a review of 超自然

HOOPTOBER XII NIGHT SIX: I don't know if I was as high on this as some folks are -- found footage and fake documentary stuff runs either hot or cold for me -- but I appreciated how it was presented. Up to a certain point in the film, my interpretation of all the "supernatural" stuff was pretty much the way I react to ALL ghost and UFO sighting bullshit. 🙄 Like big fucking deal, you saw a random speck fly across the frame, that couldn't have been a bird/bug/whatever. A cheeseburger wrapper fell on the ground twice, and a big pile of papers fell off a desk? Clearly it's your psychic abilities flaring out of control, no other possible explanation. Oh look, somebody in a manga cafe pretended to go into a trance and scribbled a thing that kind of looks like a rock formation if you squint at it really hard? But then as it went on, it became clear to me that whether this was real or not was kind of beside the point, that this was Shiraishi (via his self-insert character) taking this stuff at face value as a thought experiment. Regardless of whether this was actually some cosmic-horror happening, you still have extremely disturbed people acting on it as though it's real. It's the same danger that we had with 9/11 truthers and later on the QAnon/Pizzagate looneys, and that's the real horror here. The ending is a wild choice, but I think I get it! I chose to see it as Shiraishi taking Eno's extremely dumb, deluded worldview to its logical extent and refusing to mystify or martyr him, but rather condemning him to an extremely silly and undignified hell from a 2000s Flash cartoon.