The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School!

Haruaki Abe is the kind of guy wouldn't say boo to a goose. But when he starts his teaching career at a high school full of creatures that go bump in the night, he soon discovers that his students have no such qualms.

A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School! is based on the manga series by Mai Tanaka. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

I'm torn – on the one hand, this is no Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun. It's exhaustingly paced and has a blithering idiot for its protagonist in Haruaki Abe, a man the original manga creator saw fit to give the most easily misunderstood fetish in all of high schooldom: an obsession with uniforms. (He doesn't specify gender at first, but everyone assumes it to be a girls' uniform fetish.) On the other hand, there are some actually fun jokes in here, like the mamedanuki who throws a plastic bag over his head to transform instead of testicles and when Abe tells the zashiki-waraki who has become a shut-in gamer that she can become a shut-in gamer anytime once she's an adult, but she can only go to high school right now.

It's that sort of silliness that's most appealing here. It's inherent in the premise of Abe no Seimei's unknowing descendant being terrified of teaching the very students he longs to teach and petrified of yokai ending up teaching at a yokai high school. Believe me, teaching high school isn't for the faint of heart, and watching Abe waffle between utter fear and actually doing his job decently well (okay, taking role decently well; that's all he's done in the classroom so far) is a little familiar. Do I love that Abe's almost always speaking in a scream? No, but it's also par for the course for this style of comedy.

A major draw for yokai fans is the variety present in Abe's class and at the school in general. We don't know what the principal is yet, but there are the old standbys in rokurokubi, noperabou, tanuki (well, mamedanuki), oni, and zashiki-warashi, along with more unusual additions, such as dorotabou and yakubyougami, a god of misfortune who, regretfully for Abe, seems to be the student most likely to bail him out. The art is simple but fun, and I like that it gives many less-humanoid students human forms as well; in the ending theme, we see the nekomata transform into a two-tailed cat from a two-tailed catboy. I think this could be a lot of fun once it irons itself out. As a manga reader, I'm willing to give it that chance.

In A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School!, the famously cowardly Shaggy and Scooby-Doo are recruited as PE teachers at a girls' school. When they get there, they are terrified to learn all the children are monsters, but eventually grow to love their students.

Wait, that's Scooby-Doo at Ghoul School. I hope you'll forgive my mistake. That movie and this series, after all, are two completely different things. A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School! is, of course, about Haruaki Abe, a cowardly new teacher recruited to teach at a school and terrified to learn the children are all yōkai. I can't believe I messed that up. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm trying to improve. You all deserve nothing but the most accurate reviews, and I have betrayed your trust.

To be honest, I would have preferred to have spent my time on Scooby-Doo at Ghoul School because this was decidedly mediocre. Much like the student Mikoto Sano, I found myself annoyed at Haruaki's timidity. Even more, I found myself intensely creeped out by his school uniform fetish. He's excited to teach at a school where the girls wear old-fashioned sailor fuku, then disappointed when one of the more human-looking girls shows up wearing pants under her skirt. If I were a girl in his class, I genuinely wouldn't feel safe around him. Of course, it's all one big punch line! Ohoho! It's hard to buy him as an inspirational teacher visiting his students at home when he's also hiding from them and fetishizing the clothes they are required to wear.

A high school yōkai class is a really fun concept, though. Yōkai are a vibrant, fascinating, goofy part of Japanese folklore, and here they're reinterpreted to work as modern teenagers. So a dorotabo – muddy ghosts that haunt rice paddies that they once tended that are now neglected by their owners – becomes a teenager who generates and slings mud. A mamedanuki is embarrassed at an encyclopedia entry that describes his kind as transforming by wearing ballsacks. The list is endless, with ample opportunity for weird, colorful characters. But in the end, I found the execution lacking, as the human-looking characters played the greatest role in the episode.

Plenty of anime feature yōkai in more interesting, dynamic ways, with better animation and less annoying main characters. Those are likely better choices than A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School!. Or, if you're really looking for a story about a teacher caring for supernatural students, may I recommend Scooby-Doo at Ghoul School?