While Kinoko Nasu is better known for the Fate series these days, fans shouldn't sleep on The Garden of Sinners, the story that prototyped his future fantasy works and is the perfect anime to watch during the Halloween season. Its 11 movie adaptations by ufotable - consisting of seven main ones and several spin-offs - also mark the beginning of a collaboration that would lead to them animating various Fate shows. With its grungy and dark mysteries, it is the perfect anime to watch for Halloween.
While Fate diverges toward bombastic time-traveling fantasy, The Garden of Sinners is easily one of the most thoroughly "occult" of occult detective stories, with mysteries that show Nasu at his most mystic, mixing bizarre sorcery with very dark subjects. With ufotable turning their quality art towards disturbing cityscapes, the end result is a movie series where the supernatural is truly terrifying.
The Garden of Sinners Is A Dark, Delightful Anime Worthy Of Halloween
The world Shiki Ryougi inhabits is macabre in every way, and the magic that fills it tends toward the grotesque and the gothic: ghosts and zombies are on full display, while Shiki battles ancient monks and insane mages with a knife and her "Death Perception": the ability to see how anything can die and make it happen with a cut. Befitting its occult detective genre, Sinners is happy to confuse viewers and force them to puzzle out the plot themselves, especially given how each movie's events are anachronistic to each other. Magic is hostile and alien - perfect for terrifying viewers.
This hostility, however, also means the subjects The Garden of Sinners tackle are not for the faint of heart. When both the characters and their magical society don't care about being normal, issues like "the nature of murder" are open to contemplation. The first movie involves suicide, while the third graphically portrays sexual assault, though these are never taken lightly, even when they amplify the supernatural horror. It's telling that after the fifth movie, easily one of the darkest and most mind-bending, ufotable chose to lighten up the sixth to "merely" confront drug dealing and revenge at an all-girls private school.
Nonetheless, the movie series is an artistic achievement, one sadly overshadowed by ufotable's later successes. Even the habit of using Yuki Kaijura's music compositions for Fate anime began here. The budget afforded to them affords consistently high-quality art that brings the urban gothic to un-life, with menacing pans across abandoned buildings, empty underground parking lots, and refuse-streaked back alleys. It's a far cry from the flashy grandeur of Fate/Stay Night and its sequels. For a chilling Halloween, The Garden of Sinners' first seven movies are perfect for a seasonal marathon.