Horror Anime

The top 20 best horror anime to watch online or on TV. These animated movies and TV shows feature the best Japanese ghost stories, vampires, monsters and zombies.

1. Yami Shibai

Every week at 5 p.m., a mysterious old man appears at a children’s playground to tell creepy and disturbing ghost stories. This anime series features short Japanese ghost stories and folktales. It uses a a picture-story style of animation with cut-out paper figures to tell stories based on urban legends and rumors from Japanese culture.

2. Higurashi When They Cry

Five young friends living together in a small village in the Japanese countryside are confronted with the mystery of a series of murders that happens at the same time every year. The outward cuteness and humor of the show doesn’t hint at the horrific turns it takes over time. It’s also more about psychological horror and mystery than out-and-out gore, but that doesn’t stop them from throwing in the occasional ax murder to make things interesting.

After Maebara moved to a new, quiet town of Hinamizawa, he spends most of the time in school living a carefree life playing games with friends. It is in this town that appearances can be deceiving. Stumbling upon some news one fateful day, he discovers a murder occurred in the very town he’s in.

It is then that mysterious and horrific events begin to unfold in front of him, learning that his close friends may not be close at all. As stories take place in different scenarios, unbelievable events begin to take place in a very horrific way.

This anime may seem cute at first, be it will have you hugging your pillow!

3. Attack On Titan

It is set in a world where humanity lives inside cities surrounded by enormous walls as a defense against the Titans, gigantic humanoid creatures that eat humans seemingly without reason.

4. Ghost Hunt (Anime)

This anime follows Mai and her friends who love to tell ghost stories to each other. Many of these ghost stories are centered around the abandoned building on the school’s campus and many are more than just stories.Interrupted by a mysterious male during one of their ghost-story sessions, Mai finds out that he is a 17 year old boy named Shibuya, who is president of the Shibuya Psychic Research Company.

As a request from the principle of the school, the Shibuya was called in to investigate the stories centered around the abandoned building. Unknowingly interfering with the investigation, Shibuya hires Mai as an assistant and she begins to learn about the paranormal world and the profession of ghost hunting.

5. Shiki

The story takes place in the 1990’s, in a normal and quiet Japanese village called Sotoba.

Mysterious murders spread throughout the village when a strange and weird family moves into an abandoned mansion. One doctor, Toshio Ozaki, suspects an epidemic and investigates as dead bodies begin to pile up. He is convinced when he learns that this may be the works of the “Shiki”, a vampire-like creature that plagues the village. This is when a young man named Nastuno, is pursued and surrounded by death and from the start, never wanted to live in the village to begin with.

a clan of what appear to be vampires move into a bucolic little village in the country and begin feasting on the locals, the battle lines seem clear: humans good, vampires bad. But one of the many, many surprises of Shiki is in how it plays with, confounds, and ultimately sabotages your expectations for everyone and everything involved. A genuinely horrific story, and not at all for the reasons you might initially think.

6. Mirai Nikki

Mirai Nikki (Future Diary) is about a boy named Yukki Amano who is forced to take part in a survival game. Each of the participants is armed with a diary that can predict the future. He is joined by a girl named Yuno who is obsessed with him and vows to defend him, whether he wants her to or not.

7. Another

The anime begins in 1972, when a student named Misaki unexpectedly died during the school year. Her classmates and teachers were devastated, but they continued with their lives, pretending that Misaki was still alive. Ever since then, the class has been cursed and people begin to die in mysterious ways. Two students named Sakakibara and Mei must find out how to survive after discovering the origin of the curse. This anime series is a must watch.

8. Perfect Blue

A retired pop-singer-turned-actress’ sense of reality is shaken when she is stalked by an obsessed fan and seemingly a ghost of her past.

9. Kaidan Restaurant

10. Ghost Stories (Anime)

This series follows the life of a girl who moves with her family to the hometown of her deceased mother. At her first day of school, her little brother, neighbor, and two others from school decide to visit an abandoned school building next to theirs to discover that it is haunted. After experiencing several encounters with ghosts, the girl learns that her mother was responsible for sealing many of the ghosts who haunted the school and town. The ghosts free themselves because of urbanizations that took place in the surrounding areas and are now terrorizing the school and town once again. The girl’s mother left her book of exorcisms with instructions on how to exorcise the ghosts.

11. Paranoia Agent

When a young woman invents a story about being attacked by a shadowy urban-legend figure named “Shonen Bat”, the legend takes on a life of its own and begins a rampage of destruction that might consume all of reality. The story gets creepier and creepier as the series progresses, and it lingers with you long after it’s over.

12. Pet Shop Of Horrors

13. Hellsing

Hellsing is a horror anime series about a secret group of vampire hunters in England called the Hellsing Organization. Their most powerful member is a vampire named Alucard who has sworn loyalty to the Hellsing family. They are joined by a female police officer named Seras Victoria, who Alucard has turned into a vampire.

14. Tokyo Ghoul

Tokyo Ghoul follows aboy named Kaneki who lives in a world where ghouls exist and feed on human flesh. They look like humans and manage to blend into society, keeping their identities secret. After he is attacked and almost killed by a female ghoul, Kaneki receives a life-saving organ transplant that transforms him into a human-ghoul hybrid. With no one else to turn to, he is taken in by a group of ghouls who teach him to deal with his new life as a half-ghoul, while striving to keep his identity secret from other humans.

15. KakurenBo

16. Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales

17. Vampire Hunter D

These animated adaptations of Hideyuki Kikuchi’s immensely popular novels about a half-human, half-vampire vampire hunter are both worth checking out for different reasons. The original is a bit more of a nostalgia item at this point, but it’s fun to watch and has some incredibly striking moments (look out for the shot of the bad guy getting split up the middle, which Guillermo del Toro paid homage to in Blade II). The movie — adapted from the third book in the series — is spectacular from beginning to end, and benefits further from having a well-constructed story to buoy it up