Corpse Party: Tortured Souls Review: Splatter & Repentance

Corpse Party: Tortured Souls

I went into this one blind, so let’s establish that. No, I have not played Corpse Party. I knew it was a game; I knew the franchise had fans; that was the extent of my knowledge. What I had was a four-part OVA that is rare to find. Found a non-censored version. I can’t tell you what “uncensored” implies in this case. I just rolled with it. Since it’s out of print, this is another archive piece, like the Judge review. Your viewing options are YouTube and maybe the Internet Archive, but if you’ve been around anime long enough, you know how to find what you want—four OVAs, a little over 100 minutes, one sitting.

The People Behind the Party

Corpse Party: Tortured Souls—Bougyakusareta Tamashii no Jukyou—dropped on July 24, 2013; all four episodes were released the same day on DVD and Blu-ray in Japan. Asread animated it, and if you recognize the name, they are the Future Diary people. Akira Iwanaga directed, Shoichi Sato wrote the scripts, and the music was by Mao Hamamoto of Team GrisGris, alongside Takashi Hamada. The episode titles are as follows: Multiple Separation, Broken Hinges, Unreachable Feelings, and Sorrowful Truth.

The source material predates most people’s knowledge. The original Corpse Party was developed in 1996 by the indie circle Team GrisGris, led by Makoto Kedouin, for the NEC PC-98. Japanese indie PC gaming (dōjin soft) nurtured grim, experimental storytelling long before commercial studios got their hands dirty with extreme splatter horror. Most fans are familiar with the PSP remake MAGES did, and this OVA leans on that story as well as a prequel OVA, Missing Footage, from 2012, which clocks in at eleven minutes. Maiden Japan released Tortured Souls over here in January 2016, with subtitles only, and that release is long gone. Hence the handling of the archive.

The cast is better than a splatterfest OVA has any right to have. Hiro Shimono leads as Satoshi, with Rina Sato, Satomi Arai, Asami Imai, Yuichi Nakamura, Eri Kitamura, Yuuka Nanri, Tetsuya Kakihara, and Miyuki Sawashiro as Naomi, Seiko, Ayumi, Yoshiki, Yuka, Mayu, Morishige, and teacher Yui Shishido. Ayano Yamamoto plays Naho Saenoki, and Tomokazu Sugita plays Yuuya Kizami, who we will get to. And then there is Sachiko, voiced by Ikue Otani. Yes, that Ikue Otani. Pikachu. Chopper. One of the sweetest voices in the industry plays the scariest child in the building; Asami Imai sings the opening, Hoshikuzu no Ring, and Yumi Hara closes it out with Hotarubi.

Housekeeping: characters are called by first and last name interchangeably, so keep a mental roster as I did. That is not sloppy writing; it is how Japanese works. Family names are used by strangers, given names by intimates, and the latter tells you who is close to whom.

A Doll, a Charm, and a Hole in the Floor

You know it is a horror movie when it opens at night in a school, with children laughing somewhere in the dark and something that sounds like it is hanging from a rope. Oh, and my all-time favorite: let’s build the new structure on top of the old structure where something tragic happened; don’t worry, it’ll be fine.

A girl wakes up on the floor of a classroom and says this is not her classroom. I knew that one. I took a nap a few days ago that was so good I didn’t even know where I was when I woke up. Post-flashback, the students sit around a candle, telling ghost stories. Ayumi relates it: A teacher fell down a flight of stairs and died, and then disaster followed disaster, including several murders, until the school was torn down. The headmaster, possessed by grief, threw himself off the roof the day it closed. Their school, Kisaragi Academy, was built on the ruins of the Heavenly Host Elementary. And the dead teacher has no idea she’s dead.

Satoshi gets nervous and wants to go home, but Mayu wants the story to keep going, and Morishige points out that she is easily scared, which is the first truly human thing he says in the entire series. A knock kills the candle, and it is just Ms. Yui telling them to finish cleaning and go home. Yuka, Satoshi’s little sister, shows up with an umbrella, and Seiko jokes that Yuka is a rival for Satoshi’s love. Mayu is moving away, so before they leave, they do “Sachiko Ever After.” Everyone repeats the words nine times each. Make sure you keep count. If you lose it, you keep going. Then everybody grabs a piece and rips the doll apart. You tuck your scrap into your student ID pocket, purse, or wherever you go, and as long as everyone holds a piece, they all stay friends. And then, of course, lightning, obviously. Then an earthquake, and the floor opens beneath all nine of them, eight students and their teacher.

