#gore

#gore

Shortly after last month's Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle confirmed last weekend as the highest-grossing anime feature of all time a big-screen outing for a movie adaptation of what, in manga terms, is a relative upstart: Tatsuki Fujimoto's gore-soaked coming-of-age saga, first serialised in 2018. Standard critical guidance applies: what will doubtless be catnip for fans is likely to prove varyingly baffling for newcomers, arriving late to a frenetic game offering few chances for catchup.

I have well established, for those with even a pittance of interest, that my taste in horror is not aligned with the mainstream. I mostly don't respond to allegory, and I need the images to do more than flash and provide the gore, which I also like plenty. In other words, I have never met another critic who likes either of the two movies I'm rhapsodizing today, the 2019 remake of "The Grudge" and Leigh Whannell's 2025 take on "Wolf Man": gory, widescreen odysseys about desperate people pushed into extranatural mysteries, breaking the chains of torment.