Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust - Does It Hold Up?

Everyone has that first anime. Not the one you first watched, but the first one you owned. As you've probably guessed, my first anime DVD was the 2000 feature film Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, and I got it as a gift for my 16th birthday. When I had received it, I had never read the (still ongoing) novel series by Hideyuki Kikuchi, or had seen the previous 1985 cult classic, released by TOHO. Nevertheless, it quickly became one of my favorite things, and I would sometimes watch it on a loop because I was just so enamored by every aspect. The narrative style, the animation, the art direction, everything about this film just spoke to the edgy teenager that I was. It had such a large impact on me, that I still have Bloodlust fanart hanging on my walls which was bought at Otakon over a decade ago. Also, it is very clear to me in retrospect that my lifelong obsession with everything Studio Madhouse began right here.

In this essay, I'll go through the movie and see how its many elements have aged in the 22 years since its premiere, and how it holds up as both a contained feature film experience, and as an adaptation. Though, since I haven't kept up with the novels, don't expect me to have an inexhaustible knowledge of the property, because I know the diehards would call me on that in an instant. Also, the copy of the film that I am using for this video is the original 2002 home release from the (now defunct) Urban Vision which I received all those years ago. So if you're looking for Blu-ray quality, you'll have to look elsewhere. Discotek Media released the only available Blu-ray in 2015, but reportedly due to rights issues, it's only available in English.

But let's just sprint through a rundown on the plot to get everyone up to speed. Based on the third novel in the Vampire Hunter D series, titled Demon Deathchase, the film centers around the titular D, a half-vampire called a dhampir (though in the English dub, they all call it dunpeal, which I've never understood), as well as the Marcus Brothers, a squad of famous hunters. They are all hired by the wealthy John Elbourne, whose daughter Charlotte was abducted by the vampire baron, Meier Link. While D is only accompanied by his horse and a parasitic entity embedded in his left hand, the Marcus Clan consists of Borgoff, Nolt, Kyle, Grove, and Leila. The movie traipses through the hunters' interactions with each other, as well as the many monsters and mercenaries which make up the world, finally culminating with a gothic boss fight that would be at home in any From Software game.

The plot follows along a fairly narrow pathway towards its climactic showdown, and there aren't any ambiguous characters or moral decisions which may cause audiences to question who they should be rooting for. While I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a stock-standard good-vs-evil paradigm, it doesn't really play with the grayish nature of what it means to be a half-breed in this universe beyond a few instances where D has to combat human prejudice. While the final sequence is centered around the skullduggery of the bloody vampire countess Carmilla, and her belief in the fundamental superiority of vampires over humans, we don't learn much more about our characters that wasn't initially built in the early moments of the movie.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Shakespeare once said that "Brevity is the soul of wit," which essentially means to not waste time getting to the point, and Bloodlust certainly understands this concept. There aren't any scenes which I could see being trimmed to make the story any more succinct (except for one moment, but we'll get to that), and while the flow from one scene to the next is a bit muddled from time to time, these flubs aren't game-breaking. Based on the movie alone, I cannot see many more details being added to keep the narrative cohesive. While the movie may not possess many of the thematic undertones which have come to hallmark Vampire Hunter D, what we are given is upfront and understandable, and mainly centered around wild action set pieces and classic gothic romance.

But in whittling the whole novel down so that it can be told within a feature film framework, we end up losing many nuanced details from the original story. For one, they changed Leila's character extensively. She is presented as a headstrong woman who the hunters found and recruited when her mother was stoned to death after being turned into a vampire (which is somewhat based on what actually happens to the Marcus parents in the novel). However, in the original story, she is the sister of the other Marcus brothers. And unlike the film (where typical anime camaraderie defines their relationships), in the book she was the victim of intense physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her family, leaving her unhinged. It is only when her brothers are dead that she manages to heal some of the damage, partially due to her friendship with D.

This isn't to say that I specifically wanted this horrifying backstory kept intact. Too often, strong characters are only made so through abuse, and while it can be a solid narrative choice, more often than not it's just used as an easy means to manufacture sympathy. But the removal of this backstory, and with it not being replaced with something equatable, not only aides in (unnecessarily) toning Leila down, but it also changes her entire dynamic with all the other characters. Don't get me twisted – without the book, Leila is still a solid character. And I honestly don't even mind a sizable amount of the changes that made it into the film. But they do dramatically trim and alter some of the more fatty aspects of the story for the sake of brevity, so we've lost a lot of the nuance. Coupled with losing many of the secondary characters which aided in fleshing out the post-apocalyptic environment, the film world feels a bit anemic comparatively. Honestly, the only accurate way of describing this adaptation is "loose."

Like I said, when taking the film as its own beast, it's easier to accept the state of things as they are presented, and just roll with the punches. The movie doesn't take any turns which require considerable prior knowledge of the property to understand, and what is present is enough to supply a complete narrative arc. But when seeing the movie with the original story in mind, the experience is completely pale in comparison because it streamlines too much. While in the book the Marcus Clan was so ruthless that they would often butcher their own competition when hired for a job, in the film they just sort of complain about D for a bit, with only Leila making any legitimate effort to eliminate or slow down their rival. We don't get how the Marcus siblings are all scientifically augmented with supernatural abilities to hunt their prey. Sure, we get Grove using his powers to wipe out enemies a couple times (which is just awesome on all counts), but we never understand how or why he has these abilities.

