Once in a full moon or upon a midnight dreary, or whatever appropriately thematic interval of time you can think of, there will emerge some new attempt to determine what exactly constitutes the Greatest Horror Anime Of All Time. But take so much as a cursory glance at any of the “Top [X] Horror Anime Ever” listicles published in the last year alone, and you’ll quickly see that the topmost horror anime will almost always include Daume’s Shiki, P. A. Works’ Another, or Studio Deen’s When They Cry (sometimes referred to as Higurashi: When They Cry, Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, or simply Higurashi).
To say that these three series constitute the crown jewels of the genre would not be hyperbole by any means. Time and again, whenever the topic of horror anime is raised, Shiki, Another, and When They Cry are raised along with it. Other horror anime have come and gone both before and since, yet for all the shows that maintain some nostalgic fandom dedication (think 2000’s Boogiepop Phantom or 2004’s Elfen Lied) or have big names attached (think Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre from this year), none are spoken of with quite the same reverence, and indeed none share in the legacy that Shiki, Another, and When They Cry maintain as the so-called “Big Three” of horror anime.
But how has this legacy come to be? And how has this legacy remained unflinchingly monolithic even as these series have aged and dated with the passing of time?
An ongoing debate among fans of the genre is whether horror anime can be as “scary” as its live-action or text-based counterparts—many have observed, for example, that adaptations such as the above-mentioned Junji Ito Maniac often fail to translate the atmosphere and fear factor of the legendary manga into the anime medium. As anime critic Nick Creamer points out, “Horror is an inherently difficult thing to pull off in animation. While it’s easy to feel sympathy for animated characters, or excitement for thrilling animated theatrics, […] the degree of emotional distance animation provides means you’ll rarely be scared by what’s hiding around the corner.”
However unsuitable for horror the anime medium may generally be, Shiki, Another, and When They Cry all generate a unique and accordingly profound sense of horror by taking advantage of the anime medium in ways not attempted by other horror anime series before or after. When They Cry (the first of the Horror Anime Three, having aired in 2006) is described by the critic James Henley as bearing a “bizarre dichotomy of light and dark elements”—emphasis mine on the word “bizarre,” as this technique for creating visual horror within the confines of the anime medium was a particularly novel one at the time.
Prior to the emergence of When They Cry, horror anime—and anime with horror-adjacent elements like Boogiepop Phantom and Paranoia Agent—often relied either on uncanny surrealism or gruesome depictions of violence in order to scare, shock, or disgust their audiences. In When They Cry, though, the visual horror skews far more implicit than visceral, and our fear is born from what we don’t see. This is not to say that When They Cry never has moments of explicit violence and gore—just that these moments are sparingly few, which gives them more weight when they do occur. Much of the fear of When They Cry is built through uncanny dread that permeates the series even if nothing outright frightening is actively happening on screen.
When They Cry creates visual horror through a stark, affronting use of the color black, which had been strangely underutilized by any horror anime preceding When They Cry despite having long been intertwined with the traditions of horror cinema. Here in When They Cry, the hue solidly forms a series of blackout shadows. When these shadows fall across the faces of the anime’s cast of characters, their formerly-adorable natures are suddenly and grotesquely transformed into something far more forbidden.
Just as When They Cry’s visual novel source material first achieved horror through its written juxtaposition of the cute and creepy, the When They Cry anime presents this abutment in more visual terms, showing us in stark relief—in one, single frame—how unsettling its seemingly harmless cast can really be. The about-face is palpable, and we’re horrified by the betrayal. Thus, the “dichotomy of light and dark elements” is not merely visual, but also thematic. The contrast between the endearing and chilling, trust and distrust, combine with When They Cry’s persistently askew camera angles, stressful weekly cliffhangers, and incessant, unceasing sound effects, resulting in a viewing experience that remains nail-bitingly tense—if not terrifying—even today.
Daume’s 2010 horror anime Shiki (based on Fuyumi Ono’s 1998 novel “Shiki” and its 2007-2011 manga adaptation of the same name) might not employ the same jarring angles, heightened cliffhangers, and exquisite sound design as seen and heard in When They Cry, but its method of creating visual horror is not all that dissimilar. Despite its similar influences, the show’s methods of building dread manage to be unique enough to keep it from being a When They Cry lookalike, as so many were worried it would be, prior to its initial broadcast).
The human faces of Shiki are initially framed in exaggerated hairstyles and outlandish outfits. This “cartoonish” palette of colors and shapes makes them all the more ghoulish to behold once they are distorted into the lifelessly pallid complexions and empty black eyes so characteristic of the titular shiki corpse demons. It’s a Day and Night-like contrast which echoes the “dichotomy of light and dark” that Henley observed in When They Cry, albeit to different results.
In Shiki, this visual contrast between the world of the humans and the world of the shiki lulls us into a false sense of understanding. We naively believe that Shiki’s horror will be of the categorically pat “us-versus-them” type, and, certain that we’ve already figured out the parameters of the horror, we are set at ease… only to be horrified when our expectations prove to be deeply misguided. As the essayist Karice observes, Shiki’s audience at the time of its broadcast “quickly lined themselves up on the two sides, throwing themselves behind the humans, or barracking for the shiki, seeing things in black-and-white [but] there is no clear dichotomy in Shiki. Rather than just black-and-white, there are numerous shades of grey.”