Naomi and Seiko wake up alone. I like Seiko. She has some sense. She believes they are in the spirit world. The windows are locked, the phones are dead, the desks are small, and she figures it’s an elementary school. The dynamic between the two works surprisingly well, hinting at a definite Yuri vibe, especially when Seiko casually asks Naomi if she brought any butt salve, for example. I never understood this, but I guess it’s to show how laid-back and honest she is as an individual, so it piqued my interest enough to actually look it up, since I didn’t realize it was a running gag from the game.

Adapted in the Tortured Souls OVA, this moment traces back to Chapter 1 of the game. Trapped inside Heavenly Host, Seiko nonchalantly says to Naomi, “Do you have any of that ass medicine on you, by any chance? You know, the smeary stuff?” Naomi’s exasperated reaction—“What, again?!”—makes it clear this is a routine ask rather than a freak occurrence. Upon receiving the antibacterial cream, Seiko departs with her signature candor, announcing, “I’m gonna go butter up my pooper with it real good!” Seiko apparently has chronic butt troubles and zero embarrassment about them, and Naomi is so used to it that she carries ointment for her. Seiko even claims her butt’s been “drier ‘n a desert” since they arrived at the school, giving the gag a flimsy in-story justification. The last thing I’ll point out is that, for those who say that English localizers often change the meanings of things and tend to worsen them, the original Japanese is much tamer. 

So with that said, it’s obvious that Naomi is serious. Seiko is class rep energy, upbeat to a fault, and in another life she is Stacy from Daria, the sunshine that keeps the room from going fully dark. Seiko is ironically one of the few main characters we know anything about: she has two little brothers and a dad who works all the time, so she is the mom of the house, which is why she mothers Naomi so much.

The front door does not open, so they sleep until morning. Seiko wraps Naomi’s ankle, and they promise to stay friends no matter what happens. Then Seiko realizes she’s lost her scrap and goes back to the bathroom to get it, while the clock strikes. Naomi cannot move or speak. A pen writes on its own, Blood runs down the walls, a voice says, “Sacchan, you finally came to visit me,” and something pours itself into Naomi. Seiko, meanwhile, finds half a body in the hallway and steps on an intestine for good measure. When Seiko screams her name, Naomi snaps out of it and runs past a figure in red who has been watching them the whole time.

Here is where the OVA earns its reputation. Naomi finds Seiko in the bathroom with a rope around her neck. She assumes the worst, except that Seiko is still trying to talk and apologize, ironically, since the two had a falling out earlier. The noose tightens the more Naomi helps, so Naomi hunts for something for Seiko to stand on, finds a bucket, and has to empty it first because it’s full of guts and Blood. She does not make it back in time.

I don’t think I have ever seen that in a horror anime of any sort, and I have seen a few. It has the same cruelty as King’s Game, where help arriving is part of the trap. Rina Sato does an excellent job voicing Naomi throughout. Grief is a real challenge to perform and even harder to listen to.

Never Split Up

When they call this thing a splatterfest, they are not lying. The second OVA opens with somebody stabbed in the eye with scissors, the thing every teacher tells kids not to play with. Over this we get the rules: the school’s curse slowly assaults your sanity until you hurt others without warning, and in the final stages your body blackens like the school absorbs ash and your soul. The show calls it corruption.

A girl with glasses finds Naomi grieving and offers condolences with the gentleness of a coroner. Her friend broke, she says, and chose a violent way out to protect her mind; until the moment Naomi dies, she will be alone. That is Naho Saenoki, a high schooler famous for ghost research with a renowned blog. Hold that thought, because Ayumi got the charm off her blog.

