Ard Vijn

During Christmas, things got rather busy in my household and as the International Film Festival Rotterdam was right after, I totally forgot to show you all the pretty fantastic-looking Blu-ray boxset of the second season of Arcane, the pretty fantastic League-of-Legends-inspired animated series. Well, it's a few months onward and I was wondering if I should actually still do this article.

Distributor Arrow has released its fourth boxset of Shaw Brothers films. The previous three were mentioned here in the Pretty Packaging articles, and this one looks very, VERY similar to them. So I wondered: should I put up an article for this release? I mean, look at them...you might be forgiven in thinking that three is enough. The thing is... this might be my favorite one yet, and that has to do with the contents.

About twenty-five years ago, Japan's special kind of horror suddenly spread over the world like a virus. This horror had none of the fun exuberance of slashers, none of the tongue-in-cheek references to popular culture, and none of the gorefests to splatter audiences with (those exist too but are a different brand). Dread and the occasional jumpscare turned out to be, when well used, extremely frightening. This special kind of horror was often bloodless, mean-spirited and surprisingly effective.