Anime can get pretty gruesome.
But what horrific shows are worth your time?
Well, from tales of malevolent spirits to portraits of people shattered into inhumanity,
these are most terrifying anime you can watch.
Go Nagai's Devilman manga has been adapted more than once, but 2018's Devilman Crybaby
might just be the most terrifying adaptation of them all.
Directed by Masaaki Yuasa, this version hews closer to the manga than others and incorporates
Yuasa's trademark character focus, resulting in a story as emotionally potent as it is
horrifying.
Akira and Ryo, friends since childhood, are the series' central figures.
Ryo convinces Akira to become the titular “Devilman” to fight off an ancient race
of demons.
But all is not as it seems, and what unfolds manages to shock Devilman newbies and diehard
fans alike.
Death, disfigurement, violence, are all on vivid display here.
The series penultimate episode, Go to Hell, You Mortals, is an absolute parade of grotesqueries,
wherein beloved characters are mutilated, killed, and reduced to desecrated body parts.
But Devilman Crybaby's true nightmare is the gulf that opens between Akira and Ryo, despite
their careful planning, best intentions, and literally divine power.
This isn't just a horror story about man's inhumanity to man, but about the destruction
of love itself at the hands of selfishness and cruelty.
Horror isn't typically considered a beautiful genre, but Mononoke is a gorgeous series by
anyone's estimation.
Consisting of 12 episodes, Mononoke tells the story of a nameless medicine seller who
hunts mononoke spirits across feudal Japan.
Mononoke can't be easily slain, however.
The medicine seller must first understand the form they take, and why they took it,
before he can dispatch them.
What results is an anime of uncommon psychological depth.
Human nature is the source of all the scares in Mononoke, and as such, the lines between
good and bad are profoundly blurred.
The series’ visuals, which resemble 2D paper cut-outs, intensify this horizontal approach
to horror.
There's no locale that looks "normal," and as such, terror creeps in with rare subtlety.
Everything from ukiyo-e woodblocks to Art Nouveau is incorporated into Mononoke's style,
and you can't help but marvel at its aesthetic flourishes as a grisly scene unfolds.
But that's the point of the anime.
Serial Experiments Lain follows Lain Iwakura, a 14-year-old girl living in suburban Japan,
who has her quiet life upended by an email from a dead student.
The student claims not to have actually died, but instead abandoned her physical form to
live within "the Wired."
Over the course of 13 tense episodes, Lain goes from introverted girlhood to outright
omnipotence, in a world where the boundary between the material and the virtual has frayed
to nothing.
Serial Experiments Lain is, first and foremost, a work of science fiction, but it commits
so wholeheartedly to exploring the possibilities of artificial intelligence that it becomes
a work of profound horror.
Reality, Lain argues, is a thing people agree on, and if that consensus can be manipulated,
reality will be altered.
Lain and the audience alike are granted no quarter as the anime delves into the nature
of a world ruled by inhuman intelligence whose influence can't be stopped.
Every time Lain sits at her desk, her slim figure dwarfed by the reef of screens, the
viewer understands that the world is changing in a way we aren't prepared for.
Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue is among the most influential anime to ever exist.
Madonna incorporated clips of it into her 2001 Drowned World tour.
A Director Darren Aronofsky remade a scene from Perfect Blue in Requiem for a Dream.
Why this far-flung influence?
It’s simple; Perfect Blue is a masterpiece of dread.
Mima, our protagonist, has just left a pop idol group to become a serious actress.
But as threatening faxes pour in and a website entitled "Mima's Room" — containing diary
entries purportedly written by Mima herself — gains momentum, Mima realizes not all
is as it seems.
The events of Perfect Blue are themselves horrific, but it's Kon's dizzying approach
to their portrayal that make Perfect Blue the nightmare it is.
Frantic cuts disorient the viewer, odd scene changes mimic Mima's increasingly disordered
mind, and mirrors, screens, and windows refract a world that has lost its meaning.
Mima descends into an underworld of illusion, and the viewer has only her perspective to
rely on, one that draws into question the reliability of reality.
There's a culprit held to account at the end of Perfect Blue, but their actions are only
part of the story.
The real terror, in Mima's mind and the viewer's, lies in her world's collapse.
Corpse Party's long, bloody history began in 1996, as a simple PC video game.
Today, the Corpse Party franchise encompasses manga spin-offs, live-action films, and drama
CDs.
Corpse Party: Tortured Souls, is 2013's anime adaptation of the beloved series.
Years before the series' beginning, Heavenly Host Elementary School was the site of a series
of brutal kidnappings and killings.
Though it was razed, a new high school was built in its place and filled with teenagers
who don't understand the malevolent psychic energy that surrounds them, until they find
themselves trapped in a nightmare version of Heavenly Host.
Corpse Party is a brutal, bloody series that revels in the macabre.
It's got spilled innards, severed tongues, and bifurcated bodies.
If you can stomach this, it's a satisfyingly savage tale of the past's long shadows and
the youth forced to grow up within them.
The trauma they've inherited isn't their own, but it’s their job to process it anyway.
Shiki, which chronicles the destruction of a small town by the inhuman monsters that
live in the mansion on the town's outskirts, is a classic vampire story.
The shiki are hypnotic, undying figures with inhuman drives, as utterly unknowable as they
are eerily similar to everyday people.
Those who are killed are reborn as shiki.
