Anime is filled with a lot of death. However, while a death scene in anime can be a useful storytelling tool, not all death in anime is graphic. Some of it happens off-screen. Some of it happens in such bulk and ambiguity that you barely even feel anything for the nameless fictional characters.
However, if you are looking for anime filled with graphic blood spatter and viscera, you do have some options.
While gore is traditionally thought of as something only for the realms of horror, you can find decent gore in many anime genres. So whether you are looking for a fun new gruesome horror anime or just want to see anime heroes slip around in someone’s guts, we have gory anime recommendations for you.
Best Gore Horror Anime
Elfen Lied
From starting with a naked slaughter spree to ending with a person liquefied and held together only by their own powers, Elfen Lied has a love affair with gore from start to finish.
With Elfen Lied, it is never just plain old death. Every death is a spectacle of severed limbs and splattered heads. It has got a pretty interesting plot to go with it as well, but I have always believed that it is the spectacle of gore that made Elfen Lied ascend to the ranks of anime with long-lasting reputations.
Higurashi: When They Cry
Based on a visual novel, Higurashi adopts a sort of unique way of storytelling that often confuses many who try to watch the series.
However, if you are a gore hound and on the hunt for a series where the most moe anime girls get maimed in a huge variety of ways, this is the franchise for you.
While Higurashi often hooks by shockingly showing character killing each other and sometimes themselves, if you continue to watch, it does eventually unravel why it is telling the story in such a confusing way and the plot suddenly makes perfect sense.
Corpse Party
Corpse Party is for the gore hounds and only for the gore hounds. It has the type of ghost story plot that can be written in an hour and the sort of characters someone pulled out of a pile of stock anime archetypes.
The only remarkable thing in Corpse Party is the gore it shows.
It is easily one of the most graphic gore anime series out there, unafraid to show the finer points of viscera in all its glory.
Chainsaw Man
Like Tokyo Ghoul or Attack on Titan, I always feel like shounen series these days do a lot better when they aren’t afraid to spill blood a bit more graphically.
Chainsaw Man – a series about a who was guy cut into pieces, resurrected by a demon he was keeping as a pet, and now has the ability to have chainsaws come out of him – is definitely unafraid of spilling blood.
Many of the battles in the series end with a graphic splatter. At one point, the main character was fighting a new enemy while slipping around in the splattered guts of the previous enemy he had just beaten.
Chainsaw Man is a splatterfest for those who don’t want something that is just gory for shock value and otherwise has no good plot behind it.
It has good gore, yes, but also good fights and an increasingly interesting plot.
Blood-C
Objectively, Blood-C isn’t a great anime series. It has a basic plot, standard issue anime characters, and the production value is a bit wanting even for an older series.
However, Blood-C does something really well that has endeared it to a small section of anime fans – murders characters very graphically.
It takes about halfway through the series before the real slaughter starts, but that is also when the plot starts to actually become at least somewhat intriguing as well. Blood-C makes you sit through a lot of mundane sub-average anime scenes to get to the good stuff, but the last episode is particular rewarding in its gore.
Hellsing Ultimate
There are two things Hellsing loves – glorious spectacles of blood and weirdly globe-shaped tits. For a vampire series, those are two fine things to be enamored with.
As Alucard, the main face of Hellsing, is a vampire that is more “anti” than “hero” when it comes to antiheroes, it allows him to let out all the cool bloodlust that you would hope from a vampire upon his enemies.
He does graphic things to them, the effect their death has on you lessened if only by how sometimes comical the amount of blood involved is.
Another
Another sets up kind of an eerie mystery surrounding a class that pretends another student doesn’t exist each year. However, it is not the mystery or creepy air that Another tries to create that people remember this show for – it’s the deaths.
People remember Another for its deaths.
The class is cursed, and if they acknowledge the student, apparently everyone in class starts dying in horrific freak accidents.
They don’t pull punches with the gore here either. The accidents are indeed horrific and graphic.
Gantz
Gantz has the premise of a pretty standard action series, but where it sets itself apart is the way it shows people being horribly maimed by a foe greatly above their human understanding.
Never expect a character in Gantz to last very long, since the vast majority of its large cast does not. Most won’t even make it out of their first mission, but the series does still show you the miserable and graphic ways they die.
It is actually much worse (or better?) when you have bonded with a character in the series since Gantz seems to revel in giving them extra graphic deaths.
Shigurui
History is often terrible and gross.
However, so many historical anime series choose to paint it as all heroics, ideals, and sacrifice. While Shigurui is a fictional story set in early Edo period, it chooses to capture a more grim nature of the samurai.
