10 Best Horror Anime on Crunchyroll – Screen Rant

The series discussed contain graphic violence, mature subject matter, and content viewers may find disturbing.

With Halloween fast approaching, many anime fans are wondering what the best horror anime on Crunchyroll are. Crunchyroll's extensive anime catalog doesn't actually have "Horror" listed as a distinct genre. The closest thing is the "Supernatural" genre, and that should be the starting point for any interested Horror fans. It takes some digging to find them, but there are some fantastic and fantastically creepy Horror series to be found in Crunchyroll's catalog. Fans of Horror are sure to find all the thrills and frights they can handle in the best horror anime on Crunchyroll.

The best horror anime on Crunchyroll take various approaches to delivering scares to the audience. From ghosts and zombies to plots based on traditional folklore and urban legends, Crunchyroll's horror catalog finds inspiration for its supernatural terror tales from diverse sources. There are even a few Horror Comedy series to balance out the scares with some lighter ghost stories.

Year Released

2013

Number of Episodes

130

The name Yamishibai is a pun based on kamishibai, a type of Japanese street performance involving a storyteller using pictures to accompany their story. Theatre of Darkness: Yamishibai makes use of this premise to fascinating and chilling effect. The series is a compilation of four-minute short stories framed as stories being told by a masked street performer. The stories themselves are based on Japanese folktales and urban legends and range from unsettling to downright nightmarish. The art style is particularly interesting, resembling the style of picture boards used in real kamishibai performances. They're more static images that move or change slightly than full animation, but that contributes to the uncanniness of the on-screen stories and really adds to the series' overall aura of creepiness.

The exact English name of the series has been translated in several different ways but is listed in the Crunchyroll catalog as Theatre of Darkness: Yamishibai.

Year Released

2023

Number of Episodes

9

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is primarily a comedy, but the series isn't shy about depicting the Zombie Apocalypse in all its gory glory. Zom 100 thrives on dark comedy and the basic comedic premise driving the series is that protagonist Akira finds the zombie apocalypse preferable to his previous soul-crushing desk job. Despite the comedic elements, the backdrop of the Zombie Apocalypse leads to plenty of legitimately horrifying scenes. The zombies themselves are depicted in a very horrifying style and the zombie-related violence is frequently intense and depicted on-screen. Although the series was plagued by delays and the last episodes of Zom 100's first season have been put on indefinite hiatus, the anime adaptation shows a lot of potential, and original the manga has been unaffected by this hiatus for any fans who want to keep following the story.

Year Released

2023

Number of Episodes

13

Accompanied by their elite samurai guards, a group of condemned criminals are sent to a mysterious island on a mission to retrieve the elixir of immortality for the Shogun. As soon as they reach the island though, some of the criminals try to escape or attack their guard and are immediately killed by the samurai. Some of the criminals attack each other. The survivors soon discover that the series lives up to its name. The island is beautiful but monstrous. The island is full of giant mutants and ruled over by a group of eight malevolent god-like shape-shifters. Even things as simple as the island's flowers and butterflies are terrifyingly lethal. Even before Hell's Paradise fully embraces the survival-horror premise and the full nature of the island is revealed, there are scenes of disturbingly graphic violence that set the tone of the rest of the series.

Year Released

2021

Number of Episodes

12

Miko Yotsuya is a high schooler who can see ghosts, a problem she hopes will go away if she ignores it. When that doesn't work, Miko soon finds herself embroiled in various ghostly escapades throughout the series. Originally a webcomic published on the popular Japanese art website Pixiv, Mieruko-chan is really more of a supernatural comedy series with creepy aspects than a full-on horror story, though most of the ghost designs are suitably scary and well-drawn. Mieruko-chan is a welcome change of pace from more intense Horror anime and is a good choice for horror fans looking for moderate scares balanced with humorous scenes.

Year Released

2018

Number of Episodes

12 + 2 OVAs

An episodic compilation of adapting the works of legendary horror mangaka Junji Ito, Junji Ito Collection brings the original manga stories to life in a horrifying new way. Ito is a master of unsettling art, and the anime adaptation of his stories adds not only full color but also movement and audio components that aren't present in the original black-and-white manga images. Each individual episode of Junji Ito Collection consists of two standalone shorts. While the stories themselves are scary, the series' representation of Ito's signature art style is sufficiently uncanny that it manages to be highly unsettling even when nothing particularly scary is unfolding on-screen.

