February 22, 2023
Your home for the spooky, the supernatural, and things that just ain’t right.
Horrifying Anime
Let’s be honest: It’s difficult to find good horror anime. Too often, shallow writing is buried underneath gratuitous blood splatter, manic laughter, and, when a writer is particularly desperate, unfortunately proportioned female characters. Fortunately, we’ve waded through the blood-soaked trenches of the horror anime world to find the ones worth watching so that you don’t have to.Chainsaw Man
Chainsaw Man feels like what would result if Quentin Tarantino made an anime, which is to say it’s violent, irreverent, and every character is the worst person you’ve ever met. It’s also a great time!Meet Denji, a 16-year-old boy with little to drive him forward except the desire to stay alive, teenage lust, and his best friend, a dog with chainsaw powers (yes, really). Long story short, Denji winds up working for a government organization as a devil hunter, a high-risk job that has him surrounded by coworkers with varying degrees of sanity remaining. Coworkers include crass, cat-loving demon Power; stoic, cursed katana-wielding Aki; and Denji’s boss, the ever-composed and cunning Makima.Stay tuned through the credits, or you’ll miss out on one of the best soundtracks in anime today.Content warnings: Violence, gore, statutory rape (attempted, but in your face), minors in awful scenarios.Shiki
Shiki follows a rural village beset by a rash of mysterious deaths, with several shifts in perspective along its 22-episode run. Don’t let the silly character designs fool you; Shiki is one of the more reflective horror anime out there. What begins as a slow-burn mystery turns into a study of the human spirit when faced with something incomprehensible, to devastating results. Shiki is an underappreciated (and frankly underrated) gem. Also, few openings are cooler. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, Shiki is unavailable for legal streaming in the United States—Funimation’s license for the series expired in June of 2018. Anyone wanna go splitskies on a box set? Only $150 on eBay!
Content Warnings: Violence, blood.Perfect Blue 
One of my all-time favorite films, Perfect Blue is a 1997 psychological thriller directed by the masterful late Satoshi Kon. When Mima Kirigoe, a member of a Japanese pop-idol group, decides to quit the group in order to pursue a career in acting, she finds her sense of reality shaken as she is pursued by a stalker.Theorized to be Darren Aronofksy’s inspiration for Black Swan (though Aronofsky has denied this despite being a self-professed fan of the film), Perfect Blue is a true demonstration of how effectively animation can be used to put an audience inside a character’s head, with its use of abrupt cuts, unconventional frame rates, and blending of dream sequences and reality.In other words, this is a really, really cool film.Content warnings: Attempted rape, uncertain reality, insanity.
—Kana Coonce, Horror Editor