if you don't mind, would you post all the names of your original characters from abot? I'd like to see how my screen reader pronounces them so I can see if I have to fix any awkward pronunciations. it's alright if you don't tho I understand.
(ABoT)
Yeah for sure!
Recurring OCs:
Tetsuo Isari
Isa Maki
Jun Isari (maiden name Yuhara)
Haruki Ando
Mei Hamadate
(not OCs but I've given the Kageyama parents first names) Akane and Hisao
Kichiemon Nakamura and Kiwako Taichi in Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo, 1968)
Cast: Kichiemon Nakamura, Nobuko Otowa, Kiwako Taichi, Kei Sato. Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo. Cinematography: Norimichi Igawa, Kiyomi Kuroda. Art direction: Takashi Marumo. Film editing: Hisao Enoki. Music: Hikaru Hayashi.
Sometimes mood is everything, especially in a ghost story. The film that starts creepy and stays creepy tests our tolerance for creepiness. Kaneto Shindo seems to know this. He starts Kuroneko with a peaceful pastoral scene: a hut with a small brook running past its door, and in the distance fields backed by the wall of a forest. He lingers on this scene just long enough for it to register on us before ragged samurai begin to emerge from the forest, approach the brook in front of the hut, and drink thirstily from it. Then he cuts to the inside, where two terrified woman are watching the approach of the samurai, who enter the hut, pillage it, rape and murder the women, and set fire to the hut. Then we cut to the opening frame as the samurai return to the forest and smoke begins to billow from the hut. It blazes up, and Shindo cuts to the aftermath: the ruins of the hut and the bodies of the women, strangely unconsumed by the fire. A black cat enters and sniffs around the women, then begins to lick their wounds. Then it's nighttime, and the scene changes to the Rajomon (or Rashomon) Gate in Kyoto, where the supernatural story begins: The women are now ghosts, their former rags replaced by fine garments, who lure the samurai who violated and killed them to their handsome dwelling in a bamboo grove, where they bite out their throats and drink their blood. Shindo is masterly at setting up a plausibly real opening and slowly transitioning to the eerie vengeance of the dead women, who seem to float and sometimes move with, well, catlike grace. News of the deaths of the samurai reaches the emperor, who orders the chief samurai, Raiko (Kei Sato), to deal with the problem. We then cut to a fight between a young soldier (Kichiemon Nakamura) and a huge man armed with an iron-studded club. The soldier vanquishes the big man, cuts off his head, and rides home to bring the news that he's the only survivor of a battle. Raiko rewards the soldier by making him a samurai and giving him the name Gintoki. The interpolation of the fight scene and Gintoki's ride again break the mood, providing a welcome contrast with the ghost scenes. Proudly, Gintoki goes to see his wife and his mother, only to find the ruins of their hut -- they were, of course, the victims of the marauding samurai. And Raiko then orders Gintoki to prove his valor by finding and killing the "monster" that has been slaughtering his samurai. Eventually, of course, Gintoki will discover that the killers are the ghosts of his wife, Shige (Kiwako Taichi), and his mother, Yone (Nobuko Otowa), setting up an impossible moral dilemma. It's a tense, beautifully photographed, often surprisingly erotic, and subtly terrifying film that even I, usually immune to the shocks of horror movies, can appreciate.
RONDE, the Sega Saturn Majin Tensei successor famous for its quality, has actual demon art! It’s by Hisao Nakamura (中村久男), who became known later for Pokemon card art. I never knew these existed.
Credit to @greed92-smt for finding these and @b-reis for doing the heavy lifting identifying the demons. The art is sourced from Nakamura’s ancient homepage in a separate gallery. The demons were identified using this Japanese Ronde data site and its images. As to be expected, the game makes liberal use of palette swaps and we named the art based on the closest color matches. Some of the image links are broken and thus a few demons remain unidentified. YOU should play Ronde and tell us what we’re missing!
Demons pictured, clockwise from top left for each image:
Azazel, Kyouryou, Lilim, Ragaraja
Top left: Unknown (similar to Salamander), top right: Naga, bottom right: Chupacabra, bottom left: Simurgh, center: Unknown (human?)