Junji Ito's manga is available to read on Viz's website with a subscription.

Year Released

2001

Number of Episodes

13

Although primarily an action-oriented series, Hellsing has clear horror-genre underpinnings and doesn't shy away from the scariest aspects of having a ruthless Vampire monster hunter for its protagonist. Alucard is at least nominally heroic and on the side of good, but he isn't a nice person. He's very much a monster who hunts other monsters, both literal and metaphorical. He's creepy at the best of times, and when unleashing his full power in battle, he comes across as a powerful, almost Cthulhu-like entity that just happens to be contained in a humanoid form. The rest of the series is filled with horrifying monster designs, intense violence, and bad guys that are so despicable that they deserve every terror Alucard unleashes on them.

Year Released

2005

Number of Episodes

46 + 2 Specials

For a horror series, Mushi-shi is pretty laid-back. The series follows Ginko, a traveler who's equal parts wandering exorcist and therapist. He helps people haunted by Mushi, supernatural creatures that aren't necessarily evil but are nevertheless dangerous because of their supernatural powers and not operating within the constraints of human morality. Thanks to Ginko's intervention, many of the human characters and Mushi get fairly happy endings, though that isn't a universal rule. That also doesn't mean there are no scary parts in Mushi-shi. In general, the Mushi themselves are inherently weird and mysterious, and manage to be unsettling just by existing. The series' general aura of strangeness and low-key horror is punctuated by moments that are overtly and openly scary.

Fans looking for the scariest episodes should watch season 1's Cotton Changeling and season 2's Tree of Eternity.

Year Released

2019

Number of Episodes

23

The Promised Neverland isn't the first horror story to use a dark plot twist to subvert an initially idyllic setting. In this case, the reveal that the children at the Grace Field House orphanage are in fact being raised as livestock to feed demons who need to eat humans to remain sentient. After that reveal, the plot centers on the characters' attempt to escape the orphanage and somehow overthrow the demons' regime that created the orphanages in the first place. Similar to a series like Stranger Things, much of the horror and lingering unsettling aura of The Promised Neverland comes from the fact that the protagonists are children being placed in very real and often very graphically depicted danger.

Year Released

2004

Number of Episodes

13

Throughout his career, the late Satoshi Kon was a master of blending surreal art and animation with mind-bending stories and themes. The only full-length anime series he directed, Paranoia Agent is a fantastic example of his signature beautiful but bewildering style. What begins as a fairly mundane crime story investigating a series of seemingly random attacks by a young boy with roller skates and a baseball bat gets progressively weirder, more surreal, and more supernatural. Like many of Kon's other works, Paranoia Agent has a major psychological focus, and like many other horror stories, has a clear metaphorical component. In Paranoia Agent's case, the series turns into an examination of coping with grief and processing trauma.

Year Released

2007

Number of Episodes

12

Mononoke has few jump scares, but it feels like it was designed from the ground up to make viewers as uncomfortable as possible. The art style is gorgeous but full of clashing colors and patterns. In addition to that, it's also heavily steeped in visual symbolism and metaphor, so it's never clear what exactly the audience is supposed to be seeing, or if they're even seeing the same thing as the characters.

While the traveling Medicine Vendor exorcises each of the titular restless spirits he encounters, each storyline is left open-ended, and very few of the lingering uncertainties are resolved. Even the Medicine Vendor himself is a constant mystery. He claims to be a simple merchant, but he's clearly supernatural and all but explicitly established to be immortal and ageless. Mononoke is an underrated gem of historical fiction that all horror fans need to watch, but the series deliberately never does anything to dispel the lingering aura of unease and slow, inescapable dread it builds up from the very first scene.

Whether it's ghosts, zombies, or even Horror Comedy series, there are some real gems in Crunchyroll's Horror catalog. Although the lack of a genre label makes the Horror series hard to find, it's worth the effort to track them down. There are plenty of memorable thrill and frights to be had for anyone brave enough to watch the best horror anime on Crunchyroll.

All anime on this list are available to stream on Crunchyroll!

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10 Best Horror Anime on Crunchyroll - Screen Rant