The List
6 Spooky New Anime for October 2018
by Lynzee Loveridge,
The average annual Halloween movie marathon has a tried and true list of the usual suspects. If you're going live-action, there's plenty of entries in the Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th series to pick from. Heck, there are even crossovers at this point. If you're going anime, you can't go wrong with Hellsing, High School of the Dead, or Parasyte for an evening of blood-soaked entertainment. Those series are mainstays, but 2018 had its fair share of entertaining horror romps. If you want to change up your usual playlist for October, why not check out (or revisit) some of this year's offerings?
Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories I've been going to bat for Yamishibai since season one. These limited animation shorts are done in the style of kamishibai, a traveling storytelling method that was popular during the Depression in the 1930s. The idea was that the storyteller would have a number of picture slides that he would narrate and perform the voices of the characters. Golden Bat was a popular character during its heyday. Yamishibai takes this tradition to tell folklore and ghost stories. Not every episode is a winner, but this season saw a return to form with some real creepers. Check out "The Wind's Warning," "The Dripping," "Sakura," "Mud Games," and "Tree of Innocence" for some particularly good scares.
Angels of Death Angels of Death is horror absurdity at its finest. Take one highly intelligent nihilist, along with a rambunctious serial killer and watch them attempt to escape from a multi-level dungeon filled with other serial killers. If this sounds more like a video game, that's because it is. Well, at first. Angels if Death was originally an indie game created with RPG Maker but it gained enough of a following to warrant a manga and anime adaptation. Angels of Death is a test in absurdity, but if you can suspend your disbelief, it's a lot of fun getting to know the story's villains. A doctor obsessed with eyeballs? A pumpkin-head wearing grave digger? Angels of Death has all that and more.
Magical Girl Site There are a lot of warnings to get through before I can recommend Magical Girl Site to anyone. There's a metric ton of of graphic abuse just in its first episode as our heroine Aya Asagiri tries to weather being her elder brother's punching bag, the subject of violent bullies, and a victim of sexual assault. Magical Girl Site is definitely in it for the shock value and likes to see how far it can push that envelope. The result is the sort of popcorn munching B-movie that's both vile and silly. Each new horrible scenario attempts to trump the last until the heroes and villains all sort of blend together. Magic panties are a central plot device and more than one person has a torture victim hidden in their house.
DEVILMAN crybaby Sign me up as one of the people that can't believe this show came out only nine-ish months ago. Devilman crybaby seems so far away now, but if you didn't catch it on Netflix yet, now is definitely the time. Masaaki Yuasa takes Go Nagai's classic about a Devil fighting for humanity and updates it with his own artistic sensibilities. The core plot is the same but the conclusion is reached in a different way, as tweaks to Akira and Ryo's personalities give the pair a different dynamic than the original. There's still plenty of over-the-top machismo, vagina dentata, and demons ripped limb from limb but there's a very human heart to Devilman crybaby and a central message of what it means to be human. Consider it horror you can chew on.
Attack on Titan Eren and company are back to face off against more terrifying giant cannibals with an added dash of politics. Admittedly, this season started off side-stepping away from a lot of human-eating antics and weird galloping Titans from earlier episodes in favor of taking down the establishment but the threat of being devoured never disappears. When the forlorn Eren is kidnapped, we finally find out what all that people eating was all about with the added bonus of a crazy drunk assassin added to the mix. The highlight in pure body horror though, has to be the Titan dragging his face across the landscape, lifting his head up to reveal his face is completely worn away.
Gegege no Kitaro Kamishibai storytelling strikes again in the latest revisit of Shigeru Mizuki's Gegege no Kitarō. The characters got a few change ups, namely Neko Musume's design, but the world of yokai is diverse as ever. Kitarō's audience skews younger and many of the episodes could be compared as "dark fables". Kitarō and the yokai also deliver a particularly nasty style of vengeance to an uncompromising Black Company that includes a train straight to Hell.
The new poll: Which character has the coolest monster form?
The old poll: Which vampire would you invite inside your home?
- Hikari Takanashi (Interviews with Monster Girls)
- Seras Victoria (Hellsing)
- Shinobu Oshino (Monogatari series)
- Moka Akashiya (Rosario + Vampire)
- Karin Maaka (Karin)
- Alucard (Hellsing)
- Abel Nightroad (Trinity Blood)
- Evangeline A.K. MacDowell (Negima)
- Mikaela Hyakuya (Owari No Seraph)
- Sleepy Ash (Servamp)
- D (Vampire Hunter D)
- Staz Charlie Blood (Blood Lad)
- Youko Shiragami (Actually, I Am...)
- Arcueid Brunestud (Tsukihime)
- Zero Kiryu (Vampire Knight)
- Saya Otonashi (Blood+)
- Hagi (Blood+)
- Mina Tepes (Dance in the Vampire Bund)
- Hazuki (Tsukuyomi -Mooh Phase-)
- Subaru and Kamui (Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle)
When she isn't compiling lists of tropes, topics, and characters, Lynzee works as Managing Interest Editor for Anime News Network and posts pictures of her sons on Twitter @ANN_Lynzee.
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