You can keep your stodgy old Crypt of Terror; for true modern horror, you need to (in the words of Berlin) go Riding the Metro. At least that's the premise behind Tokyo Calen & Yoshiken's manga horror series Dark Metro (Tokyopop), and when you think back to recent history (vis-à-vis, the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo Metro), you can perhaps see the point. "They say there are passageways to the underworld in the tunnels," one subway worker tells a new hire in one story, "and that the dead wander the subway." So it's not just loony millennialist cults that'll get ya, it's the ghosts lurking underground.
Volume One of Dark Metro features five stories, largely centered on young attractive urbanites as they face vengeful spooks that have been waiting for them in the city's bowels. Also residing in the Metro is a guide very unlike the Cryptkeeper, the dark-haired and shoujo handsome Seiya, who helps to lead the innocent out of peril and stands back when the guilty are about to get what's coming to 'em. In the second episode, "Shibuya Station," two high school pimps are lured to a party where they're torn apart limb from limb by the ghosts of girls who were murdered by one of their customers; a third, unknowing, classmate gets yanked out of the party by Seiya before things get grisly. In the first volume's final tale, "Meiji-Jingumae Station," we learn that Seiya has been given the ability "to choose who will live and lead them to the correct path" after he presumably perishes rescuing a young girl from a subway fire. Seiya, apparently, was born with the ability to see the flame of life that burns within us, and thus can tell whether it's our time to go or not.
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