Boogiepop Phantom is both intriguing and horrifying at the same time to me. After a beam of light shot up into the sky a month prior, several strange, paranormal occurrences began happening all throughout the nameless town this series takes place in. It’s one of those shows that doesn’t explain what the hell’s going on and why until the near-end of it. As a matter of fact, it doesn't even begin to explain what caused the beam of light to begin with until around the second half of the show. It is mostly because of this, at least for me, that the show manages to legitimately creep me out. Not to mention nearly the entire show has a sepia-tone screen filter over nearly every shot that made it feel even creepier for me.
The first half or so is filled with grotesque stories of people slowly but surely losing their sanity, turning to illegal and even life-threatening ways of getting what they want, committing suicide and overall, just humans at their absolute worst. The end result of most of these stories are these same people being killed and/or dying in some horrifying ways.
Despite the fact that this series terrified me to no end a majority of the time, I actually did like it for that same reason. After all, fear is an emotion at the end of the day, and just because it’s a negative emotion doesn't mean the object of the fear is bad. Sure, it made me feel almost completely uneasy as I went through the series, but it was also partially because of that that I think the series accomplishes the task its genre is supposed to.
Another thing I liked about this series was what I saw as an underlying message. Boogiepop claims that the only reason they manifest is when an “enemy of the world” appears. The thing is, these ‘enemies’ aren’t operating on a global scale, as one might suspect from the phrasing; rather, they are simply beings who often aren’t human and are often trying to make the world around them more like what they envision as an ideal world, pretty much. The way I see it, the fact that Boogiepop eliminates these things infers an underlying message that society is not supposed to be perfect, it is supposed to have both good people and bad people. In the words of real-life baseball player Yogi Bera, “If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
The Boogiepop series was absolutely horrifying more often than not for me personally, and yet despite that, it managed to tell the story it wanted to tell with what I felt was fantastic execution.
