Is This a Zombie?

Not all monsters are created equal. Some are big, some are small, some are eldritch horrors befitting an H.P. Lovecraft story, some are boringly unrecognizable from us humans, some are ferocious and deadly, and then some just want to have an easy life while making us laugh our butts off. Ayumu Aikawa, the hero of Is This a Zombie?, fits the farthest latter of the group. An ordinary high school boy who just wants to live in peace, his life takes a turn for the crazy when he gets murdered by a serial killer. As luck would have it, Lady Hellscythe, an extremely broken necromancer who’s taken a vow of silence for reasons the writer can’t explain for fear of getting jumped by anti-spoiler advocates, happened to be walking by upon his demise, so she revived him as a zombie. It seems like a situation falling from bad to worse, but Ayumu gets a good deal with his special brand of zombification, considering he eats normal food, lacks the safety limiters normal humans have on their strength, can’t be killed, and can transform into a magical girl. Yes, that last part wasn’t a typo. Add in other dilemmas like horny monsters, magical girls wielding talking chainsaws, and busty vampire-ninjas, and you have a recipe for Ayumu's disaster but our hilarious enjoyment.

Parasyte: The Maxim

Ever seen The Thing? Please follow the writer’s advice and do the following for maximum enjoyment: Watch The Thing in a room with no lights, the curtains down and secured, no one else in the room with you, and the volume turned to 100%. Go ahead; I’ll wait…. Now imagine that experience in anime form. Parasyte follows the hollowing tale of humie Shinichi Izumi living a world suddenly invaded by shape-shifting creatures of who replace humans by consuming their heads and then replacing them like the sickest version of mini-Voltron you’ve ever seen. The bad news for our plot’s hero is he gets attacked by one of these Parasytes; the good news is he stops it from reaching his head by cutting the circulation to his arm. Having an actual face attached to one’s hand appears terrifying and downright weird for a plot, but wouldn’t be enough to earn it a slot on this list. After all, if that was the case, then Midori Days would be a qualifier… Shinichi later gets saved after suffering a mortal wound from a another Parasyte, so his decides to preserve its existence by transferring some of its parts to its host. After such, Shinichi begins his journey of angst as he becomes more like the emotionless, logical, powerful creature supplanting his hand. Parasyte was an interesting watch raising many social questions concerning the dilemma of other species sharing this world with us, but there is only one true question the writer thinks we should be asking ourselves: Is having super strength, super speed, and a logical, emotionless method to quickly analyze situations with a genius, transformable hand as a sidekick worth all the trauma Shinichi endured? You can form your own opinion, but the writer is going with no. No it wasn’t.

Hellsing

Come on, people. We can’t have a Monster Mash without a vampire or two, now can we? Widely considered the best vampire in any medium and the most badass in animedom, Arucard comes to mind when anyone thinks of the horrible make-me-want-to-stab-my-eyes-out original series followed by the Oh-my-God-I-want-to-marry-this-series-from-its-awesomeness OVA. Not even the pain of enduring the original anime could stop otaku boys and girls from staring wide-eyed at his love of cruelty, cocky demeanor, and jubilation in destroying anything in opposition to his equally severe, domineering master, Sir Integra Hellsing. Now that the writer has your attention, he’s telling you to forget about Arucard and his OP, bullet-ridden, Integra-whipped self. What about Seras Victoria, the human he saved episode 1 after she’s attacked by the fastest-groping-vampire-in-the-West by turning her into a vampire? Sure, Arucard can take a bullet storm like he’s singing in the rain, but Seras takes on the role of wide-eyed novice through which the viewer learns about the world, making her fit the protagonist role better than tall, dark, anime Dracee. Seras initially takes her new life as a vampire stumbling, at first refusing to drink blood and unhappy about being confined during the day, but her transformation from scared and hesitant to a badass in her own right, accepting of her vampire self, adds a spice to Hellsing Arucard couldn’t bring to the series alone.

Tokyo Ghoul

Cases often exist where people love an anime’s source material better than the anime itself, and then there are cases when source material fans sacrifice goats to the original content so much they’ll crucify and drown anything deviating from it. Enter Tokyo Ghoul, such a series you’ll hear praises about that go downhill quicker than a greedy business mogul going bankrupt. The writer doesn’t want to spoil the brave and the bold, so he’ll just say, for the sake of this article, it begins with a boy who’s first date ends tragically when his girlfriend turns out to be a ghoul, and consequently tries turning him into dinner. A freak accident killing her but putting him in critical condition, the doctors “save” his life by implanting her organs into his, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a brilliant horror anime is born. Ken Kaneki’s entire world gets flipped drastically, for now he finds himself discarding his appetite of food for human flesh, has a Rukia-clone-Tsundere as a mentor, must deal with being hunted by other ghouls, a government organization hunting ghouls, the ghoul whose organs he borrowed trying to take over his body… And to think all this happened from one bad date. You’ll hear screams from the rooftops on how well season 1 blurs the line between good and evil by creating feels for the humans hunting ghouls as well as for the ghouls hunting them. Just don’t ever… EVER mention season 2, especially if you see a fellow Tokyo Ghoul enthusiast with moldy stacks of the manga on his or her bookshelf, and especially if you see black candles around those manga with the charred head of a goat on top of said bookshelf.

Shiki

Out of all the anime featuring a human dealing with the trauma of becoming a monster, no series does the subject more justice than Shiki. Rather than adopting the modern, sexy, gunslinging vampires of today, Shiki places horror back in the subgenre by having its dark-eyed monsters infiltrate a small town while they transform or kill its residents one-by-one in an attempt to take it over. Shiki drains the competition by not only showing the struggle its characters face upon joining Team Loli-Vampire, but also how desperate circumstances can turn even regular humans into monsters lacking humanity. In Shiki, viewers will be asking themselves which is worse, dying and being reborn something nonhuman, or in the monster inside us all taking control, making us lose ourselves?