This Week in Anime

Halloween Anime Spooktacular

Nick
Gather round! Gather round! Step right up and take a look. It's time for This Week in Anime! This week's story is of two anime writers about to delve into the haunted horrors of the anime world. From surreal scares to miserable mistakes, it's our Halloween TWIA Spooktacular!

There is a (not wrong) assertion that anime isn't great at horror. Compared to the decades of horror films and TV in live-action media, it can feel difficult to find something genuinely unnerving. Usually, the best you can hope for is something with a lot of gore or creepy moments between action. It's to the point where even Anime databases seem desperate to fluff up the numbers. Like, I'm sorry Anime-Planet, but you are never going to convince me Attack on Titan is a goddamn horror anime.

It puts "horror anime" in an odd spot, where some of the most memorable moments of horror either exist in distinctly non-horror shows or lean into a far more abstract kind of scare than is typical of the genre. For instance, one of my favorites is Mononoke, a show that has its share of unsettling imagery but builds its scares mostly through disorienting abstraction and suggestion.


There's rarely on-screen blood or deaths. So much of what is terrifying is implied or just out of frame.

Anthology seems to be where horror thrives in anime—and television in general. Maybe I just got a taste of it as a kid, what with constant October reruns of Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Twilight Zone, but I find that a lot of my favorites are episode stories that can range in style and quality. There's a reason I referenced the opening lines of every Theater of Darkness: Yamishibai anime to start!

As creepy little bite-sized scares, they do an outstanding job utilizing their limited, stylized animation. They're meant to resemble paper theater plays (kamishibai), making them feel pretty distinct. There are times when that limited animation makes things scarier, like when they utilize a rotoscoped movement for a particular specter that moves in a way utterly alien to the rest of the show.

Admittedly, it's a very inconsistent series that slowly accrues more misses than hits. Yet the episodes are so short that I've kept watching them for over a decade now.

I've been meaning for ages to watch the first Boogiepop series. There are a few horror anime staples I've never really made time for. I still haven't watched the original Higurashi, and at this point, it feels like a running gag that I keep failing to watch Shiki when the time for ghosts and ghouls arrives.

I don't see anything scary about that. It's just what everyone looks like when you walk into a party, right?

Now we're really in my wheelhouse. I am terminally burnt-out on zombies, so I haven't gotten to School-Live just yet, but I have quite the affinity for shows that are Horror + "Not Typically A Horror Kinda Thing." It's a combo style that pops up frequently enough in anime to become one of my favorites.

I like it best when the horror is mixed with something lighter. It not only gives you a sharp contrast between scares and laughs but can mix those emotions into something new. Probably the most obvious version is Mieruko-chan, which combines modern styles of horror and comedy to make something really fun.

Its many monsters are almost always without context, random ghouls that infest the world around us without us sensing them. The humor comes from Miko desperately trying to ignore the problem until it disappears. The mixture of the two ideas creates something tense, weird, and darkly funny.

Speaking of bonding with shadows, now that I've successfully gotten Steve and Chris to watch Sankarea: Undying Love, my new agenda is to get people to watch Dusk Maiden of Amnesia, a similarly ambitious and trashy horror rom-com. You see, the story is about a boy meeting the classic ghost girl haunting his school and trying to solve the mystery of her death that even she doesn't remember. The twist is that she wants to get some dick.


Also, it was directed by ex-SHAFT veteran Shin Oonuma at the height of his powers, so it looks sick as hell, too.

Also, please do not think too hard about two of my favorite anime being about romancing dead girls.

Do not get me started on the people who think ghosts or zombies count as monster girls. It's like these fools have no clue what the difference is between necrophilia and bestiality, I swear.

I won't shame you, but I will leave you to hang out on that spaceship full of CG monsters by yourself. I tried watching that show and could not get past the look of it all. Same with Aragne: Sign of Vermillion, a laudable, ambitious horror movie made by basically one person that was nonetheless hideous enough to make me actively nauseous.

Horror is, famously, pretty hard to pull off. It takes a lot of craft and thought and a solid grasp of your audio-visual capabilities to do right. Some embrace being unable to do that and craft campy romps that can be a lot of fun in their own right. I grew up watching a bunch of goofy, low-budget Hammer Horror flicks. Probably the closest I've found to that in anime is Another, aka Anime Final Destination, a show that tries so hard to be serious and spooky that it shoots the moon and winds up one laugh track away from being a perfect black comedy.

Years later, director Tsutomu Mizushima would go on to do The Lost Village, a show Steve has vehemently told me is funny-bad on purpose. But for my money, there's nothing like the vintage "add cartoon sound effects to this horrible death" energy.


They really should sue whoever manufactured that umbrella with an Assassin's Creed murder poker.

I'm not strict on what does or doesn't count for a particular genre. I go on vibes and overall narrative trajectory. I'm sure some scoff at the titles we've discussed even being mentioned in the same breath as horror. To those people, I say go to Hell...Girl, which is not a very good show, but I rewatched some of it for this column and have to show you this goofy shit from the 4th season premiere.

I guess after three seasons, you run out of good ideas for visually ironic tortures for somebody who's been sent to hell by a vengeful victim. So sure, the Cyber Bully's head is a cellphone, and the envoys of hell can CTRL+X her organs. Why not.

There's also stuff trapped in the afterlife limbo of "not streaming." I have no idea if Le Portrait de Petite Cossette would hold up compared to when I watched it a decade ago, but I'd sure like to find out! Discotek or somebody, please get onto that.

Hey, there are worse reasons to cling to the mortal coil. Just try not to get your spirit attached to a movie theater showing crappy movies.