Essentially you watch two brutally maimed samurai having a fight to the death while the story unfolds telling you how they became maimed enemies in the first place.
It’s doesn’t shy away from gory details. I watched it long ago when it first came out, yet I still think about its bean-splitting technique sometimes to this very day.
Tokyo Ghoul
As the story centers around a race of demi-humans that eat human flesh, you had better hope Tokyo Ghoul would have some brutality.
However, for the first bit, it seems practically disappointing as the main character takes up with those who don’t actively hunt and kill but rather scavenge to survive.
That distinctly changes after a pretty brutal turning point in the series. Then Tokyo Ghoul really starts to get some teeth and embrace the gore of the situation.
Akame ga Kill
Akame ga Kill starts off as your pretty standard action series about an idealistic kid pulled into a war on the side of rebellion instead of joining the knights as he planned.
However, what made it stand apart from other, similar series is that it was distinctly unafraid to kill off its main cast of characters.
It isn’t just that it kills off characters that it have been endeared to you either, it is that it makes them often die pretty miserably. It allows for real emotional impact, and for the gore hounds, it is pretty graphic to boot.
Berserk
There is pretty good reason for Berserk to be widely beloved despite the many problems it has had with adaptation into anime. One of those reasons is how the original anime ended, and just left you with that ending in a pretty traumatizing way.
As a story about mercenaries in a war, from the beginning there is plenty of blood, but it lacks real impact.
The impact comes later at a crucial turning point in the series where the faint glimmer of growing hope is soundly thrown on the ground and firmly snuffed out and ground into the dirt by a boot heel.
Devilman: Crybaby
While Devilman is an aged, yet beloved franchise, you might look at the designs from older Devilman anime and give it a pass. However, Devilman Crybaby brings the franchise into the modern age and lets people know that its a pretty brutal story.
Too often demons in anime lack debauchery and forget to take vicious pleasure in their demonic duty of slaughter. They don’t forget in Devilman so much as some choose not to indulge.
The series highlights the rift between devils that just want to exist and devils who crave chaos. Yet, while demons do their fair share of slaughter, the series also doesn’t let us forget that humans are often the most evil of all.
King’s Game
If all you want is to see anime characters die, then King’s Game is probably for you.
This series combined too much content from its source material into 12 episodes, and its makes King’s Game a messy and muddled affair in terms of plot. For the most part, it follows a class that are all forced to obey the orders they get on their cellphone or else they die after a set amount of time.
If you don’t get to invested in the “why” of it all, it provides plenty of gore.
However, because it doesn’t give you any reason to bond with the characters, often the gore comes off more comical than horrifying.
Angels of Death
When the plot is about escaping a locked compound where every floor is the domain of a different murderer, gore is a must. Angels of Death does well to craft unique killers for each level with fun and new ways of making them dangerous, deranged, and sometimes, sympathetic.
Its got the gore that its plot demands, but perhaps the most surprising thing is that it ends up being a pretty decent mystery series too.
It makes you want to unravel the mystery it creates around its main character, and delivers in the end.
Attack on Titan
I am of a mind that what made Attack on Titan so popular initially was its penchant for brutal and frequent death. It even goes so far as to make you think the main character you were rooting for dies within the first few episodes.
Of course he wasn’t, but the series still made plenty of the frequent deaths impactful and did something even more rare – it made them surprising.
The series, while it shifted away from just murdering all titans, also doesn’t lose its teeth over time either. It is a pretty gory and brutal story right to the end.
Juuni Taisen
Juuni Taisen is a series for the anime fan that just wants to watch characters fight and die. The story is about mercenaries from various Chinese Zodiac-themed clans that are gathered to fight in a death match for a wish.
The substance of the show is character back story, and then usually watching those characters die viciously.
Don’t need a plot, and just want some good, graphic violence? Then you will have zero problem with Juuni Taisen.
Rin – Daughters of Mnemosyne
There is a lot of immortality littered about in anime, but Rin is the only anime series that really acknowledges the pretty messed up things you can do to immortals. Like cutting out chunks of them, or keeping them in bondage and stuck full of blades.
Alongside the graphic maiming, this anime series also loves a lot of naked girls and lesbian sex.
Terraformars
Much like Juuni Taisen, Terraformars is all fights. Not because it doesn’t have a plot, but it often forgets that in lieu of… more fights.
The series follows those infused with various insect and animal DNA sent to Mars in order to fight the terraforming cockroaches that went incredibly awry and ended up as buff, emotionless alien beings that kill anything they see. It is silly sounding when put into text, but they make up for it with brutality.
Do you have more solid gore anime recommendations? Let gore hounds know in the comments section below.
