Smut That Doesn't Suck: This is Halloween Town

Yeah, I actually found something for this series related to Halloween. The odds were slim, but I found something, and I found something really interesting. Titled The Town of Halloween, this is a work from Aran Rei, a hentai artist from around the 80s and 90s (I can't confirm their exact timespan of work) who plays around with guro and yuri works. He's mostly ignored by translators, but one work got some love, and it was easily the most appropriate. Porn and horror have never really mixed, and torture porn is just too poorly handled in film to really work. But The Town of Halloween gets it right, terrifyingly so. It does this by making a story not about people committing horrors on people, but people being preyed on forces they can't possibly understand for the most cruel of reasons.

Starting in 1978 on Halloween, we see an unknown girl chased down by a scythe wielding attacker that chops off her arms and torments her before taking her head with them. From there, we flash forward six years to 1984, where a group of girls named Sylvia, Attica, and Varis are lost in the woods, and are found by the woman from the night in 1978, notably not in divided parts. She brings them to a strangely empty town, where Sylvia is planning to make a move on Attica. However, they soon find they're not alone, and their host reveals that on Halloween, the things we speak of in horror stories come out to have some fun. Sadly for them, this town they've come to is a trap where the ghosts and ghouls of the holiday play with the bodies and souls of anyone who arrives, and they're not leaving. The second part takes place two years later, with a detective looking for the missing girls, only to find their families have gathered in that same town they disappeared to after being sent letters by that same mysterious host. They end up finding their daughters, and what follows makes them wish they didn't, while the detective confronts the host.

This is effectively a classic ghost story. A former victim of a horrible crime comes back to haunt the living, and she drags along her victims into her dark fate. The erotic elements are used to highlight the horror of the situation, with the first part particularly standing out by putting Aran Rei's beautiful art alongside gore and blood. It's very macabre and unsettling, with the second part even ending with the host kissing the decapitated head of one of her victims on the lips. The second part is more sexual, using the taboo of incest to make erotic scenes less pornographic and more disturbing, especially matched against the fate of a father and the detective's ultimate torment. There's less gore here, and more soul breaking, with a very grim ending where it's directly stated that all who are trapped here are doomed to be the undying playthings of demons until the next Halloween, where they get their chance to do the same to some unexpecting victim.

I adore this set-up, and the art is simply gorgeous. The 80s had a style going on that simply looked beautiful in some hands, and this series is a great example. Hair and faces are heavily detailed, and bodies lack ridiculous exaggeration that would become popular in the 90s and on. More importantly, the coloring is absolutely beautiful, creating a warmth and atmosphere completely absent from the few black and white pages. This was an artist who knew how to use color to their advantage, something rare for manga artists. I really hope this person found a lot of work later on.

Still, the two parts don't feel quite right. The second has too much focus on erotic scenes. They're well drawn, but don't quite match the horror vibe as well as they could. Something a bit more supernatural needed to be there. The first part, on the other hand, has too much set-up before reaching the chaotic payoff, and it never quite reaches the highs of its fantastically twisted prologue. The story just never commits fully to its horror theme and doesn't come together quite as well as it could. I could seriously see this as something masterful if it blended the sexual with the horrific more than it did, yet it chooses to relent far too many times.

But at least I can say that I've never read something like this before. This is Halloween Town is bizarre, eerie, and an artistic feast for the eyes in so many ways. Guro artists normally aren't this artistically minded, going for smutty styles and subject matter, or just outright wallowing in gore. But this is different. This is something I can look at and defend for its artistic merits, and I do feel its erotic elements play a huge part in what makes it so unsettling. There's a good few fears here tapped into that needed to be more explored, but for two one-shots over the course of a few years, this is damn impressive.