Red Garden is one of those anime that is deucedly hard to categorize. I suppose it's mostly horror, though of a peculiarly Japanese sort. Four girls from an exclusive high school on Roosevelt Island in New York City find themselves entangled in a bizarre and frightening situation. At night, they hunt semi-human monsters, while during the day they try to lead normal lives. The basic plot device has been rattling around in anime at least since Devil Hunter Yohko in 1990, and is perhaps most familiar to Americans in the guise of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.
In at least in the first four episodes, Red Garden forgoes the comic relief of its predecessors. The lives of the girls are shattered; they walk through their day in a distracted haze of anger, denial, and regret. One episode focuses on the excruciating tension of waiting for a midnight call to go out and kill. The camera follows each girl separately, one staring at the clock, another shaking uncontrollably. One akwardly excuses herself from the family table at a restaurant and hurries to the ladies' room to throw up. In a strange and brilliant touch, they all begin to sing the same dark, melancholy song of hopeless resignation and despair as the final minutes tick away. It's an odd, touching scene quite unlike anything I've ever seen.
In the end, the real interest of Red Garden isn't the monsters, or the murderous villains, or the conspiratorial organization that manipulates them to fight. It's the girls themselves, how they react, what they feel, how they are with each other. Japanese horror can be plenty gruesome and scary, but the focus is ever on the psychological trauma that whole human beings suffer when they confront the unwholesome. This is a very promising series.
