Juicy vampire lore exists in every country, in every culture, in every industry, and in every economic period, and you can bet that whenever they pop up their heads in the media landscape they will be leading a genre revolution. In the 19th century, Bram Stoker's Dracula turned the outdated epistolary novel into a best-seller, and in 2005 that Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga established YA supernatural romance as an incredibly lucrative genre.
The best way to explore their many facets is through the most prolific medium ever: manga and anime. This is a list of the best vampire manga & anime that you have to know, ranked from the most contemporary and tame to the most genre-defining.
Updated by Brianna Albert on October 9th, 2020: Vampires mixed with practically any other genre will generally result in a stellar combination when it comes to anime, manga, and entertainment as a whole. While vampires can be feared for their bloodthirsty and cruel tendencies in some series, they may be shown in a completely different light in another one. Here are a few more anime and manga featuring vampires that will be sure to hold fans' attention and not let go.
15 Midnight Secretary
Midnight Secretary is a classic josei manga that features an office romance between a seemingly perfect secretary, Kayo Satozuka, and her vampire boss, Kyouhei Touma.
Despite the fact she discovers he is a vampireーand with Kayo being a humanーthings get complicated when he falls in love with her, and she soon follows suit. This romance manga has not only lots of drama but action and a plot that features them trying to figure out how to love each other without getting the other in danger.
14 Vampire Dormitory
Vampire Dormitory is a series about a girl named Mito who lives on the streets without a family to call on.
However, when she is saved by a vampire named Ruka, she gets more than she bargained forーit turns out Ruka will only allow her to live in the boys' dormitory if she allows for him to feed off her. Making this deal with him, Mito does all she can to avoid being discovered as a female.
13 Karin: Chibi Vampire
To open this can of leeches, Karin: Chibi Vampire is one of the nicest, gentlest, cutest takes on vampirism that can be found in any market.
Karin, although she comes from a long and illustrious family of vampires with very specific tastes, has the opposite syndrome: she produces too much blood, that either builds up inside her and then comes out of her nose (which as you know is anime shorthand for sexual arousal, and it’s mortifying for her), or she manages to inject it to unsuspecting humans, inciting warm and happy feelings in them.
12 Blood Lad
Staz is the otaku vampire district chief of Demon World. Fuyumi is a hapless human that falls through a demon portal, and immediately after meeting Staz manages to get killed by a carnivorous plant and gets turned into a ghost; cue our geeky protagonist embarking on an epic urban quest to bring Fuyumi back to the human world and to life; too bad that almost every creature and human that they will encounter will try to take advantage of them.
Blood Lad is remarkable not only because of the comedy and the very realistic depiction of what a teenage vampire would be like, but also because the plot has a great pace, the action is well-drawn and lots of fun, and the worldbuilding is very interesting. You will love it if you read The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black, or if you were a fan of The Little Vampire series when you were younger.
11 Millennium Snow
With its feet firmly planted in classic shojo tradition, Millennium Snow features the classic Vampire-Human-Werewolf love triangle. Chiyuki Matsuoka, the female protagonist, has always known that she would die very young of a cardiac arrest. Touya Kanou is an 18-year-old vampire that refuses to drink human blood because the proper way to do it is by choosing a human companion, exchanging fluids, and committing to live together for a thousand years, and he doesn’t want to curse anyone to that fate.
The romantic antagonist (of sorts,) is Satsuki, an outgoing, sunny werewolf with a great sense of humor.
Millennium Snow was Bisco Hatori’s first manga after she graduated from the Vampire Knight studio, and it shows; her style, which would mature halfway through her hit series Ouran High School Host Club, was not yet there, but she was already showing a lot of flair in capturing the endearing stupidity of teenage boys of any species.
10 Vampire Knight & Rosario+Vampire
This double-entry falls within the “Creatures of the Night High School” category. Both Vampire Knight (shoujo) and Rosario+Vampire (definitely shonen) started out with “normal” human protagonists trying to operate in a High School environment that caters to vampires, succubi, werewolves, and other demonic creatures, with Vampire Knight being the more serious, and Rosario to Vampire the silliest.
However, halfway through, Vampire Knight devolved into a sentimental babble that seemed designed to put you to sleep, while Rosario to Vampire took the female side characters, broke every single trope that it had built around them satisfying a guy, and managed to create one of the most epic multiple storylines and character developments of the genre without dumbing anything down. If you felt ripped off with the ending of Vampire Knight, take Rosario+Vampire for a whirl, and it might reconcile you to the whole genre.
9 Blood The Last Vampire, Blood +, Blood C
Saya, the protagonist of the many times rebooted Blood series, is Japan’s answer to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although it is not clear if the Sayas starring in Blood + and Blood C are the same character, different incarnations of the same person or if the name “Saya” is just the one given to a certain kind of vampire hunter.
