Animate Your Nightmares with Five Chilling Animes to Watch for Halloween
Spend October watching a slow marathon of creepy, spooky, and just plain scary shows and movies with me. Starting with these five animes.
Halloween may be my favorite holiday. It’s low-key, secular, and just plain fun. One of my favorite ways to get into the spooky spirit this time of year is to stock up on Halloween-themed, spooky, scary, and horror movies and shows to watch all month. And some of these animes are on that very list this year. These are some of my favorite spooky, creepy, and scary animes to get you in the Halloween mood.
Another
I can confidently say that this is a binge-worthy show for the Halloween season… Because I personally did watch all of it in one night. It’s a pretty fun horror mystery and a show that will keep you guessing creeped out and saying “ew” once or twice. Class 3-3 is cursed and everyone in the class will die unless they figure out who doesn’t belong. It’s a little like the premise of Among Us if the imposter didn’t know that they were the one slowly killing everyone and if it were way less cute. It’s a little bit gory, a little bit suspenseful, and at times a little sweet and funny.
Paranoia Agent
This show came out when I was in high school, and boy does it hold up. A “little slugger” in inline skates is attacking people with his golden baseball bat. Another show with a mystery element, but the suspense and a slowly unraveling big-picture just work so well in the horror genre. I don’t know for sure if this one is scary, exactly, but it finds the balance creepy and fun and manages to stay there for thirteen episodes.
Shiki
Disappearances and deaths are piling up in a small rural town and while some believe it to be some illness or pandemic sweeping the community, it turns out to be vampires. There are a lot of vampire movies and a lot of vampire tropes, but Shiki subverts all of them, creating characters and a story all its own. It’s a show that makes it hard to root for or against the monsters, but are they really monsters?
Mononoke
The Medicine Seller wanders from place to place and everywhere he goes there seem to be unnatural and unhappy spirits lingering. Mononoke isn’t as much a single continuous story as the others, instead showing us a collection of exorcisms in the Medicine Seller’s adventures. The creepy nature of these spirits and the beautiful but unsettling art style work together to create something almost artistically spooky and captivating.
Junji Ito Collection
In my mind, anime horror and Junji Ito are as good as synonymous. The art style alone is evocative and unnatural in a way that’s so simple and still so frightening; a perfect example of how to make your art tell a story as much as your words. This collection mixes a few of Junji Ito’s more popular manga with some more obscure titles, creating an anthology of the unexplainable and weird that will leave you wanting more.
Have you seen all of the shows on my list? Do you like it when horror anime is unsettling and weird or actually completely terrifying? Which scary anime is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!
Ja ne, Adventurers!
