The Spirit World....

I've always been fascinated with the folk tales of other countries; the stranger and more outlandish the better. I suppose part of it is that America is such a new country we barely have any ourselves, and certainly no folk beliefs of any substance that are uniquely ours. 

Heck, the only things we have that come close to being castles are either prisons, factories, mcmansions, or data vaults.

Now sure, some people point to the cute, folksy americana that gets babbled by people with weird accents, but none of it has the quite the same flavor that those of other cultures and creeds do. There are no bogies, brownies gobbledy-gooks or pretas in those stories, no underground realms, avaricious kobolds who jealously guard their gold beneath the smoking cracks in the earth,  or witches who raid graveyards for the teeth of the dead. Tales of half-seen things from people with a frame of reference centuries before the the pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Even then they brought their old world stories and sensibilities with them, but where are they now?

Nowadays, we have cable, video games, movie special effects and the internet. Gone are the wonders of your own mind, the half seen things in the shadows and around the corner. Tales told by the fireside. The old days, the old ways. 

Just... gone. 

Well, at least we have Guillermo del Toro.