‘Housing Complex C’ Is the Perfect Anime for the Spooky Season

From The Midnight Club to The Watcher, we’ve been blessed with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to creepy television this fall. But there’s one spooky installment that you may have missed. If you love small-town, horror-filled mysteries, then you need to be watching Adult Swim and Toonami’s latest anime, Housing Complex C.

There is a distinct 2000s brand of horror that defines this beautifully animated show. Written by amphibian and directed by Yūji Nara, the series revolves around the titular Housing Complex C, a low-cost apartment complex in the seaside town of Kurosaki. Initially, there’s a sorrowful peace among this community. All of its older residents share the same two hobbies: bickering and doting on the one child in the complex, the cheerful Kimi (Ayahi Takagaki in Japanese; Xanthe Huynh in English). That serenity is disrupted once a consultant and his family moves in and brings a group of Middle Eastern interns with them. That small change would be enough to completely upend this quaint community. But when a series of mysterious events start to unfold, this once-loving bubble descends into distrust and chaos.

It’s the xenophobia at Housing Complex C‘s center that works to make this series so eerie. Most of the older residents in this building have never seen let alone interacted with someone from another country, which leads to several blatantly racist interactions. But rather than use these misunderstandings to challenge these characters, Housing Complex C uses them to slowly ratchet up the tension. As the show progresses, more and more bizarre things start to happen. Dead fish appear in piles. Slaughtered dogs and foxes are found in the woods. Residents see glimpses of amphibious creatures. People disappear overnight, only to leave a pile of moss in their place. These occurrences are unsettling on their own. But as the longtime residents narrow their eyes at their new foreign neighbors, they also become frustrating in the same way as all good community-centric horror becomes. These people are so focused on blaming the outsiders that they refuse to see the actual threats surrounding them. What follows is a race against time that most residents can’t see until it’s too late.

All of this tension and fear is captured through the eyes of Kimi and the far more observant Yuri (Haruka Tomatsu in Japanese; Kayli Mills in English). These little girls serve as the perfect counterbalance to the paranoia of the adults around them. As the prejudice of the adults leads them to the wrong conclusions, Kimi and Yuri have a better understanding of what’s really taking place. But whereas no one believes Yuri, the sheltered Kimi doesn’t have the language or the base level of fear to tell anyone that something is seriously wrong. It’s a dynamic that will make you want to scream “Run” at your TV.

If you’re in the mood for a zippy mystery this October, Housing Complex C is a good option. Because it’s anime, you know that the monsters are disturbing and the solution to this puzzle is intricate. And with half-hour episodes, it offers the perfect dose of horror for you to jump in, get a couple of goosebumps, then jump out.

New episodes of Housing Complex C premiere on Adult Swim, Saturdays at midnight ET.