Trick or Treat?!

It’s that time of year again: Pumpkin Spice is the flavour of the month in your local café, the supermarket shelves are filled with tempting spider/bat/skeleton snacks, and the nights are getting longer…  So why not settle down in the warm and read some seriously spooky manga – or indulge in some deliciously scary anime to celebrate the coming of Halloween? Here to offer some seasonal suggestions for 2024 are the Anime UK News writers…

Darkstorm

The Witch’s House: The Diary of Ellen is a prequel to the 2012 video game The Witch’s House, telling story of the main villain, the titular witch. While it isn’t recommended to read if you plan to play the game and don’t want it spoilt, [but] if you have played it, or have no plans but need something to read, I think this manga is a satisfying and short read by itself. Only two volumes long, the manga starts with Ellen, a diseased girl growing up unloved and neglected, only to be saved by a demon cat who trades her parents’ souls for a house of her own, filled with magic and dark secrets. The second volume takes places years later where we meet Viola, a young girl who stumbles upon a sick girl in a mysterious mansion within the woods, a girl named Ellen…

Its a terrifying tale of Ellen’s self-loathing and her powers feeding her darkest impulses, warping her into the witch we know within the game, and the second half is a horrifying read as we watch Viola be tricked and manipulated into what Ellen wants, with no means of warning her. You can understand why Ellen chose her path and, at the same time, hate what she’s become. You also feel sorry for Viola as her naivety brings her own downfall, tricked by someone far more knowledgeable and powerful than she is. On top of being a good story, the art by Yuna Kagesaki is fantastic too with lots of gory images and great shading to highlight the darkness of Ellen and the magic of the house. I also love her design of the cat; it’s just simple enough to look like a cat, but with eerie facial expressions that really set you on edge.

The Witch’s House: The Dairy of Ellen is available now on Yen Press.

HWR

Gregory Horror Show is a relatively obscure franchise that began in 1999 and spawned several seasons and a PS2 game in 2003. It’s become a bit of a cult classic and focuses on a mysterious hotel named Gregory House, which becomes a haven for lost souls and supernatural beings, including Gregory a mouse who runs the hotel, his obnoxious grandson James, a set of anthropomorphic scales called Judgement boy (complete with his own self-sung theme song), and a sadistic nurse named Catherine.

What makes GHS notable is its use of CGI, which for a 1999 anime would seemingly date it but thanks to a unique art style hasn’t aged too badly. What also makes the series a fun watch is that each episode only lasts a few minutes, so you can enjoy an entire season in around an hour.

There are four seasons on offer, the first focusing on a businessman confronting his workaholicism and how it’s eroding his family life, and the second a woman whose failed relationships become a target for the inhabitants of the house.

The third and fourth seasons switch the premise up as the third is set entirely on a train with Gregory as the lead character, bearing witness to the eccentricities going on around him, whilst the fourth and by far the worst of the seasons focuses entirely on Catherine, and is a thankfully brief but mediocre conclusion to the series.

I’ve yet to check out the video game but have heard good things about it, and with new CGI horror comedy series’ like The Amazing Digital Circus making waves, I’d love to see the series remade and rebooted for a modern audience. I was able to find the entire series on YouTube (dubbed into English) with each season receiving its own video, and if Discotek ever did a license rescue for this, I’d be a happy anime viewer indeed.

Happy Halloween to everyone reading this, and as a little aside and tribute, a rest in peace to the legendary Roger Corman, whose horror films have no doubt inspired at least some of the individuals involved in anime’s horror highlights.

Sarah 

Vampires! Not the Twilight sparkly kind – nor the Chinese vampire hopping jiangshi variety – but the more traditional Bram Stoker Dracula-influenced creatures of the night that can transform into bats. Japanese anime and manga have had an ongoing love affair with vampires for many years, ranging from the teenaged angst of Vampire Knight to the cherishable yet ridiculous hi-jinks of The Vampire Dies in No Time. So what to make of The Vampire and His Pleasant Companions? This ongoing manga from Yen Press (six volumes in Japan), is written by Narise Konohara (Cold Sleep, Cold Light, Cold Fever, Castle Mango) with distinctive art by Marimo Ragawa (Those Snow White Notes, New York New York) showcasing all her customary flair and graphic story-telling skills.

