The 21 Scariest Horror Anime of All Time

For many years, especially in the ’80s and ’90s, anime in the United States had a reputation for the horrors it was willing to put onscreen. The dynamic and adult-oriented work of directors like Katsuhiro Otomo and Yoshiaki Kawajiri, usually available on the back shelves of local video stores, starkly contrasted with the bubbly, kid-friendly cartoons (and relatively static cartooning) that defined U.S. animation. Guts spilled, nudity was commonplace, and many of the one-off “original video animations” (a.k.a. direct-to-video OVAs) relished stories of the kind of supernatural savagery we just can’t get enough of in the Halloween season. Today, anime is more globally available than ever before, which is why we’ve assembled this list of the best anime horror movies and TV shows you can stream or buy right now.

Horror Anime Movies

Akira (1988)

Manga artist and director Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 classic is well regarded for its nearly nonstop action animation, postapocalyptic production design, and sick bike slides. It’s less frequently remembered for its horror bona fides: The villain Tetsuo transforms into a gruesome and tragic monster not unlike Frankenstein; the godlike powers of Akira comment on nuclear war and the failures of the ruling class; and its relentless soundtrack from Geinoh Yamashirogumi alternately immerses and shocks the viewer. Akira straddles multiple genres — cyberpunk, action, psychological thriller — but it’s got some of the most horrific sequences anime has ever seen.

Belladonna of Sadness (1973)

Fifty years ago, director Eiichi Yamamoto’s dark fantasy epic shocked and baffled audiences seeking out more straightforward animated fare. Instead they got an adult art film about the brutal rape, demonic revenge, and subsequent fall of a woman maligned as a witch in medieval France. Belladonna of Sadness is something of an anime cult classic and a visceral, often uncomfortable example of second-wave feminist cinema. Visually, it looks nothing like the televised anime of the era — it’s more like a cross between the paintings of Klimt and the phantasmagoric hippie art of the ’60s than Yamamoto’s earlier directed works Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. The film feels a bit dated today, but the horrors that its central “witch” Jenne stands against — repressive societies, misogyny, sexual violence — remain.

Demon City Shinjuku (1988)

One of the most memorable OVA releases of its ’80s and ’90s heyday, Demon City Shinjuku is a classic from anime’s horror-action master Yoshiaki Kawajiri and his studio, Madhouse. It showcases several of the artistic hallmarks Kawajiri would continue to return to over the next 20 years: kinetically animated swordplay, demonic creature designs, and world-ending stakes are all on offer. The action begins when its setting, the special ward of Shinjuku City in the Tokyo metropolitan area, is destroyed in a cataclysmic earthquake and subsequently threatened by the demon world. Adapted from a novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi, one of Japan’s most widely read horror writers, Demon City Shinjuku is one of several collaborations he did with Kawajiri.

The End of Evangelion (1997)

Infamously torn up inside about the franchise that came to define his life, Hideki Anno made what is still his scariest film, The End of Evangelion. It’s here that he most shockingly matched his obsessions with psychosexual development, various religions, and the whole idea of individuality with terrifying imagery. In The End of Evangelion, giant-size guts fly across the screen, characters explode into melting yellow goop, and eerie live-action segments punctuate a story that feels like it transcends time, space, and consciousness. Over the next 25 years Anno continued to refine his Evangelion story with a tetralogy of remake films that borrowed liberally from the imagery he had produced before, but nothing will ever match End’s grotesque surprises.

Lily C.A.T. (1987)

Director Hisayuki Toriumi made his bones directing early, kid-favorite anime titles from the ’60s and ’70s like Speed Racer and Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (a.k.a. Battle of the Planets in the U.S.), so it’s somewhat delightful that he was also responsible for Lily C.A.T., the claustrophobic Alien- and John Carpenter–inspired story of a space mission gone wrong. Over the course of its deadly 67 minutes, the crew of a deep-space cruiser are progressively murdered. The culprit? A cybernetic cat! Lily C.A.T. is pulpier and not as polished as some of the other anime on this list, but it’s rich with jump scares, moody environments, an ’80s metal soundtrack, and grisly kill scenes.

Paprika (2006) 

The late, much-celebrated, and much-imitated Satoshi Kon was responsible for Paprika, a psychological horror film about the nightmares (literally) of living a digital life. Its dreamlike visuals are the main event, as scene after scene of this film kaleidoscopically portrays its characters sliding in and out of the real and hallucinatory worlds. (Christopher Nolan’s Inception owes a lot to Paprika.) The film’s centerpiece is a chaotic, carnivalesque parade of surrealistic characters marching through Tokyo. The imagery is intended to mock and reflect modern Japan in some way — from the overworked salarymen gleefully staging suicidal leaps off of buildings to the schoolgirls (who, in the dream, have cell phones for heads) exposing themselves to perverts (who also have cell phones for heads). Unlike several of the other titles on this list, Paprika’s creepiest scenes are usually rendered in bright, poppy colors.