And speaking of Grove. We see how kind and caring Grove is to Leila, with many moments heavily suggesting that he is in love with her. But in the book, he is just as angry and demeaning as his other brothers, and had joined in with raping Leila in the past. Because we lose so many of these additional conflicts between the characters, they are all just badasses with few moral qualms, which fundamentally undermines the whole attitude which I gleaned from the world of Vampire Hunter D.

While the purist fans of the original novel may be champing at the bit for me to go through every discrepancy within the adaptation, I won't. For me, it would be largely reductive, and while the film lacks a lot of the complexity which made the book so compelling, it successfully banks everything on its morose atmosphere and physics-defying badassery. From a technical perspective, the movie is brimming with rich art direction, impressively fluid animation, and a completely inseparable musical score — all of which have remained thoroughly impressive up to the present day. You know we're roaming through a post-apocalyptic landscape even without the opening text detailing the dichotomy between humans and vampires. We see it; in the beat-up desert towns, the strange and hostile fauna (such as sand mantas), the long stretches of overgrown ruins, and the utterly gothic tone which infects every nook and cranny of the visuals. Sure, there are a few instances where the backgrounds sort of merge together into a muddy mess, but usually it isn't detrimental enough to interrupt your immersion into what's happening. But that's never an issue with any of the character designs. They're all fantastic, no matter how important the character may be. The Barbarois — half-beast hybrids which serve the vampire nobles — are a plethora of different designs, calling back to numerous classic creatures in folklore while blended with the filmmakers' unique spins, such as with the werewolf Machira. This all culminates in the final sequence within the Castle of Chaythe, which I swear has some influence from Warhammer 40,000, but that may be just because I recently finished another book in the Horus Heresy series, and play games like Battlefleet Gothic and Vermintide 2.

I could nitpick a bunch of technical moments to catalog all of the film's visual and auditory shortcomings, but that's all they are: nitpicks. The voice cast is phenomenal, regardless of which version you watch, and if you're a John DiMaggio fan, he plays like four roles, so you'll surely be sated. The presentation is rightfully iconic, and I couldn't imagine another way to handle the art direction or character designs than how it was executed by Yuji Ikehata and Yutaka Minowa, respectively. Though, as you could have guessed by this point, (for me) the musical score by Marco D'Ambrosio is the most essential element of the work which allows it to retain its lasting power two decades later. Whether it's when eerie choirs sing against shrieking strings and booming organs, or sludgy woodwinds mesh together with nearly off-tuned pianos, the music is stellar from front to back. I will never take anyone who doesn't like this OST seriously. Yes, that's biased, and I don't give a damn.

Even matched against some of Studio Madhouse's more recent fare, it still holds up as one of the studio's most elegantly executed feature films, and I wouldn't be surprised that people will continue to say so in another decade. It also stands clearly as one of director Yoshiaki Kawajiri's better feature films, which is saying quite a bit about the creator of Ninja Scroll. But when it comes to Kawajiri's screenwriting, there's one moment in the film in which I've got a genuine gripe. Whether or not this was in the original book, I am not sure, but if it is, then this is a big flaw in the story regardless of who was telling it.

After Carmilla is defeated and Charlotte is killed, D tells Meier that he will be taking Charlotte's body back to her family. Meier then attacks D, claiming that no one loved her as he did, and they engage in a fairly lame fight scene where they just sort of stand and shake at each other for a couple of minutes. After which, D wounds Meier in the shoulder, only to accept Charlotte's delicate ring as proof of her death, and allows Meier to take her body on the gothic rocket ship which had lured the pair to the castle to begin with. This whole scene, after such an impressive visual and narrative feat of the previous sequence where Carmilla is taken down, just comes across as poorly written. If the ring was an option, why bother with the fight in the first place? Meier and D don't have any dialogue exchanges while they're facing off, and since D knew that Meier and Charlottes' love was genuine by this point, why would he even bother trying to fight Meier when there existed a path to satisfy everyone without violence? Maybe they just felt that Meier and D needed a showdown, since the movie was building towards it. But I personally think that this whole scene could have been altered to achieve the same outcome without sacrificing the pacing of the film's conclusion.

However, having said all of this, I still could not recommend Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust any higher just based on its merits alone. Sure, it's not a carbon-copied adaptation, but just as I have pointed out with works such as Metropolis and Berserk, it really doesn't need to be. What we are given is "peak anime" during one of the most experimental moments in the medium's history, and for that alone, the film is worth checking out. While I've heard that Kawajiri was brought back to helm a new anime series, originally announced in 2015 as Vampire Hunter D: Resurrection, Covid-19 reportedly halted production in 2020, so I am uncertain as to the current fate of the anime. But all I can really hope for is a continuation of everything awesome which I have come to love in this film. No, I'm not looking for them to copy Bloodlust, but I am hoping that whatever is brought next to the table will have the same care, style, and depth which will allow Vampire Hunter D to flourish for future generations of anime fans.

Thank you to everyone who's watched this video till the end, y'all are lovely. If you enjoyed (or have taken issue) with my examination of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, leave a comment down below to let me know. If you have an idea for an anime which you'd like me to cover, also let me know in the comments. I read every one, so I definitely want to hear from you, so I can continue to get better at what I do. If you haven't done so, subscribe to the Anime News Network. We release new content every week, so ding the bell. My personal channel Criticlysm is a place for similar content, and I'll be whipping up something to post on there shortly, but freelancing always has a habit of derailing your plans, so bear with me. I deeply appreciate your continued support and feedback. Until next time.