The most stunning incarnation of Saya, however, is in the Blood C series, which was scripted and designed by the CLAMP (xxx-Holic, Tsubasa Chronicles,) who not only gave glasses to the protagonist but also decided to twist the vampires into more Lovecraftian figures. This is an extremely graphic series, to the point that it was censored in Japan and outright blacklisted in China, so thread with caution.
8 Dance In The Vampire Bund
Dance in the Vampire Bund is supposed to make one feel uncomfortable – one of the premises of the series is that humanity is the worst and the viewer, should be ashamed.
Media mind games aside, the series follows Mina Tsepes, the dual-bodied queen of the vampires, and her bodyguard Aki, a werewolf, while she executes her opus magnum: the construction of an island off the coast of Tokyo, the Vampire Bund, where vampires could eventually live openly. Despite her primary appearance as a 12-year-old: she’s an incredibly smart 300-year-old vampire, and in true chess master fashion she will has lined all the means like domino pieces leading to her preferred end.
7 Shiki
Shiki packs two horror stories within one single plot, which starts out as the classic isolated village horror story and ends in the darkest, evilest place within yourself. Fun, right?
Welcome to Sotoba, hyper-rural Japan, a quiet town that has been experiencing a deadly cold epidemic ever since the eccentric Kirishiki family moved into the only Western-style mansion. The Kirishiki ladies, mother, and daughter alike, seem to suffer from a terrible sun allergy, or so they say.
6 Vassalord
And now for something completely different: meet Charlie, a 150 cyborg priest vampire hunter that is also a vampire and owes fealty to another vampire, Reyflo the vampire playboy. Charlie has a big problem too: he wants to become a Vatican priest, but the Vatican kind of frowns upon their priests drinking literal blood from actual humans, so Chris is determined to only drink Reyflo’s blood, but not to succumb to Reyflo’s seduction games (which Reyflo is always playing because he takes his role as a vampire playboy very seriously.)
Vassalord is chock-full of yaoi fanservice and it originally targeted a josei public, but the originality of Charlie’s character, the amazing action sequences, and the intricate mysteries of the week will keep you glued to Vassalord even if you find the pretty boy power trip romance aspect of it a bit lackluster.
5 Lunar Legend Tsukihime
Lunar Legend Tsukihime is a classic vampire, horror, and romance manga and anime made by Type-Moonーthe doujinshi circle behind the Fate/stay night franchise.
The series follows Shiki Toono, a boy who survives an accident and gains powers, as well as Arcueid Brunestud, a girl who is the White Princess of the True Ancestors.
4 Blood Alone
Blood Alone focuses more on the supernatural and mystery aspect than romance and was finished in a doujinshi rather than a manga volume. However, the series is great enough for its unique story.
Kuroe Kurose is an author and vampire hunter who takes care of Misaki Minato, a vampire girl who was recently turned.
3 Kiss Of The Rose Princess
Kiss Of The Rose Princess follows a young girl named Anise Yamamoto who has always had a rose choker around her neck and was told to never take it off.
However, when it accidentally falls off one day, she learns of a shocking secretーshe is the Rose Princess, and she needs the protection of four knights called the Rose Rhode Knights. What's worse? All of them attend her school.
2 Hellsing: Ultimate
Hellsing: Ultimate is the Hellsing reboot that actually follows the manga’s plotline instead of straying into fanfiction territory. With a style that is closer to Death Note than to Vampire Knight, Hellsing: Ultimate relates the deeds of Alucard, the most powerful of vampires, that has been strapped into servitude by the powerful vampire-hunter Hellsing family, as well as Integra Hellsing, Alucard’s implacable master, and Seras Victoria, his young vampire apprentice.
If you like Castlevania, you will definitely enjoy Hellsing: Ultimate both shows draw heavily from Vampire Hunter D and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, both have great action sequences, and both feature ambiguously good main characters. Hellsing: Ultimate is just a tad better.
1 Vampire Hunter D (Manga) & Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust
The D in Vampire Hunter D stands for "dhampir," a human mother – vampire father hybrid, who due to his despised lineage is condemned to roam the Earth alone. Luckily for him, his very mixed heritage has blessed him with all the vampire gifts and almost none of their weaknesses, which makes him the ideal supernatural hunter. And oh boy, does the post-apocalyptic, supernatural-infested Earth needs more dhampirs like D; humans are just barely clinging to life in this magical, mutated frontier world as it is.
This is the manga that in 1983 revolutionized the genre and opened the way for every Japanese vampire production – it was as generationally relevant as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman was in the West. Not only is the original illustrator, Yoshitaka Amano, an incredible artist, but Vampire Hunter D seeded every trope originating from classic vampire lore into the future of sci-fi, horror, and vampire Japanese media.