Ask John: What Horror Movies Would Make Good Anime?

Question:
I was wondering what horror movies would John like to see as an anime adaptation. I recently saw Dario Argento’s Suspiria and later read that Gonzo was planning to make an anime adaptation, but so far there has no more news on it.

Answer:

While there are countless horror movies which I’d love to see remade with bigger budgets and better talent – director Scooter McCrae’s 1994 zombie drama Shatter Dead immediately springs to mind – I’m quite satisfied to see live-action horror remain live-action. Simply because of its illustrated medium, anime horror literally cannot be as immediate and frightening as live-action horror cinema. That’s not to say that horror anime is ineffective, though, as many horror anime like Vampire Hunter D, Vampire Miyu, Urotsukidoji, Yoju Toshi, and High School of the Dead have been exceptional. There are no live-action horror franchises that I’d personally recommend for anime adaptation because I’d prefer to see original anime or anime based on other, more appropriate sources like manga, novels, and games. However, I can think of a handful of live-action horror films that may be interesting in anime form.

Gonzo was rumored to be considering an anime adaptation of Dario Argento’s 1977 supernatural thriller Suspiria in 2006. But the studio ran into financial troubles, and the rumor might not have even been true. In any case, a Suspiria anime was never produced, although I’ve long believed that the first episode of director Akiyuki Shinbo’s 2001 series SoulTaker includes a prominent Suspiria homage. Several of Argento’s giallo pictures could lend themselves to anime adaptation because Argento’s films are already so vividly colorful and otherworldly stylistic to begin with. Suspiria is a haunted school story, which itself already sounds like an anime. Its sequel film, 1980’s Inferno, and Argento’s 1985 film Phenomena could also lend themselves well to anime adaptation. Inferno is a violent detective mystery about a pair of people trying to uncover the location of a powerful witch before she fully resurrects and unleashes her devilish powers on the world. Phenomena is set in a girls school in which a student with a psychic bond to insects tries to unravel the mystery behind student murders before she herself is killed.

The 2001 Japanese zombie horror comedy Stacy is a live-action adaptation of a novel by Kenji Otsuki. Stacy could also bear an anime adaptation. This bizarre parody of Japanese culture depicts a future Japan in which teen girls routinely die and resurrect as flesh eating zombies, so the Japanese government is forced to enact laws governing these undead girls, and an entire pop sub-culture emerges surrounding them. While the live-action film was heavily flawed, its concept could be well exploited by a satirical horror anime.

Director John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing could be intriguingly realized in anime form because the concepts of alienation, uncertainty, paranoia, and anxiety transcend live-action and function just as well in animation. The Thing doesn’t have to immerse viewers; it just has to keep viewers guessing, and it needs to shock viewers. Anime is particularly capable of doing both. I shudder to think of what type of visual horrors Japanese illustrators could envision for horrific, mutated incarnations of the titular Thing.

Creator & director Don Coscarelli’s 1977 Phantasm movie franchise could be quite fun in anime form. This episodic sci-fi/horror/splatter franchise depicts a mysterious “Tall Man” with an army of interdimensional dwarfs and floating metal spheres with killer drill bits, and heroes that strive to decipher the Tall Man’s sinister plans and stop his wicked machinations. The visual concepts and the story outline of the Phantasm series could be easily adapted into an original anime story with its own unique plot developments and twists.

I’ve long thought that director Paul W. S. Anderson’s 1997 film Event Horizon was a case of awfully wasted potential. The concept of a demonic space ship that exploits its crew’s fears actually was somewhat illustrated in the obscure 1987 horror OVA Hell Target. In that anime the evil wasn’t the spacecraft; it was the evil planet that the spacecraft landed upon. But the very fact that there’s already been one anime with a near identical concept proves that a story like Event Horizon can easily and effectively transition into anime.