Top 5 Anime That Tried To Be Scary But Aren’t

Please Stop. You’re Embarrassing Yourself.

Horror isn’t an easy genre to master, especially in the world of anime. There’s only so much animated gore and shocking imagery that you can throw at the screen before it gets redundant. In that regard, these five titles utterly failed to even make us shudder!

#5: “Mars of Destruction” (2005)

What more do we need to say about this absolute failure? It’s known as the worst anime of all time for a reason you know. This also extends to what it apparently thinks horror is. With the Earth under attack from aliens, a group of cardboard cutouts posing as characters have to fend them off. The animation is so poor that the death scenes are more akin to someone cropping their heads off in Microsoft Paint. Watch at your own dismay, just know that the true scares don’t come from the narrative but rather the show’s abysmal quality. 

#4: “Pupa” (2014)

Don’t get us wrong, watching this show will make you physically sick, but it’s more from the subject matter as opposed to anything to do with credible horror. If watching a sister devour her brother in a cannibalistic display of incestuous affection is your idea of a good time, then by all means binge it, the rest of us will wait over here and judge it silently for trying to shock us into submission. Hard to imagine there’s a series that actually fails in its use of excessive gore, but that’s Pupa for you. 

#3: “Ghost Stories” (2000-01)

To see how badly this anime failed, you need only to look at the dubbed version. Due to the story, character and general plot being utter trash and devoid of even the mildest scare, the voice actors decided to literally say “fuck it” and turned it into a crude comedy. The result is surprisingly hilarious, becoming something of an official abridged series and managing to gain way more popularity than the original ever did. We can’t think of a better putdown than that. 

#2: “Junji Ito Collection” (2018)

This one actually hurts. After all, the man has such a vast collection of truly frightening tales that an animated anthology almost series seems like a match made in heaven. There’s just a little snag; none of the stories are scary. The animation fails to capture the visceral nature of Ito’s most haunting titles, all the while poor pacing just removes any sense of tension and dread. It’s a true tragedy that no-one can manage to capture the horrific essence of such a genre genius, but by this point we’re just hoping studios leave Uzumaki alone. 

#1: “The Lost Village” (2016)

A classic haunting featuring a group of young and endearing characters? Yeah, don’t expect to find any of that here. Whatever promise the beginning might have had quickly fizzles out when you realize there are too many characters to keep track of, the plot is anything but focused and the so-called scares never manage to actually leave an impact. It was pretty much an underwhelming disaster from beginning to end, so much so that even the ghosts in this supposedly cursed village were bored by it.

Be sure to check out the video below to see our picks for the Top 10 Terrifying Anime Villains.