We switch to Satoshi and Yuka finding a newspaper, the Heavenly Post, and piecing together history: the serial child disappearances of 1973, closed that September 18 when police found the children’s corpses along with a faculty member holding bloody scissors. The ghost story was real history. The school was torn down decades ago, so how does anybody keep ending up inside it? The siblings walk past corpses looking for a bathroom, because horror protocol says the little sister’s bladder is a plot device. They find Morishige photographing remains and learn students from other schools have been pulled in too—kids who did the same charm. Then Satoshi and Morishige split up to search, agreeing to tell anyone they find to meet at the entrance, and Morishige warns them about ghosts. Ghosts of other children. He saw them attack and mangle other children.

Cut to Shinozaki staring at a clock, about to lose her mind. Yoshiki attempts to calm her down. While this is happening, a ghost child asks which one of them wants to be killed first, and when he vanishes, Naho appears and explains the architecture: the curse built a plane of overlapping dimensions. Same school, different layers, and they cannot meet unless they share one. Nine souls entered, eight remain, and the spirits of the murdered children sustain the plane. Appease them and the students might go free. The way to appease them is the criminal’s repentance. And the murderer is still at the school.

It was slick how she said perhaps they would succeed where others haven’t. Then we get a dramatic pause with three dots, and she disappears, and a doll appears on the floor. Shinozaki looks at the doll, and the doll says, “Gomen nasai, I am sorry.”

More secrets unfold when Yoshiki falls through a wall and finds a pouch that belonged to Ryou Yoshizawa, one of the children from the newspaper. The ghost boy comes for it and goes for Ayumi’s throat, and she grabs what fell out of the pouch—his tongue. The killer cut out those children’s tongues. Show the murdered child the piece of himself that was taken, and the gray drains away, color comes back into his skin, and light carries him up. So that is the actual game beneath the gore: find what was stolen from these children and return it.

Mayu’s death lands hardest. Ms. Yui finds her in a classroom, laughing with two ghost kids as if it were nothing, one missing an eye, the other partially beheaded. Yui pleads with them to get away from her student, and they kill Mayu instead, guts against the wall. Yeah. This series is that type of anime, if I have not made that clear yet. Morishige goes a different direction. He is not breaking down from fear. He is taking pictures, and on his phone screen, he says, the bodies look almost like wax figures. Then Mayu calls him from beyond and says, “Don’t look at my insides.” He was fond of her. He knows what he is looking at, and he loses it. He loses it to the point, and I guess I need to put out these spoilers since I’m archiving this, that he is willing to kill Yuka. I don’t know if it’s because he lost someone he loved. He wanted to take someone who was loved, because one of the things I learned about this series is that, at least in my opinion, the guys are sort of jealous of Satoshi.

As he goes on his homicidal rampage to kill Yuka, his efforts are thwarted by Yuuya Kizami of Byakudan High School, a handsome older student who finds Yuka hiding under the floor. At the same time, her brother is knocked out elsewhere. Tomokazu Sugita plays him with a warm, reasonable voice that says, “Your big brother will protect you, and your big brother will also kill you!”

Growing a Spine in Heavenly Host

The third OVA is the emotional center of the series. Yuki Kanno is a ghost girl who appears to Ayumi and Yoshiki and tells her own small, sad story. She argued with her mother, went to school instead of going home, sat between the buildings and watched it rain, and the teacher, who would be accused of the homicides, sat down next to her and listened to everything. She has her tongue. She already heard the criminal’s repentance, carried through the doll Ayumi holds, and it is not enough. Yuki explains that the four ghost children are no more than small joints keeping the plane from falling apart, and that the grief soaking this school has begun looking for a new host, driving the spirits insane. When someone is killed with great brutality and holds lingering attachments to the world, Ayumi explains, the soul remains confused. That is a Japanese lens on horror if I have ever heard one, and I mean it as praise.

I will say it now: Ayumi carries this duo the entire arc. Yoshiki spends most of the runtime in a state of apathy, at times pouting, and I stand by that. When the way home opens for a moment, and Ayumi says she wants to go back in to save their friends, Yoshiki says no. Yuki warns them the plane is unstable and they might not survive. Ayumi has decided to go, and even though he genuinely loves her, he still says no. Ayumi goes anyway, not just for Satoshi, but because she wants to save others too. She leaves him, and he punches the blackboard and says f***, and again this supports my theory that all of these girls like Satoshi.

