What makes an effective jump scare anyway? In the first half of the episode, a girl hears about a creepy urban legend. If it’s snowing, if you look out the window at midnight, you’ll see the ghost of a woman who jumped to her death. You will then be cursed. Sure enough, curiosity kills the cat… or at least it tries to. The ghost ends up luring the girl out of her home and tries to pull her off the side of a high-rise apartment. But leading up to the curse, we see the girl standing in front of her window, curtains undrawn. Jump scare incoming, right? So the anime delays the beat. She pulls back the curtains and finds nothing. Haha, ’tis a silly urban legend after all. She then leans in. Classic horror move. Is it jump scare time now? Nope! Not yet! Let the tension build! Only when the girl steps back does the ghost lady show up. So did it work? No, not really. I felt nothing.

And look, I’m not some super duper tough guy who never gets scared. I’m just really curious why some jump scares work and some don’t. Take the movie Smile, for instance. I thought it was almost relentless with its jump scares. There was like a jump scare every other minute. It felt like the filmmakers knew that the audience is expecting it, so if they overwhelmed your senses, then a good percentage of those jump scares would land. Is that the trick?

As for the girl’s fate, a young boy eventually shows up with his talking dog and utters an incantation in reverse. As a result, the ghost lady gets sucked into his book. Phew, the girl is saved. Still, it was a pretty bog standard horror up until that point. As soon as Fushigi and Jimmy — yes, the dog has a human name — showed up, however, every bit of tension got sucked away along with the evil spirit. It’s just hard to take it seriously, y’know? Now I’m imagining the ghost lady screaming in frustration, “And I would’ve gotten away with it too if it weren’t for the kid and his stupid dog!”

But maybe this is why we get a strangely deadpan sad ending for the second half of the episode. A trio of friends encounter a wiggly thing in the middle of a field. Aw c’mon, it looks so goofy. It looks like Mister Burns when he’s hopped up on drugs, so everyone mistook him for an alien! Not only that, the evil spirit is literally called The Wriggler. That’s not a scary name! Nevertheless, it emits a ringing sound that makes people go mad. It eventually chases after the girls to do… what, exactly? Absorb them into itself? One of the girls bravely fights back. I wanted to say I was proud of her for saving her friends. She could’ve run to protect herself but she didn’t. Unfortunately, the Wriggler (pfft) turns its attention to her and absorbs her instead. Only then does the boy from earlier finally show up and do the sucky thing with his book. So… is the girl dead? Is she gone for good? Shrug. The boy doesn’t know, and neither do we. Horror can be fun, because you can just laugh about it later. Sadness sticks to your soul. Even if you manage to clean off the muck, it’ll probably leave a stain. You end the day feeling miserable and there’s nothing you can do about it… except maybe go look at videos of cats being dumb and silly.

So is there an overarching plot? Yeah, kinda. Fushigi has a twin sister named Himitsu, and she seemingly has no face. Even worse, she has the power to bring these urban legends to life. She’s the reason why the ghost lady and the Wriggler showed up in this episode. So it’s up to Fushigi to catch Himitsu and stop her milquetoast horror rampage. I wonder how each episode is gonna work. Are we gonna keep getting these small, self-contained short stories that may or may not have bad endings? Will we finally get a long-running story arc at some point? The horror didn’t really work on me this week, but seeing where the story goes might be interesting.