31 Shinbi's Apartment Ghosts!
DAY NINE: BLOODY EYES

Written by Jonathan Wojcik

FIRST, AN IMPORTANT NOTE! Our previous eight reviews were dedicated to ghosts from the very first season of the show, which received a licensed English translation for Netflix in 2019. To date, nobody has translated any more episodes, officially or unofficially. There aren't even uploads of the series by any of the usual anime bootleggers out there. From here on out, our clips are in either the original Korean or in some cases the Hindi dub, the only versions that you can find on youtube. Most of season two is legally available on their official channel here at the time of this posting, but still without English captions of any kind, and the remaining seasons are available only as short summaries or clips! That said, you don't have to understand the dialog to appreciate the visual storytelling:

direct video link

SEASON 02, EPISODE 01: awakened by a mysterious, unknown figure involved with this season's new story arc, a dark spirit begins to stalk, terrorize and swallow up a select few children. In particular, children it has caught bullying or insulting others.

Bloody Eyes is a spirit that tends to . It may at first appear as a black, shadowy figure that eerily lies face-down, but can also manifest as big, bloodshot eyeballs in a black void or a black, eyeball-covered humanoid with no discernible neck or head. Its eyeballs are also portals to a dark void in which it can imprison its victims in shadowy tentacles, but it can only take those who have made direct eye contact with it. Stranger still, it only manifests in cracks, crevices, holes, or on the other sides of doors; basically wherever you might "peep" on it, or it peeps in on you!

Especially unsettling is how the creature engulfs victims by actually splitting open its eyeballs, and can even reach its arms out from these makeshift orifices.

Investigating the spirit, the kids are eventually lead back to an old garbage dump, and specifically an old, abandoned refrigerator. Her friends are certain she'll be captured by the spirit if she peers through the crack in the doors, but all she sees is a smaller, pitiful version of Bloody Eyes wheezing, shuddering and lying helpless.

ORIGIN REVEAL:

Bloody Eyes was originally a human child suffering from an unspecified lung disease. One day, fleeing from two bullies that were teasing him, he ran into the dump and hid himself in the old refrigerator...but he barely had the strength to open it from the outside, and couldn't even budge the doors at all from within.

Unable to cry for help with his weak lungs, the boy could do nothing but peer through the thin gap between those doors, watching in silence as he hoped for rescue. Without access to water, he would have only lived another three to five days. If any water was dribbling into his prison, up to a month or two before he died from starvation.

Having been rescued from the spirit by Hari, the same two boys who had bullied him now knew what they had done, and helped her open the long rusted doors of the refrigerator. It's all the spirit even wants: for those damned doors to be opened by someone, like he'd hoped for every moment of his last days alive.

Since they helped free his soul, he forgives the other two boys before he passes on. While we're not shown what happens next, we can assume his body was given a proper burial and his family given closure.

FINAL REVIEW:

The debut ghost of season two is a solid one. It's our first eyeball-themed spirit, which is always a winner of a motif, even if a bipedal, blackish ghoul with eyes all over it is admittedly a rather common design. It has a frightening design, equally threatening powers, the novel Bogeyman gimmick of staring through gaps, and another shockingly painful origin that completely validates its bloodlust. When I went into this series "blind" (no offense to Bloody Eyes), I was glad to find out there was more than the Netflix season, a little let down to realize no more was being translated, and glad again to see that the next season kept up its powerful storytelling.