The core of Shiki’s horror lies in its warping of expectations. The title humanizes the historically monstrous, and makes monsters of its human cast, before muddling even these distinctions via its ultimately indiscriminate slaughter. Unlike When They Cry, Shiki features a gradual ramping-up of violence which comes to a peak in the show’s climactic final episodes. Ultimately, the show’s small town of Sotoba is viciously wracked with cadavers, the drawn-out tension finally breaking in a cathartic way that gives the audience no peace of mind.
While the massacre itself is vivid—and, yes, sickening to behold—most of our horror in this moment comes not so much from the bloodshed itself, but from the sheer inhumanity of it all. Indeed, the violence seems to have no effect on the ones perpetrating it. A horror anime of many faces, Shiki sides neither with its human characters nor with its shiki, but rather asks us, the audience, to make ethical sense of the situation ourselves, if any sense can be made of it at all. Subsequently, the series merits the ongoing discussion and dissection it receives on popular forums to this day.
Shiki’s eerie tension and senseless violence is echoed in P.A. Works’ 2012 horror anime Another, which is based on Yukito Ayatsuji’s 2009 novel of the same name. In Another, death is doled out to the cast via a series of unfortunate, unavoidable accidents. Alex of MyShinyToyRobots.com describes the title’s set of elaborate, excruciating death traps as being akin to those seen in the Final Destination films. Meanwhile, horror critic Brendan Morrow observes that the accidents depicted in Final Destination are of equal weight to acts of murder, because “the killer is death itself”. This concept of death as an indiscriminate murderer is one that forms the core of Another’s horror.
“Death,” writes Morrow on Final Destination, “does whatever the hell it wants,” and so it is in Another—Death is apathetic by design; accordingly, so too is it senseless. If the violence in Shiki shocked us with its inhumanity, then we as the audience can only despair at death for the sake of death as it happens in Another. There can be no reasoning, let alone reconciling, with such a force so inherently devoid of thought or motive or humanity. It’s a scenario where no one is safe and the audience is never allowed to feel at ease.
In recent years, Another has received some criticism for its abundance of gore, with many arguing that its gorier scenes exist solely for shock value—not unlike the gore for which Elfen Lied and Gantz have since become so infamous. Unlike those series, though, Another takes care not to begin with a shocking display of violence, opting instead to build incrementally up to one. As such, its horror is initially not visceral, but aesthetic. Complete as they are with ravens and crows, desolate morgues, and uncanny dolls, Another’s first three episodes depict “a general atmosphere of gloom and doom” similar to early gothic horror stories by Edgar Allan Poe. It isn’t until the finale of its third episode that the show leaps from its gothic foundation to plunge face-first gorily into its “umbrella incident,” wherein Yukari Sakuragi tumbles suddenly down the stairwell of her high school and skewers her throat on the tip of the umbrella she dropped as she fell. This one, harrowing moment shocks the audience and sharply pinpoints the tone for the rest of the show to follow.
What elevates the shock of this moment is its placement within the series overall. Occurring as it does at the end of the third episode, it twists Another out of the realm of atmospheric horror and into far gorier territory. While yes, the title is a horror anime from beginning to end, its sudden shift in tone three episodes in creates an additional degree of distress and horror than other anime series which begin with, and ride one type of horror through to the end. Note that the show’s initial trailer, which was released in November of 2011, does not suggest any of the violence that it would come to be known for. For newcomers to the story of Another, who didn’t read the original novel, the twist of the third episode was a secret prior to its broadcast.
This technique of building gradually up to a shocking third episode—most commonly attributed to anime director Yousuke Kuroda (Mobile Suit Gundam 00, Trigun)—was not unique to Another at the time of its initial broadcast. Writer Urobuchi Gen, for example, employed the “Kuroda technique” (to resoundingly impactful results, might I add!) when writing Shaft’s 2011 anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
When They Cry also follows the trajectory of the Kuroda technique across the span of its first episodes, also to staggering results. One of the series’ most iconic scenes comes about at the apex of its third episode, when Rena—hitherto presented as cute and harmless—shrieks her chilling “Uso da!” and takes on the more sinister image she is most often associated with today.
Of the Horror Anime Three, Shiki is the only one which doesn’t echo Kuroda’s three-episode beat sheet verbatim. The show does have its own shocking moment in the form of Megumi’s re-emergence as a shiki demon during the series’ fourth episode. The effect is not lessened as a result, however, and images from that scene remain at the forefront of the series’ identity even now.
Based on my own observations as a seasonal anime-watcher, the “Kuroda technique” seems to have fallen out of fashion somewhere during the mid-2010s, though its core tenets have resurfaced in anime series from time to time here and there. The feature-length premiere of 2023’s Oshi No Ko, for example, followed a Kuroda-like beat sheet and achieved ostentatious success as a result. This pacing method is thus not unique to horror as a genre, but it’s hard to overstate its impact on the horror aspect of these three series. Building atmosphere, setting up expectations, and then horrifically breaking the drawn-out tension are all key parts of what sucks the audience into these stories and keeps them along for the ride, hands gripped to the railing.
What set Shiki, Another, and When They Cry apart from other horror anime of the time, and what continues to set these series apart today, is the impact they achieved via their nuanced employment and masterful execution of visual and narrative techniques. However much they may have aged over the years since their initial broadcasts, Shiki, Another, and When They Cry continue to maintain their status as icons of horror anime by way of their impactful moments’ being so persistently iconic—stark imagery and visceral gut feelings of dread and fear that have stuck in the minds of viewers for more than a decade. To date, no other horror anime before or since has leveraged the limitations of the anime medium to the same effect, and until such a time as when a worthy new entry into the genre emerges, the shows are set to maintain their indelible legacy as the “holy trinity” of horror anime.
Editor:Alex Henderson
