If there's one thing horror anime are most known for, it's copious amounts of gore. But while some horror anime used their blood and severed limbs to punctuate an already nightmarish story, others are little more than gorefests.
This isn't always a bad thing but, as a result, these pieces of horror animation aren't as scary as their creators intended. In fact, some never even prioritized frightening audiences to begin with, instead choosing to revel in their crimson rain.
WARNING: Graphic content will be discussed here.
10 Jujutsu Kaisen Focused More On Bloody Action Than Scares
In brief, Jujutsu Kaisen is the shonen battle anime take on exorcists and demons. Yuji Itadori and his fellow sorcerers exorcise deadly Curses not through prayer and rituals, but by beating them up in combat. The Curses can answer in kind, as they too have impossibly overpowered Cursed Techniques that can overwhelm even the best sorcerers.
Despite its monsters that defy logic and the disturbing violence that they're capable of committing, Jujutsu Kaisen is more action-packed than terrifying. The anime uses horror tropes and violence to challenge Itadori and friends through cool fights. In fact, some characters are even powered by blood, making the gore both necessary and badass.
9 Hellsing Ultimate Has More Schlock Than Horror
Since it's an unofficial sequel to Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel Dracula, thinking that Hellsing Ultimate would be a Gothic horror story is justified. Instead, it's an incredibly gory and violent 10-part OVA series that focuses on Dracula (now known as the horror-themed protagonist Alucard) living in the '90s, where he fights an army of Nazi vampires.
The Hellsing Organization's fight against Millennium is filled with horrifying deaths, but these are depicted in the language of an action movie. Alucard, Seras, and their allies kill Nazi vampires in badass fashion, while The Major and his Last Battalion slaughter in the same way a villain would to intimidate the heroes and audience.
8 Highschool Of The Dead Prioritized Excessive Blood & Fanservice
Highshool Of The Dead is a zombie apocalypse, so gore wasn't just expected but required. But unlike the George A. Romero classics and other underrated zombie movies it took inspiration from, the anime traded scares and scathing social commentary for cool zombie fights and shootouts that ended with showers of bullets, blood, and dismembered corpses.
Further distancing Takashi and his group's trek through an undead Japan from horror is the copious amount of fanservice, which more often than not occurs at the same time as a gory zombie attack. While it has some notable scares and creepy scenes, Highschool Of The Dead was always meant to be a raunchy exercise in schlock.
7 Another's Countless Deaths Were Unintentionally Funny
In Another, a class of high school students desperately try to break a curse that doomed them all to die one by one. Rather than scare audiences, Another ended up entertaining them through its deaths, which were either hilariously over-the-top or so contrived (for example, someone slipped neck-first into an umbrella) that they bordered on self-parody.
Another has been called anime's answer to Final Destination, and it earned its reputation. As if Kouichi and Mei's classmate's already unpredictably outlandish deaths weren't enough, the high volumes of blood that exploded from their bodies felt like a punchline that only ramped up Another's accidental black comedy.
6 Gantz Is An Otherwise Generic Death Game Anime
Since the manga wasn't even halfway finished at the time of animating, Gantz had to craft a new story. Rather than build up to a cosmic horror, Kei Kuruno's struggles just focused on the gamified violence he was trapped in. Basically, Gantz became little more than another death game anime after it diverged from its source material.
Even by the standards of other 2000s-era anime, Gantz's bloodletting and scares barely stood out when compared to other brutal and high-mortality death games and horror anime. Additionally, the anime didn't adapt the manga's truly nightmarish arcs and monsters, further cementing its status as a nihilistic action story instead of horrifying science fiction.
5 Blood-C Became A Guilty Pleasure Thanks To Its Weird Gorefests
Blood-C had a lot of problems, one of which was its horror or the lack thereof. Like its predecessors, this otherwise unnecessary anime reboot had Saya fight ancient monsters, so blood and horror were expected. Unfortunately, the anime's story was so muddled that it failed to scare anyone, and the well-animated fights were little more than gorefests.
Worse was that even without context, many of the kills and horror elements were just unintentionally hilarious. The biggest offenders were the Motoe Twins' torturous deaths that inexplicably found a way to add fanservice in and the finale, where a sadistic monster rabbit fittingly named "Bunny" multiplied itself and devoured Saya's hometown.
4 Goblin Slayer's Violence Gradually Became Routine
Goblin Slayer is a cross of dark fantasy and horror and, unsurprisingly, it attracted tons of controversy. The anime notoriously opened with the goblins perpetrating visceral murder and assaults, and they were only stopped when the polarizing hero Goblin Slayer brutally murdered them. But after a while, the horror and violence became obligatory.
One of the most prevalent criticisms against Goblin Slayer is that it failed to maintain its tension, seen in how it slowly turned into a slightly darker but otherwise familiar fantasy anime instead of doubling down on what its pilot episode hinted at. As a result, the ensuing scenes of death and worse felt more perfunctory than terrifying.
3 Elfen Lied Is Known More For Its Gore Than Anything Else
Elfen Lied is easily one of (if not) the most controversial anime aired in the 2000s, especially because of its gore and violence. Lucy began the anime by murdering most of a laboratory's staff and security with her psychic powers, and it got worse from there. Thing is, the onscreen violence was more gratuitous than actually frightening.
Lucy and others either inflicted or were subjected to brutal murders and/or tortures, most of which were dragged out to an almost voyeuristic degree. Rather than tell a harrowing story about how dehumanizing life as a living superweapon would be, Elfen Lied focused on violence so much that it's all it's remembered for these days.
2 Genocyber's Ultraviolence Desensitizes More Than It Disturbs Or Shocks
Anime from the late 80s to the early 90s were notorious for being ultraviolent, with the sci-fi horror Genocyber being one of this trend's most infamous poster children. Genocyber is a monstrous cyborg that resides in Elaine and whenever she unleashed it, swaths of people and even entire countries are at risk of being pulverized into gore.
Though it has elements of both cyberpunk and horror anime, Genocyber didn't bother examining the blurred line between man and machine or exploring the human condition in a mechanized world. What it focused on, instead, were some of the bloodiest massacres ever animated that were so mean-spirited that they only exhausted viewers.
1 Violence Jack Has Little Else To It Beyond Its Gore & Torture
Arguably, Violence Jack (which is actually a sequel to Devilman Crybaby) is the most controversial anime ever produced. In a post-apocalyptic Japan, Violence Jack meets survivors, raiders, and warlords, most of who die horribly by Jack's hands or someone else's. While it certainly overachieved in terms of gore, this OVA series had very little in the way of actual horror.
Violence Jack can be best compared to an ultraviolent exploitative B-movie from the '70s, where what little plot there was took a backseat to wanton depictions of killing, torture, and worse. Any attempts at horror were lost amidst excesses of violence since the only thing that Jack and everyone else had on their mind was murder.