Perfect Blue (1997)

As far as its color palette goes, the muted tones of Perfect Blue, which Kon made almost a full decade earlier, are the opposite of Paprika. Both blend horrific imagery in the real and imagined world, however. Perfect Blue follows a former J-pop idol turned actress who gets a stalker and begins to lose her mind in the process. As she commits herself to her acting jobs, she starts seeing reflections of her past self in her idol outfit. Then murders start popping up around her. Perfect Blue is violent and unsettling — a movie Darren Aronofsky shamelessly borrowed from to create scenes from Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream.

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)

This is arguably director Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s and the Madhouse studio’s horror masterpiece, and also the best of Kawajiri’s several collaborations with gothic horror scribe Hideyuki Kikuchi. Based on a novel of Kikuchi’s long-running series, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is part Yojimbo, part Romeo and Juliet: When a woman is kidnapped by a powerful vampire baron, a half-human, half-vampire, 100 percent–badass bounty hunter named D is sent to retrieve her, squaring off against demons and fellow bounty hunters along the way. The ruthless killings and dark creature designs in Bloodlust are chilling to watch, and with a story set almost entirely at night, its environments feel especially dour, atmospheric, and inventively dangerous (for example, the ninjalike enemy who strikes at D through shadows). Although the plot is laser-focused on D’s mission, each scene world-builds Kikuchi’s postapocalyptic Earth beautifully, and by the end we lament that the characters are doomed to live or die in it.

Wicked City (1987)

Bathed in dark blue tones and noirish intrigue, Wicked City is a bit like Michael Mann’s Manhunter (which debuted a year earlier) if the villains were demonic terrorists instead of serial killers. With a treaty between the demon world and the human world set to expire, agents from each plane have to ensure that a rogue cadre of demons don’t threaten the peace. Wicked City — which was originally intended as a 35-minute special before it was granted a full feature’s runtime after an early test screening — epitomizes some of anime’s most gross-out tendencies: Several scenes depict sexual violence, including tentacle stuff and sexually threatening spider-women, and there’s gunplay and gore throughout. While it loses points for feeling somewhat puerile, the movie came to define both Kawajiri’s and Madhouse’s adult-oriented style. It looks so atmospheric, after all, because the director craftily used blue tinting to distract audiences away from noticing how few animation cels his budget could afford.

Horror Anime TV Shows

Attack on Titan (2013)

Perpetually the problematic fave of modern action anime, Attack on Titan is nonetheless one of the most terror-inducing TV shows of the 21st century. Whether it’s the grisly design of creator Hajime Isayama’s giant, naked, tooth-gnashing humanoid Titans or the way the plot inflicts tragedy after tragedy upon its characters — from getting eaten alive to being turned into the mindless hulking beasts doing the eating — Attack on Titan pulls no punches. It’s a franchise that, despite its massive popularity, has been criticized over the years for how it incorporates fascist iconography and historical revisionism to craft its fantasy narrative. Regardless of how you feel about its political subtext, Attack on Titan has always been scary.

Berserk (1997)

The late Kentaro Miura’s Berserk is probably the best dark-fantasy manga ever drawn and written, and though it only adapted the opening chunks of its sprawling, decadeslong (and still ongoing) story, the 1997 adaptation is still the best. Directed by Naohito Takahashi, the 25-episode run of Berserk takes on some of the manga’s most memorably chapters — from the introduction of its gruff, greatsword-swinging antihero Guts and his warrior comrades in the Band of the Hawk to their ultimate fate upon encountering a massive demon army. Berserk is a beautiful but dark franchise, a series defined as much by Miura’s indelible designs as by the twisted brutality its characters must overcome. This adaptation infamously ends on a massive, brutal cliffhanger that we won’t spoil for the uninitiated (but that you might want to Google if you think you need a content warning).

Blue Gender (1999)

Ryosuke Takahashi, the creator of Blue Gender, is known for making violent, grim, hard sci-fi inspired by the conflicts of the Cold War (several stretches of his show Armored Trooper VOTOMS look straight out of Vietnam), and this show is no different. Like Ripley in Alien, the hero Yuji awakens from his cryogenic sleep and quickly learns that the world has been overtaken by a species of buglike creatures known as the Blue. In the show’s opening episodes, Yuji must navigate the claustrophobic ruins of Earth and eventually join the resistance against the brutal alien species — which kills almost all of his comrades. From there Yuji must fight to survive, whether that means against the Blue or against the surviving humans losing their minds over the end of the world.

Death Note (2006)

What would you do if you were a creepy teenage boy who came into possession of a cursed notebook that would kill anyone whose name you wrote into it? Death Note is an addictively suspenseful supernatural thriller — one in which the scariest person happens to be the story’s edgelord protagonist. More amusingly, though, it’s wrapped up in emo aesthetics (bangs! angst! fishnets!) and often feels like a fever dream set in a Hot Topic. Death Note goes a little off the rails in the second half of its 37-episode run, but the anime remains a must watch nearly 20 years after it debuted.

