While"Dark Pictures" does sound like something more horror-related, plenty of stories can be dark without being in that genre. It would also be rather constrained for the remaining seven games to all be horror, especially on account of the Curator, who apparently has a "repository" of all sorts of stories.
- At the very least, they'll be different genres of horror. One entry might be a technothriller in the vein of Agent Pendergast or the works of Michael Crichton. Another might be more Gothic horror in the vein of Dracula, Frankenstein, or the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
- Jossed in that the anthology is firmly horror, but confirmed in that the exact tone and approach of each entry to the genre is considerably different.
- Jossed... but also confirmed after a fashion. Shroud of Innocence foreshadowed Little Hope, the second game in the anthology. The book itself made a brief reappearance in that game's prologue, and gets a Title Drop at a dramatically appropriate moment later on.
- Confirmed. The third game in the Dark Pictures Anthology, House of Ashes, will be built around the missing archaeologists.
From the name alone, it seems likely that "Manchurian Gold" has some relationship with the Japanese puppet state, Manchukuo. Unit 731, an infamous division of the Imperial Japanese Army responsible for some of the most heinous atrocities committed in East Asia, was based there. In the 731 building complex, experiments were performed using various chemical and biological weapons on live human subjects. Between their testing there and their deployment in the field, around 500,000 people likely met their deaths either directly or indirectly as a result of the unit's research. It seems very unlikely that this is all a coincidence.
In 1947, with the Cold War ramping up, it's likely that the US would have wanted to remove any novel agents from the region. The Chinese Civil War was in full swing, and the risk of the region falling to Mao Zedong's forces (which would occur only two years later, in 1949) meant that the gas could easily end up in the hands of an organization that was then a staunch Soviet ally. The possibility of furthering research to produce something usable in the field would likely have occurred to the US, as well. The US is known to have granted legal immunity to members of Unit 731 for information involving their research, and the idea that part of the deal involved information about where to find a stockpile of Manchurian Gold doesn't seem far-fetched.
If there were more containers involved, or if researchers produced more in the US after the loss of the Ourang Medan and retained a vast quantity of it, it's likely that a diplomatic nightmare would ensue from its discovery. If more "advanced" forms were developed later and still in storage for future use, that could complicate relations even with allied countries. Hence why the military doesn't take kindly to the crew of the Duke of Milan finding out that they recovered it. They've probably got more, and may have used it on the battlefield to force entrenched enemies to kill each other.
On top of explaining where the Manchurian Gold came from, along with violent reaction to its existence being unearthed, this could be why it was so poorly secured for transport. If the Americans didn't develop it themselves, then their knowledge about its properties could have been dangerously incomplete. A few documents that survived incineration here, the unreliable and patchy accounts of scientists who saw it in action once or twice there...those sources would create a profile of the substance with some massive blank spaces related to its behavior. It seems like the deadly neurotoxin is, under normal circumstances, a pretty stable liquid. That's probably what higher-ups believed they would be transporting when they put the Manchurian Gold into a simple wooden crate, presumably containing a few poorly sealed bottles, and instituted precautions more focused on keeping people away than on keeping it contained. It's only after first being exposed to intense heat, in the form of a lightning strike, and then encountering water that the Gold becomes a volatile gas and floods the Ourang Medan. At that point, having adequate respirators on board might have kept things under control and minimized loss of life, but there just aren't that many to go around. The entire ship was probably doomed in the first place because those responsible for transporting the toxin weren't aware that it needed a waterproof container and a dry environment, or that it could become an airborne hazard if improperly handled.
Also because the anthology is starting to tie together now, and with few direct connections yet established between Man of Medan and Little Hope, it'd be interesting if their family was somehow connected to the town.
With that in mind, the fact that the alien venom and Manchurian Gold have the same effect on humans is very suggestive. Both cause intense fear, and apparently have a hallucinogenic effect. There are also suggestions, in HoA, that similar aliens have been found at other sites (the clean-up crew at the end seems unsurprised by their discoveries, and make reference to an incident somewhere named Winterhold).
Either the Japanese (as suggested in a theory above) or Americans could have discovered the aliens and attempted to weaponize their venom during the darkest years of World War II. This venom, stored in canisters aboard the Ourang Medan then triggered the events of this game.
