Horror is one of the most difficult genres to get right. Push it too far, and the serious just gets silly; showing the monster is good for a scare, but it can break the carefully constructed tension that the rest of the work has struggled to build up.
This is a problem that anime, especially, has struggled with — although things are looking up for the genre, with Junji Ito's famous Uzumaki set to get an anime with some truly amazing-looking animation. As fans wait for that, though, they should remind themselves of how wrong it could go — and enjoy some laughs along the way.
10 Ghost Stories Inspired A Famous Parody Dub
Ghost Stories is an extremely generic, Scooby-Doo-esque anime that attempted to scare kids and teach them a lesson or two, but wasn't very good at either. It might have gone completely unnoticed by Western fans if not for its unique English dub.
Seeing the sheer mediocrity of what they had to work with, the dubbing team at ADV Films decided to throw the original script out the window and just have fun. The result is essentially an official abridged series, full of crude humor and fourth wall breaking. The ghosts in this anime might not have been scary, but they provided plenty of comedic fuel.
9 Higurashi's Animation Was Hilariously Low-Budget
Higurashi: When They Cry might be the most iconic horror anime out there. The way it slowly moves from moe slice-of-life to full-on horror is deeply unsettling, and the mysteries of the village of Hinamizawa just keep getting deeper as the plot unfolds.
However, it's also famous for its noticeably low-budget animation, which leads its characters making seriously silly expressions during the show's most dramatic scenes. This problem was fixed in the recent remake, although some fans thought it took away from the series' charm.
8 Blood-C's Twist Comes Out Of Nowhere
The Blood franchise had already had two hits — Blood: The Last Vampire and Blood+ — when Blood-C started airing, so fans were ready for another series. There were a few raised eyebrows due to the fact that Blood-C would be a collaboration with CLAMP, whose delicate art isn't normally associated with horror.
As it turned out, the character designs were the least of anyone's problems. The level of gore in the series quickly went from horrifying to hilariously over-the-top, and a third act twist that made a lot of the series feel pointless ensured that few fans would remember Blood-C as anything but a punchline.
7 The Lost Village Didn't Know Where It Was Going
Fans were initially very excited for The Lost Village before the series aired in 2016. The mind behind the series composition was Mari Okada, the well-loved writer who penned fan-favorite shows like Toradora! and Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day.
Trailers promised that The Lost Village, which follows a busload of characters sinking into the mysteries behind Nanaki Village, would be a tense, unnerving psychological thriller. Quickly, however, viewers realized that the series was turning into a melodramatic and nonsensical trainwreck — or should that be buswreck?
6 Magical Girl Site Is The Worst Of The Madoka Rip-Offs
Ever since Puella Magi Madoka Magica first became hugely popular for offering a darker take on a magical girl story, there have been many other magical girl shows that have tried to capture the same tone — and the same profits.
But, all too often, these shows fail to grasp that what made Madoka Magica so compelling was that the "edginess" felt well-balanced and realistic. The worst offender in this respect is easily Magical Girl Site, a psychological horror that inflicts so much suffering on its heroine Aya straight off the bat that it goes past tragedy and straight into comedy.
5 The Junji Ito Collection Can't Live Up To Its Source Material
Junji Ito is the undisputed master of horror manga, so the was a lot of hype around The Junji Ito Collection, which promised to finally adapt some of his most famous short stories to screen. Unfortunately, not only was the show obviously quite low-budget, but Ito's work, with its many tiny details, would have made it an uphill battle to adapt even if the budget was unlimited.
For many readers, it's Ito's gruesome details that make his work so frightening; the best pages of Uzumaki look as if they could leap off the page. Without this realism, a lot of his stories lose their spark, and viewers are just left to laugh at the awkward animation.
4 Bad CGI Kills The Horror Of Berserk (2016)
Few fantasy manga are as horrifying as Berserk, which uses the late, great Kentaro Miura's fantastic art to plunge its characters into the depths of hell itself. This atmosphere was preserved by the '90s anime adaptation, so fans were confident going into the new 2016 version.
Unfortunately — and bizarrely — the creative team behind the new Berserk anime decided to use stiff, clunky CGI rather than traditional animation. Guts' dramatic fights against terrifying beasts ended up looking like bad video game cutscenes, and all long-time fans could do was laugh in disbelief.
3 Pupa Is Quick-Fire Unintentional Comedy
Pupa has the dubious honor of being, at the time of writing, the worst horror anime ever according to MyAnimeList, with a truly dreadful score of 3.37. Just about everything that could be wrong with Pupa is, from a completely nonsensical plot to awful characters to lackluster art, not to mention the incestuous subtext.
What makes it funny, though, is how seriously it takes itself. Pupa is a truly awful B-movie-level story, but obviously thinks it's a deep psychological thriller. Plenty of anime fans have watched it just to laugh at it, which is easy thanks to each episode's merciful four-minute run time.
2 Another's Ludicrous Deaths Are Pure Slapstick
Another is one of the most famous pure horror anime out there, and there's no denying that its mysterious plot, which sees 15-year-old Kouichi meet his mysterious classmate, Misaka, who may or may not have died decades earlier, is very compelling.
The series' more gruesome moments don't always work, however, with a lot of the death scenes being so contrived that they become downright silly. Special mention goes to the unfortunate girl who trips down the stairs and ends up impaling herself on her umbrella. Ouch.
1 Gibiate Is Infamous For Good Reason
Pitching Gibiate is easy: a show about a samurai and a ninja who travel through time to stop an apocalyptic supernatural disease sweeping modern-day Japan? With design work from Final Fantasy's legendary Yoshitaka Amano? Sounds awesome! Unfortunately, the finished product turned out to be one of the biggest disappointments in anime history.
Just focusing on the horror elements, all of the monsters' potential scare factor is lost thanks to some truly terrible CGI work, while the characters are so insufferable that viewers will be hoping they won't survive.