Regarded as one of the first erotic anime and on rerelease for its 40th anniversary, this 1985 film doesn’t really draw on the gothic carnality of the Bram Stoker tradition. Instead, it goes to town on a sleazy peephole sexuality that now looks either quaint or distinctly stone-age, depending on your tolerance for aesthetic standards in anime’s red-light district. A miniskirted heroine kitted out like a cos playing bierkeller wench, Medusa-like succubi draining a bounty-hunter of his essence, one character fishing out one of the protagonist’s breasts mid-conversation a propos of nothing … #MeToo feels a very long way off.
Seriously underdressed to fight mutants in an apocalyptic wasteland, Doris Lang (voiced by Michie Tomizawa) is waylaid by Count Magnus Lee (Seizō Katō), who is intent on making her his bride. So she hires roving mercenary D (Kaneto Shiozawa) – half-undead, half-human, Blade-style “dhampir” – to dispatch this horror. Not only does he have to hack down a thicket of minions en route, including shock-haired mutant Rei (Kazuyuki Sogabe) and Lee’s snooty daughter L’Armica (Satoko Kitou), he has his own baser nature to deal with. Arguing with a symbiote who inhabits his left palm when the bloodlust kicks in, he is a paid-up member of the self-hating undead brethren.
Apart from her ass-kicking intro, Doris is largely a passive plaything, in an unsophisticated linear storyline (adapted from the first in Hideyuki Kikuchi’s bestselling light-novel series) that is not unlike a TV cartoon serial. But what a setting: a florid, prog-rock album-cover desolation that is part-western, part-sci-fi, filled with mittel-European towns assailed by freaky Japanese yokai. Despite some rough background art, the character designs (with contributions from original illustrator Yoshitaka Amano) are always sumptuous; D, peering from underneath the brim of his art, is like a bounty-hunting Marc Bolan.
In terms of narrative and emotional intelligence, Vampire Hunter D might be crude compared with Studio Ghibli films, founded the same year. But it’s also possessed of a psychedelic freakiness that insistently tweaks the imagination, from the radiant “time-bewitching censer” that stops vampires in their tracks, to D’s mitt. The sexual politics are outdated, but you might find yourself talking to the hand regardless.
• Vampire Hunter D is on Shudder, AMC+ and HIDIVE from 30 May.
• This article was amended on 29 May 2025. An earlier version stated that Doris Lang was voiced by Kaneto Shiozawa; however, Lang is voiced by Michie Tomizawa. Shiozawa plays D.