Devilman Crybaby (2018)

Manga artist Go Nagai’s Devilman has been a horror classic in Japan for decades, a work that synthesizes biblical references, antiwar messaging, and teen horniness into a story that retells the fall of Lucifer. It paired perfectly with the twisted mind of Masaaki Yuasa, one of most inventive and prolific anime directors of the last two decades. Yuasa’s ten-episode adaptation updates the IP for the Netflix era, bringing his surreal and elastic animation, explicitly LGBTQ+ characters, and social media to a story more than 50 years old.

Elfen Lied (2004)

Stranger Things may owe a lot to American horror movies and pop culture of the ’80s, but the premise of an all-powerful murdergirl escaping from a government facility is ripped straight from Elfen Lied: Like that show’s Eleven, Lucy is a girl with funky headgear, telekinetic superpowers, and plenty of trauma that she usually processes by killing and maiming people. It’s just 13 episodes long, but if you plan on watching, know that Elfen Lied is full of multiple scenes with nudity, decapitation, mutilation, dismemberment, and at least two deaths by pen stabbing. With all that packed in, Elfen Lied can sometimes feel exhausting, but it’s an undeniably transgressive, creatively risky watch.

Hellsing Ultimate (2006)

Above all, the Hellsing franchise understands that vampires aren’t just scary: They’re cool. And the baddest of them all, Alucard (*cough* read that name back, right to left), wears a red trench coat, a pair of laughably huge pistols, and sunglasses at night to prove it. Bound to the service of the Hellsing Organization, Alucard fights against fellow vampires, a crusading faction of the Vatican called the Iscariot Organization, and wannabe Nazis alongside his allies Seres Victoria and Integra Hellsing. This anime and the franchise as a whole are ultraviolent and ridiculous: Alucard, because he is so ludicrously overpowered, often allows his enemies to shoot or maim him before he unleashes his own hell upon them. Even so, its action sequences are beautifully animated, and both the original Hellsing and the Ultimate series (the latter more faithfully adapts the manga) are supernatural-horror classics of the form.

Higurashi When They Cry (2006)

What the aforementioned Puella Magi Madoka Magica is to the “magical girl” genre, this show is to the “slice-of-life” and “harem” genres: a bloody dismantling of tropes and viewer expectations. Higurashi When They Cry follows a teenage boy and the girls he interacts with when he moves to a cursed mountain town in Japan. Each arc, several episodes long, ends with the main character, Keiichi, suffering one gruesome fate after another before the show’s timeline resets and we are delivered back to square one with a new arc and new horrors and trials for Keiichi to face. Despite all these resets, Higurashi’s engrossing suspense only builds, because we incrementally learn more and more about this cursed town and these girls as they reveal their sadistic streaks.

Mononoke (2007)

Visually unlike any other title on this list, the experimental 12-episode series Mononoke looks a lot like a moving representation of the flat, traditional Japanese paintings from centuries ago that depicted subjects like samurai, dragons, and ancient spirits. A mononoke is (basically) that — a spirit that thrives off the negative feelings of the surrounding population — and Mononoke focuses on a cryptic medicine seller who tours Japan, searching for them so that he may rid the area of their evil. Mononoke’s murder mysteries are circular but never boring: Its stories echo and rhyme with one another as the merchant travels from town to town, a spell-binding take on the supernatural.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011)

Sailor Moon this is not, despite any indications to the contrary. To the initiated, Puella Magi Madoka Magica is one of the cleverest recent riffs on the “magical girl” anime genre. It’s got shimmering transformations and girl power galore; it just happens to pair that bubbliness with heaping mounds of trauma and brutal character death. Writer Gen Urobuchi and directors Akiyuki Shinbo and Yukihiro Miyamoto sought to subvert expectations as much as they could by infusing the story with blood, guts, and irony — it’s often the conventions of the genre that cause the Madoka Magica girls abject misery. The twists and turns along the way make it a compulsive watch, though — another irony to consider.

Serial Experiments Lain (1998)

This 13-episode techno-horror about a young girl who is slowly subsumed into a life on the Wired (the show’s version of the internet) is a perfect pre-Y2K-paranoia binge. Despite the fact that it came out a year before The Matrix, Neo and and the young Lain share some similarities: They’re both surrounded by their computers, they slip deeper and deeper into online communities they don’t fully understand, and their realities bend as they begin to uncover the secrets powering the virtual space. Along the way Serial Experiments Lain tackles questions of transhumanism, identity, and godhood while Lain herself confronts hackers, tech fanatics, and eventually herself — a process the show’s late director, Ryūtarō Nakamura, portrays visually in washed-out, high-contrast imagery. Twenty-five years later, Serial Experiments Lain still looks and feels striking.

X (2001)

The world is ending, and the messianic kid destined to be there when it happens — ancient sword in hand and ready to fight off demons — acts like an antisocial prick. So go the early episodes of X — the 26-episode adaptation of the manga by CLAMP. Anime-horror master Yoshiaki Kawajiri directs, and X is full of hallucinatory visions of the end times: flowing ribbons, angelic wings, and clanging swordplay are all animated beautifully. X has been adapted in an anime film directed by Rintaro as well, but Kawajiri’s slower-paced series (released just a few years later by the same studio, Madhouse) gives the story a lot more room to breathe.