Now, unless I missed it, the anime does not even explain how he gets back into the dimension; nevertheless, Yoshiki is running the Chorogy playbook. I wrote about Chorogy in my Ribbon Hero review: the coward who tries to save his own neck, then grows a spine, decides there are things he wants to protect too, and dies for it almost immediately. Yoshiki is a delinquent; the anime alludes to it fast and never dwells on it, ambivalent all the way through. Then he gets courage, comes back, stops a mutilation, puts up a fight, gets his confession out, sort of, to the girl he loves, and gets slaughtered for it in the same episode he finally shows up as a man. Japanese culture logic hangs over him the same way it hung over Chorogy.

Looking back, I also regret what I said about Yuka. Eri Kitamura voices her, and she gets plenty of screen time, and the show intentionally makes her endearing. She’s the youngest and exudes little sister energy, and I was rooting for her the entire time. Don’t bet everything on the wrong horse.

The episode closes on a bench in the room where the children died, with a pair of scissors and a laugh, and I’m going to leave it there.

The Reward for Paying Attention

If you watched the first three OVAs and felt like the details were sketchy and the pacing quick, the fourth is your reward. The show has been giving you clues the whole time, through ghosts, newspapers, scrapbooks, and diaries, and now it lays out the answers, so if you were piecing it together as you went, you can check your work. I was wrong. That is all I will say. It was not who I thought it was.

The truth comes out through diaries and old records: a birthday entry from 1953, a stuffed cat, a school nurse loved by children, and a fall down a flight of stairs. The first minutes of the ghost story are not entirely true. The newspaper from 1973 isn’t exactly the truth either. The children do not want revenge; they want what was taken from them to be returned and acknowledged. The living cannot go home until the dead are heard. That’s slasher skin over Buddhist bones. Even the monster at the heart of this thing is a child who couldn’t get anyone to listen to her and chose the most morbid way to get attention I can think of.

The undoing ritual mirrors the charm that trapped them. Chant once for each participant, once more for Sachiko, and stick the scraps back together. And the ending hinges on a question the show asks out loud: what happens if you use a scrap that is not yours? The OVA ends on that cliffhanger, on two girls holding hands, on a student ID lying on the ground, and I am not resolving it. Did someone lie? Did someone chant wrong? Watch it. And do not turn it off when the credits roll. The epilogue after the fourth OVA is maybe a minute long and is the most poignant part of the whole production. Very brief. Very heavy.

The animation is not particularly impressive. I will put it right next to King’s Game the Animation and say it looks a little better, and King’s Game came four years later. The pacing runs slow in stretches, enough that I checked the clock more than once, but there was always enough happening to keep me in my seat. The OSTs were not intrusive; sometimes I noticed them, sometimes I did not, and for horror, that is probably the right call.

Two grievances. One, the series has almost no fan service, but it includes two unnecessary panty shots in the second and third OVAs. These serve no purpose. Tortured Souls is frustrating because it’s confident in its gore but insecure about everything else. Second, character development is intentionally thin. Satoshi is a shonen lead from frame one, and everyone else gets enough shading to hope they survive.

Who Is This For?

If you love slasher movies, even B-grade ones, this anime is for you. It sits exactly where a good B horror movie sits: mean, fast, a little ugly, and honest about what it is. If you have been looking for actual horror anime, real gore, and real dread, not horror-flavored seasoning on a school romcom, this might scratch that itch. MyAnimeList has it around 6.4 at the time of this writing. I land at a 6.5. If the animation were crisper, this would be a 7, easily, because the story, convoluted as it gets, does come together, and the clue structure rewards you for paying attention. It just needed one more coat of paint.

The Games Are on Sale Right Now

As I was watching this, I got a wishlist notification on Steam, and I had to laugh at the timing. At the time of this writing, the 2016 Corpse Party is 70 percent off at $4.49, the 2021 remake is 50 percent off at $9.99, and the Corpse Party Generations bundle gets you both for $10.86. The sale runs through September 14. If you miss it, it is on Steam. It will come back, especially with Halloween coming up. I plan to pick up the 2021 remake myself to get a feel for the whole universe, since the games go deeper. They always do.

That is all I got…