deaths. Its most meaningful attempts at horror come from very occasional uses of gore and mutilation, a thin layer of Lovecraftian lacquer and the invocation of a decidedly sophomoric form of misanthropy, delivered with a side of ham-handed commentary about the evils of xenophobia.

To conclude, Housing Complex C is a thoroughly unimpressive and undercooked outing, taking promising concepts and source material, mixing them with basic takes on tired themes and sacrificing them (if you'll pardon the metaphor), along with character, plot, tension, logic, consistency and general writing quality, on the altar of an amateurish murder mystery that concerns itself more with ten-a-penny depictions of social strife than with earning its reveals through clever writing. The series evokes more frustration than horror with its awkward dialogue, reams of cavernous plot holes, underdeveloped characters, overdone themes and answers that only raise more questions. If it's a mystery or horror series you're looking for, you could do a lot better than this.