"Episode XXXV: Jack and the Haunted House" is the thirty-fifth episode in third season of Samurai Jack. This episode feature Jack attempting to keep a little girl safe from a house possessed by some force of evil.
Plot
While travelling at night, Jack encounters a young girl that runs away as soon as she notices Jack. He follows her to return the teddybear she dropped (which clearly resembles the blue beast from the previous episode). His pursuit leads to an old, clearly Japanese house. He decides to take a side entrance rather than the front door the girl used. Immediately, he encounters what appears to be a ghost: the silhouette of a woman sitting next to a fire is visible through the door. As soon as he tries to open it, a horde of butterflies cuts past him, startling him. The next moment, there's no sign of the woman or the fire.
After entering, Jack experiences several flashbacks showing vague images of the people who lived there and a strange shadow monster that attacks them. He lights a candle he finds on the floor to light his way. The entire house looks delapitated, abandoned and dirty. The episode resembles a horror movie at this point, with everything looking scary and with very discomforting sound effects being played.
He searches the house until he finds the girl. He suggests leaving the house and heads back to the room he came in through, and is baffled when he notices all doors and windows in that room are now gone. After returning to the room in which he found the girl, he is shocked to see the same thing has happened there. He and the girl decide to try to sleep, stating they both feel strangely tired.
Jack's sleep is troubled by further nightmarish visions of the monster and its attacks on the house's inhabitants. Upon waking up, he notices the girl is gone. While looking around the room, he faintly hears music and notices a well-lit room behind a doorway. He enters it and sees the girl happily sitting at a table with 3 family members (mother, father and brother as seen in Jack's visions) in a well-kept room. Jack angrily shouts his disbelief, that it must be an illusion of some sorts, and draws his sword. The father convinces Jack to calm down, sit and drink tea with them. The small talk completely distracts Jack when they mention the tea is from a region Jack's familiar with. The girl however looks concerned.
When the father asks the son to say something, the son reacts by eerily rolling his eyes up into his skull. He then starts to drool and hunch backwards. Soon after, the mother and father do the same. Jack is brought to his senses and watches a stream of shadowy matter erupt from their mouths. The room vanishes and turns into the ruinous structure it really is, while the shadowy matter accumulates into the shadow beast.
The monster attacks Jack and finally seizes him using tentacles that came out of the floor. He then sends Jack's consciousness into an alternate reality, where there is no environment, only he, the monster and the family members. They are all tied down, likely to visualize their mind being captive whilst the monster can use their bodies.
Jack somehow levitates his sword using his will and cuts his bonds, then fights and defeats the monster. They erupt back into reality, where the night seems to end as Jack comes to. He tells the girl he saw her family, but couldn't save them. Then the father's voice is heard as he calls out to his daughter: all the family members are unharmed. Jack leaves them in their hug and continues his quest.
Horror Effect
This episode is markably different from other episodes in 2 ways: drawing style and spookiness.
Drawing Style
Most episodes feature simplistically colored characters and foreground objects on a mixture of backgrounds that are sometimes just as cartoonishly colored and sometimes highly detailed, as if painted. This episode however employs the "fancy" coloring on ALL backgrounds and many of the foreground objects. The entire episode looks graphically superior to the other ones. This makes the abandoned state of the house very visible and adds to the immersive effect of the horror graphics.
In addition, Jack's flashbacks and presence in the alternate reality have their own, unique drawing style. Everything is drawn with black smears on a glooming white background, with abrupt animations and lots of flickering. Noise is constantly heard during these scenes. The strangeness of these graphics adds to the horror factor.
Spookiness
This episode has a noticeable lack of background music. Instead, there is only silence and frequent, seemingly sourceless and highly discomforting "ghost noise". Jack is visibly unsettled and anxious. Everything he does seems to trigger something "spooky", such as when he knocks over a metal jar that then rolls up to the foot of a statue, making loud noise in an otherwise dead-silent room. The candle and moonlight are the only sources of light inside the house, giving everything an unusual appearance. The coloring of many backgrounds resembles paintbrush strokes, somehow creating an impression of age, wear, ruin and abandonment.
This is without doubt the most unsettling episode of the series.
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