Hacker Cinema
Vampire Hunter D
バンパイアハンターD
1985 · Film · 80 min
Part of Vampire Hunter D Collection
Directed by Toyoo Ashida
In a far-future time ruled by the supernatural, a young girl requests the help of a vampire hunter to kill the vampire who has bitten her and thus prevent her from becoming a vampire herself.
3 positive1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
It's usually my first thing to watch on a new monitor or projector or whatever device I might want to see how well it shows a film. Another typical "test watch" is Vampire Hunter D. That and GitS are amazing anime films, IMO.
Years ago I had a band (electronic/industrial style) and at one show we played, the venue staff were projecting stuff onto the stage and ceiling. I was super happy when I realized they were projecting GitS during my band's performance. Perfect choice! I think I thanked them afterward haha :)
Part of what made Anime and Manga so "exotic" back in the day was just how different it was to anything you'd find in the West.
A lot of early Anime has sci-fi/post-apocalyptic vibes because Japan was essentially a post-apocalyptic society. Japan is the only nation to have nuclear weapons used against it. It was so devastating, the entire world decided to just not do that sort of thing again.
But the level of national trauma Japan faced must have been something else. It affected their creative output for decades. Kaiju movies are essentially a response to the event. And elements of nuclear desolation is present in a lot of Anime. Akira, Vampire Hunter D, the earlier works of Miyazaki.
It's a huge fucking cultural touchstone for at least a couple of generations of Japanese people.
But we're also about 80 years from the event. Things are different in Japan. People have been born, lived full lives, and died between the time the bombs fell and today. There likely are children of children of people who were born after the bombs.
Japan today does have a lot more in common with the world at large. Their contemporary cultural touchstones are much the same ones around the world. So it makes sense that their art would reflect this.
I really _really_ tried to enjoy The Shadow of the Torturer but I couldn't fall into rhythm I guess. As English is my second language, I had to struggle to know if a word was invented or just obscure English (I found that the author uses a fucktonne of the latter after I finished it). And I hate needing a glossary to read a novel (looking at you Tolkien).
It struck to me like an 80s animated movie: extremely rich from a technical point of view but, well, not a good history and even boring for some people (think about Vampire Hunter D or Angel's Egg. For the record, I love these movies).
Meh, I'll give it another go, after I finish Blindsight from Peter Watts (2006). Thanks for reminding me of that saga!
Serial Experiments Lain is everything wonderful about anime. It is violent, dark, scary. In summary: ADULT.
Anime tells stories in a visual format that for years and years you simply could not get anywhere else. Adult genre fiction was not well represented in American media. Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes.
Today, people are spoiled with their options for genre fiction. Cowboy Bebop blew my mind as a kid. Berserk was also one of my favorites. I did not think anything could be cooler than Vampire Hunter D. This was before Game of Thrones or The Expanse or any number of other amazing science-fiction or fantasy media we have today. Coming from a small town, it felt like a secret that nobody else knew about and I loved immersing myself in this grim, beautiful, foreign worlds[0].
A lot of anime has a lot of gross "fan service" that objectifies their female protagonists, and that is something I was never a fan of. It was something you tolerated because there wasn't anywhere else to go.
Lain is a great example of all of this. Where else are you going to get a gorgeously rendered cyberpunk-horror series?
0: Probably at a younger age than I should have been allowed to. Though honestly I don't see myself censoring everything from my kids. Part of the draw was the adult nature and feeling like I was getting away with something.