How did Al (Albert) come to wake up in Japan? The young Nebraskan (and aspiring actor) was trying to adjust to being made a vampire by eating fresh meat at a food processing plant in the US but ended up being flash-frozen in bat-form and shipped abroad. Thawing out, he transforms back to his human – naked – form to find he’s ended up in a country where he doesn’t speak a word of the language! The police are called – at sundown, Al reverts to his bat form – and it’s only thanks to the friendly (though baffled) police detective Nukariya that Al is taken to meet his friend Akira. Akira is not only fluent in English, having spent some time in America, and he also likes bats. He just so happens to be an embalmer, so he also has medical training, but he’s not good with people.

Al’s vampire origin story is rather pathetic. He tells Akira that he met an attractive young woman at a party and they were making out when she revealed her true vampiric identity and sank her fangs into him. Unfortunately, before Al underwent the full vampiric transformation, some thugs arrived and trashed the car they were in, leaving him for dead. So, even though he awakened a week later as a vampire, he’s not ‘finished’: he has no fangs, he transforms into a bat when the sun sets and back into a human when it rises. He also can’t suck blood from other humans. Akira is more than eager to ship him straight back to America but Nukuriya laughs and says it’ll be good for him to look after Al. And so begins a rather awkward cohabitation as Al tries to learn Japanese, gets caught up in helping solve Nukuriya’s caseload (murder!) and eventually gets into film-acting, his onetime dream career (though not so easy if you keep changing into a bat as the sun sets).

If you’re a fan of vampire manga, this is one that’s different but (perhaps because the author’s a novelist) really well thought out, with fascinating characters. And Al – in bat form – is just cute! (And noisy.)

The Vampire and His Pleasant Companions is available in print and digital versions from Yen Press.

Demelza

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is set in Seikyou Private Academy, an old school with several abandoned or unused sections dating back centuries. In a place like this, it’s no surprise that there are rumours of evil spirits wandering around. First-year Teiichi Niiya finds himself lost one day and encounters Yuuko Kanoe, a ghost with no memories. To some, she appears as a frightening spirit, but to Teiichi she looks like a beautiful girl. After discovering her remains under the floor of an old clubroom, Teiichi begins to wonder what happened to Yuuko. Why is her skeleton under the school and why can’t she remember anything? Perhaps investigating the school’s seven mysteries will lead the two to some answers…

Mangaka team Maybe are perhaps best known for Tales of Wedding Rings or To The Abandoned Sacred Beasts, but Dusk Maiden of Amnesia was their first long-running series. It was even lucky enough to receive an anime adaptation by Silver Link in 2012, but it’s the original manga I’m here to talk about. For a long time, the series has been unlicensed here in English, which is both a shame and surprising given the general popularity of Maybe’s works. However, this year it was finally put on Manga Up! in English (which I hope will eventually lead to print from Square Enix…), so fans can experience this heartfelt story.

This is a mystery and romance series at heart and fan service scenes are abundant as you’d expect if you’ve read Maybe’s other works, but I suspect means it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. However, the story is very emotional as they get closer to the truth behind Yuuko’s death and we readers grow invested in the relationship between her and Teiichi. The artwork is detailed and provides a haunting atmosphere, befitting of the older school buildings that have long been abandoned and Yuuko’s ghostly situation. It is not a horror series, but it certainly is suitably creepy. Yet at times, it can be tranquil and beautiful, impressively conveyed through the art. Even if you’ve previously watched the anime this is worth watching since the story significantly differs as it goes on. Personally I like the direction of both the anime and the manga, so I definitely recommend experiencing both!

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is available to read on Manga Up!

Cold Cobra

For a horror-themed anime experience to go along with this article I chose Wicked City, an anime film I watched at around 1am on the sci-fi channel as a teen, sleeping over my friend’s house and staying up late to catch the “adults only” animation, anime at the time being pretty much just 18-rated stuff created as a “forbidden fruit” to draw in a teenage and young adult audience. Watching all these years later as a 40-year-old man was quite the different experience, I can tell you! While Wicked City has a lot of body horror and gore, it shocks more with sexual scenes than anything else, and while a few more infamous scenes did still exist in my head going in, the film was somehow even more sexually charged than I remembered, and I remembered it being pretty damn full of it!