Megumi, the first to die, goes from being a small-town girl with big-city dreams to
being an undead killer with disdain for her hometown.
This might sound familiar, but what makes Shiki a truly memorable work of horror is
the truth of the shiki themselves.
At heart, the shiki just want to build a peaceful home.
The shiki's actions are vile, but the anime never shies from the truth of their tragic
situation.
They exist, they must feed, and they're trying to find a way to do both with a minimum of
cruelty.
The impossibility of reconciling these things is what makes Shiki such a resonant horror
story.
No Longer Human began as a 1948 novel by legendary author Osamu Dazai, and it's a story as powerful
as it is challenging to adapt.
Yet 2009 saw that accomplished when Aoi Bungaku a 12-episode anime series featuring adaptations
of popular Japanese literature devoted the first four episodes of its run to animating
No Longer Human.
Though Aoi Bungaku takes liberties with its source material, the core conceit remains
intact.
Protagonist Yozo, feels completely detached from everything that makes one genuinely human.
Watching him disastrously fail to connect is a truly harrowing and relatable portrait
of brokenness.
His life might not be anything like the viewer's, but as in the original novel, almost anyone
can see a little of themselves in Yozo.
That's what No Longer Human forces us to view through Yozo's inhumanity.
In this, he's far more human than he realizes, and that's the most terrifying thing of all.
Years before the events of Another, a student in Yomiyama Middle School suddenly died.
Her classmates, reeling with grief, pretended as though she hadn't died at all, to the point
of reserving her seat at graduation.
This culminated in the deceased classmate's mysterious appearance in the class's graduation
photo.
Years later, a boy named Koichi begins his time in the same class late, due to illness,
and he discovers that something is amiss.
Misaki, a quiet classmate, is entirely ignored by the other students.
And then, one by one, Koichi's peers start dying.
Misaki is the only one who isn't surprised by these tragedies, and only she understands
how to stop them.
The anime's moments of violence, terror, and dread make it the sort of nightmare any horror
fan can enjoy, but their true power lies beyond brief thrills.
They're the pillars of the story's central tragedy.
The class is locked within a cycle of grief that can only be broken by that most crucial
thing: acceptance.
Their inability to do so is the series' truest nightmare of all.
To be young and in love.
Happy Sugar Life addresses the virtues of this sublime state, only to confront the viewer
with the reality of its starring couple Satou, a teenage girl with a hard-luck past, and
Shio, the kind-hearted eight-year-old that Satou keeps locked in her apartment.
Satou will do anything to conceal and protect the "happy sugar life" she believes she's
created for her and Shio.
Theirs is a love of pristine purity, according to Satou, and there's no evil she won't commit
in her devotion to its preservation.
Happy Sugar Life never glories in the details of Satou's grisliest acts.
This anime chills the viewer with a vision of just how people can twist each other into
monsters.
Satou, exposed to only the most dysfunctional relationship models as a child, believes that
kidnapping a child is excusable in the name of true love.
But it is Shio's character arc that really terrifies.
Having known only abandonment and violence so far in her short life, she can't recognize
Satou for the monster she is, nor identify herself as an individual beyond what Satou
projects upon her.
What results is a story about how entirely people can destroy the ones they love and
just how invisible the process can be.
An alternative ending to Neon Genesis Evangelion’s controversial final episode, The End of Evangelion
shows us the apocalypse.
NERV, the paramilitary group responsible for the Evangelion units that our heroes pilot,
is being used by its commander, Gendo Ikari, to hasten the end of the world.
He succeeds, though not as he would've liked.
Prickly Asuka is disemboweled.
Quiet Rei attains Biblical power and joins all of humanity into a single consciousness.
Protagonist Shinji survives, yet the story ends on a shot of him and Asuka alone in the
ruined world.
It’s implied that humanity might reform, but in that moment, Shinji attempts to strangle
Asuka to death.
When he fails, Asuka mutters the last line of the film,
"Kimochi warui,"
which is most often translated as, "I feel sick," or, "How disgusting."
The End of Evangelion is possibly about hope, but mostly, it's about the venality of the
world, the corruption of the powerful, and the inevitability of decay.
Shadow Star Narutaru begins as a tale about a pigtailed everygirl and her mysterious alien
friend, Hoshimaru.
You might be thinking that this sounds like Digimon or Cardcaptor Sakura, a story of youngsters
and their unlikely companions saving the world with their supernatural bond.
This is very much by design.
Hoshimaru is adorable, Shiina is a cheery charmer, and the opening theme features purposefully
childlike drawings of the cast alongside their alien friends.
It's sweet, it's bright, and it features a lot of harmonica.
Somehow, Shadow Star Narutaru begins this way and then ends, 13 episodes later, as one
of the most graphically disturbing anime series of the 2000s.
Characters are beheaded, impaled, forced to eat maggots, have their severed heads mounted
on dolls, and experience a whole host of other grisly horrors too graphic to be described.
Shadow Star Narutaru is, in the end, a series that absolutely glories in the worst things
people can do to each other.
Watching it is dizzying, as moments of grotesque horror are often juxtaposed against scenes
of peaceful daily life, to say nothing of Shiina, whose blue-haired perkiness becomes
more and more discordant as the series darkens.
Its abrupt ending only makes the series more upsetting.
Shadow Star Narutaru charms, horrifies, and then, somewhat inexplicably, ends.
The viewer is left to absorb all that unfolded on screen with little in the way of explanation
and definitely nothing resembling comfort.
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