There’s a rumor going around town: a faceless kid in a hoodie. If you encounter this person, something unusual will happen to you. What kind of “something”? Well, for a schoolgirl named Hiromi, it all begins when she hears on the news that there will be snow in the afternoon, despite the day seeming quite hot. Hiromi also learns that supposedly, at some point in the past, a woman threw herself off a building—the same apartment Hiromi lives in—and that if you look outside at midnight after a sudden snow like this, you’ll die from the curse of the woman’s ghost. Hiromi and her friends are doubtful, but suddenly it begins snowing out of the blue. Later that night, she wakes up right before midnight and decides (with the IQ of every horror protagonist ever) to look out the window. When she does see a woman falling, she freaks out (understandably); her parents come to check on her, see nothing, and chalk it up to an overactive imagination. But creepy things keep happening to Hiromi, until (once again at night) she starts to believe her mom has gone up to the top of the building. What if something happens to her? Hiromi runs up to the top of the building and sees a figure about to jump. “Mom!” she yells, but as she gets closer, the figure doesn’t quite look like her mother… Moments later, the ghost is dragging Hiromi over the side of the building. All seems lost until suddenly the kid in the hoodie appears, along with a…Human-Faced Dog named Jimmy who also wears a hoodie (I swear I am not making this up). Jimmy bites the ghost, while the kid recites some phrases backwards and captures the ghost in his red notebook (which, incidentally, is where the title of the episode comes from). Hiromi is saved, but other dangers lurk for unwary schoolgirls: We are only halfway through the episode. Three friends—Natsuna, Yurie, and Rin—see a white shape dancing over a field and suddenly experience a terrible headache. Over the days that follow, the white figure—known as The Wriggler—proceeds to haunt them and drive them into greater danger. Can our hoodied duo save them?

In all honesty, I am probably not the target audience for this show: I have little patience for the shortsightedness that seems embedded in the genes of horror protagonists (Why did Natsuna and Rin drag the injured, bandaged Yurie out of her hospital bed and try to flee down several flights of steps while carrying her?), and dubbing something “The Wriggler” simply makes me laugh at it. Nevertheless, Horror Collector appears, at least in this first episode, to have some thematic depth; it captures something of the difficulty of being an adolescent, especially in how to relate to authority figures. For Hiromi, this difficulty centers around her parents, who both give her reliable information that seems unreliable to her (namely, the weather forecast) and who reject Hiromi’s attempts to tell them about the ghost as “silly.” This ambiguity is heightened at the climax of her story, when she confuses the ghost for her mother; and then again after she is rescued (by someone who appears to be a peer, not an adult), as there is no sense of closure to the story, no reappearance of her parents to reassure her. She is alone in a bleak world—alive, but without a reliable guide. Natsuna, Yurie, and Rin fall afoul of a rule (Don’t stare at The Wriggler) without being warned about it; their only warning comes after Yurie is already hospitalized, once the rule is already broken and it’s too late to do anything about it. Here the authority figures are Mr. Hoodie (who delivers the late warning) and the girls’ teacher, who offers no warning at all (because, let’s face it, what teacher is gonna tell their students to watch out for wriggling crop ghosts?) and whom in turn the girls do not trust enough to confide in (when he does ask them what’s going on with Yurie). Who, then, can be trusted as a young person’s guide? Not adults, who won’t believe the kids and who don’t provide the guidance that truly matters; nor one’s peers, who are too weak to fend off the dangers of the world (even Mr. Hoodie can’t save Natsuna); nor one’s own self, incapable of discerning the right course of action before it is too late. This particular show may not be my cup of tea, but it does raise questions worth considering. Were this series a bit more like Boogiepop, rather than the anthology format it appears to have (which is less conducive to deeper character development), I would certainly follow it.

Horror Collector is streaming on Crunchyroll.