Throughout the early 80s, Anime as we knew it was more directed at families, or animated series airing on television; but in 1985, one of the very first examples of the Japanese making a title for adults or older teens was born in the form of Vampire Hunter D. While certainly not as extreme as some of the other, more overtly mature titles that sprung up in its wake, the story of a stoic being fighting supernatural beasts in a post apocalyptic future still features an overindulgence in world building that’s still impressive even to this day. After all, it’s wasn’t every day you’d get a film that tries to blend classic Hammer horror with the set up of a typical Western and then sets the whole thing in the futuristic wasteland of 12,090 AD…
But while this outlandish mash up sounds less like the work of an actual adult and more like it’s been hastily scribbled in the back of a schoolbook by a bullied teenager using his imagination to escape reality, can Vampire Hunter D manage to align its many influences to create something supercool?
It’s Anime, so you know the drill: future, nuclear holocaust, dystopian wasteland, yadda yadda yadda… However, in the wake of this very familiar set up, a highly bizarre, fantasy world has sprung up centuries in its aftermath. While humans now live in a manner highly reminiscent of the Old West and tend to do things that they did back then like farming and own ranches, they still have many futuristic mod cons such as laser rifles and robot horses, which admittedly sounds pretty cool. However, the cloud that comes with this silver lining is that in this retro, throwback time, monsters, mutants and Vampires also readily exist and while out hunting one night, Doris Lang, the orphaned daughter of a famous werewolf hunter, stumbles into the unnerving presence of Count Magnus Lee, a vampire noble who has racked up 10,000 years on the clock, who decides to bite this girl who has trespassed in his domain.
Knowing that being infected by a vampire’s bite is only the first step to disaster, Doris and her younger brother Dan, are relieved when they happen to bump into impossibly enigmatic D, a mysterious vampire hunter who agrees to help them break Lee’s curse and rescue the gutsy Doris from a fate worse than death. This leaves the town’s leaders somewhat disgruntled as the usual protocol for a vampire bite is to let the victim rot in the local asylum, but D soon shows his worth when, later that night, he rescues Doris after she is spirited off to the Count’s absurdly evil looking castle by some of his superpowered underlings.
You see, it seems that D has some tricks up his sleeve too – literally in one case as he reveals he has a symbiotic being located in the palm of his left hand – but can the fact that he’s a Dhampir (born from the union between a vampire and a human) still aid him when the Count himself decides to get involved?
It’s no real surprise to discover that Vampire Hunter D was directed by Toyoo Ashida, the man who would go on to blow our collective sinuses with the head popping, gore-extravaganza, Fist Of The North Star, because both not only conjure up impossibly fantastical post apocalyptic worlds, but both aim to be as grounded as a fever dream brought on by imbibing expired medication. Anime has never been a genre that’s regularly accused of holding back on imagination, but Ashida literally throws so much razzmatazz at the concept, it’s impossible not to be completely dazzled by the world building. Essentially the video game Castlevania, but blitzed out on black market animal stimulant (Castleinsania?), the film repeated assaults you senses with pumped up gothic imagery which largely doesn’t make any logical sense – but you soon divine that “making sense” isn’t exactly high on Ashida’s agenda as he’s having too much fun to care. D himself is the monosyllabic, black clad, gothic hero, equal parts Man With No Name and Van Helsing who has a chatty face embedded in his hand (which is never truly explained) and a sword that seems to change length from shot to shot. Doris seemed to be an amalgamation of the typical, terrified virginal victim from a vampire film and the plucky, tomboy likes of Cat Ballou all rolled into one and from here things just get weirder. Magnus Lee carries the appropriate “final boss” weight needed despite looking faintly like a eight foot Jon Pertwee, his daughter, L’Armica has a forehead/eye/face ratio that resembles an Addams Family era Christina Ricci and Lee’s monster stuffed castle looks like it was designed by an evil Dr. Seuss.
And yet, despite of – or more likely because of – its many contradictory influences, the universe of Vampire Hunter D is just so bonkers, its impossible not to get caught up in this world by simply being entranced by the nonchalant weirdness. It’s just a shame then that for all it’s visual pizzazz, the film literally has all the substance of Casper the Ghost’s BMI as once you strip away all the gothic bells and whistles, there is virtually nothing past the frenzied reinvention of horror and western tropes. Luckily, if one genre was built to be able to exist on style alone, it’s Anime, but when compared to either the brilliance of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, the unrestrained extremes of Hideki Takayama’s Urotsukidōji: Legend Of The Overfiend, or even the punk rock brutailty of Ashida’s own Fist Of The North Star, Vampire Hunter D seems more like a minor entry despite probably being massively influential from everything from Blade, to Underworld, to Priest, to Van Helsing and anything else that’s ever included people brawling with supernatural beasts while wearing illogically cool getup.
In fact, it’s this very issue that makes Vampire Hunter D so hard to rate accurately as it’s incredibly fun to watch and has obviously made a sizable mark on popular culture even if the people stealing from it had no clue they were even influenced by it. I mean, no one ever seems to mention it, but it predates so many things that look exactly like it, it simply just can’t be coincidence, right? However, when I walked away from some of the Anime I previously listed, I felt profoundly changed as if I’d seen something that I simply couldn’t unsee even if I wanted to and despite its cornucopia of striking designs, funky creatures and stylish action sequences, Vampire Hunter D simply didn’t strike me as anything more than just being pretty cool.
Loaded to the bursting point with such disparate references, it’s nothing more than a supernatural miracle that this hyper gothic freak-out holds together as well as it does, but despite resembling every overly-slick vampire hunting movie that came after it, Toyoo Ashida’s admittedly badass horror/western/fantasy just doesn’t stick with you as much as you’d want it to.
Vampire Hunter D? Nah, that’s too harsh; it should be Vampire Hunter C+ at least.
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