The story (which yes, there is one squeezed in between all the gore and sex) is that a demon world exists and has something of a peace deal with the human race that gets renewed every so often, and now is the time for the next renewal and a bunch of radical demons are trying to stop it so they can freely kill all the humans they want. Both sides have a law enforcement agency called “The Black Guard” who monitor and stop any attempts to harm each other’s race, and that’s where our main duo come in. Renzaburo Taki is a human Black Guard who in the very first pre-credits sequence has sex with someone who turns out to be a demon in an infamous scene where the female demon in question reveals that her… um, private parts are actually a gaping, toothy and very much snapping mouth. It’s an opener that really sets the mood! Renzaburo is given the task of protecting an old man called Giuseppe Mayart alongside a female Demon Black Guard called Makie. The majority of the film is the two of them stopping attempts on his life, attempts which often involve lots and lots of sex thanks to Giuseppe being the perverted old man stereotype in a film with no restrictions on how he can express his perversion. Ever want to see a small old man fondle a woman’s breasts for a minute or two straight before being slowly pulled into her chest like quicksand? This is, presumably, your only opportunity to see it.

As you might imagine, Taki and Makie end up falling for each other as well, and so the latter third of the film focuses more on them, including Makie being captured by the radicals and forced to… you know what? Never mind. “To have very unpleasant things done to her without her consent”, how about that? Our hero obviously comes to her rescue, including fighting a female demon whose entire torso becomes one giant v- … Anyway, there are a few revelations during the finale that are fun, especially revolving around Giuseppe, but overall, to me now, it has a real sleazy vibe that I didn’t particularly enjoy.

I get teenage me and friends watching it together and laughing and freaking out late at night, same way a lot of “splatterhouse” and other live action horror film series do the same thing. If that’s what you’re after this Halloween, then I recommend it, it does have plenty of bloody body-shock horror and more “scenes of a sexual nature” than you can shake a stick at (ugh, maybe not the best phrase I could’ve chosen there…) so it will be a good laugh with friends, but if you’re looking for a more tense horror or one full of jump scares that’s otherwise a bit more tame, then I’d avoid Wicked City. While some 90s anime released at the time earned their 18 certificate because Manga Entertainment intentionally added the F-word to their dub scripts in every other sentence because they wanted that “it’s too cool for you young ‘un!” logo on the VHS cover, this earned its 18 within the first 10 minutes and then kept on going!

Noemi10

For those of us who love the spooky season but have a strong aversion to everything horror, it can be quite hard to find something to watch to match the season. Thankfully we can still count on Beelzebub, where demon Baby Beel and his human guardian Oga Tatsumi mix supernatural elements in their day-to-day life thus bringing laughter to its viewers instead of terrified screams.

One day, high school delinquent Oga Tatsumi and his friend Furuichi Takayuki find a man on the river shore…a man who suddenly splits in two (like you split a KitKat) and a baby comes out of him. This baby with green hair and lightning powers is no alien…he’s Beelzebub, the son of the demon king whose goal is to take over Earth.

As you can imagine, chaos ensues when Oga becomes his human guardian. And with the arrival of Hildegard, Beel’s demon nanny who is not afraid to hit and kill whoever her master doesn’t like, Oga has a lot to manage. He has to raise a baby demon to NOT destroy Earth, make people understand that Baby Beel is not his son and Hildegard isn’t his girlfriend, and most importantly he has to climb to the top of Ishiyama High—the school he attends that also happens to be full of delinquents wishing to become the strongest.

The anime series is pure comedy with action scenes. Oga and Beel’s relationship develops throughout the series turning from a co-operation born out of necessity (aka stop Beel from destroying the world) to becoming family. While it’s not the typical child upbringing story, what Beel ends up learning fits perfectly with the story’s humour, and their partnership attracts peculiar characters who can’t help but become their allies (mostly). So, if you’re keen to jump into teen fighting with sporadic trips to the demon world and the occasional world saving, this is a great series to watch in the spooky season.

Beelzebub is currently available to watch on Crunchyroll .

Our featured image is from xxxHolic by CLAMP.