166 reviews in this genre
by Lee So-Young
A review of Model — the Korean manhwa gothic romance about a vampire who approaches a young female artist to paint his portrait, beginning a relationship that asks what an immortal creature actually wants from human connection.
by Takashi Tsukimi (art), Spike Chunsoft / Kazutaka Kodaka (original story)
A review of Danganronpa: The Animation, Takashi Tsukimi's 4-volume manga adaptation of the first Danganronpa game — the Hope's Peak killing game, Monokuma's theatrical executions, and the class trials, available in English from Dark Horse.
by Kyo Shirodaira (story), Eita Mizuno (art)
A review of Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, a mystery manga about a teenage detective hunting the Blade Children — and what it means to live when you've been told your existence is a mistake.
by Shuzo Oshimi
A review of The Flowers of Evil by Shuzo Oshimi — a deeply uncomfortable coming-of-age manga about a middle schooler blackmailed into a twisted relationship with the class outcast.
by CLAMP & Production I.G (story), Ranmaru Kotone (art)
A review of Blood-C, the horror manga drawn by Ranmaru Kotone from a CLAMP and Production I.G story that uses a sweet shrine-maiden heroine to set up one of the cruelest reveals in the genre.
by Yusei Matsui
A review of Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro, the supernatural mystery manga by Assassination Classroom's Yusei Matsui — about a demon who feeds on the mysteries of human crime.
by Takumi Yai
A review of Takumi Yai's Strange House — 2 volumes from Manga Plus. A man asks an architectural friend to explain why a house's floor plan makes no sense; the answer is much darker than any real estate concern. Adapted from Yai's viral web novel. VIZ Media's English edition is complete.
by Seita Horio
Golden Gold follows Reiko, a teenage girl on a remote island who finds a small god of fortune — and discovers that luck granted by a supernatural force does not come without cost, and that the cost is paid by those around you.
by Osamu Tezuka
Yu's review of Barbara — Osamu Tezuka's adult psychological horror about Yosuke Mikura, a celebrated novelist who takes in a filthy, drunken muse named Barbara and descends through black masses, perversion, and madness as he loses the ability to tell art from destruction.
by Ryukishi07
Yu's review of Higurashi When They Cry — Keiichi Maebara moves to the rural village of Hinamizawa and discovers that every year, during the village festival, someone dies and someone disappears; the story resets across multiple arcs, each showing different versions of the same events as Keiichi and his friends try to understand and survive what the village is doing to them.
by Fujio Akatsuka
Matarou ga Kuru!! follows Matarou Fudou, a timid boy who is constantly bullied — until he invokes a terrifying curse that punishes anyone who harms him, transforming his mild exterior into something that everyone who crosses him will come to deeply regret.
by Hideo Uchida
Kyofu Shinbun follows Kichi Taira, a middle school student who begins receiving a supernatural newspaper delivered only to him — a newspaper that reports events before they happen, including deaths, and whose receipt shaves years from his own lifespan with each issue.
by George Akiyama
Zeni Geba is George Akiyama's seminal 1970s manga about Futaro Gamagori, a boy whose poverty-driven obsession with money turns into a complete moral collapse — a brutal social critique that asked what desperation does to a person.
by Daruma Matsuura
Kasane follows a girl whose face society refuses but whose lipstick can swap her face with another's — a 14-volume Evening psychological drama where every act of becoming someone else is also an act of erasure.
by Shiori Ōta (original) / Tou Mizuguchi (art)
Yu's review of the Beautiful Bones: Sakurako's Investigation manga — the short two-volume adaptation of Shiori Ōta's mystery novels, in which osteologist Sakurako Kujou reads the stories that human bones tell, with high-schooler Shotaro as her reluctant companion.
by Shigeru Mizuki
Yu's review of Akuma-kun — Shigeru Mizuki's early supernatural manga about a child prodigy who summons the demon Mephisto in his attempt to build a perfect world. A foundational occult work from the master of yokai manga, currently unlicensed in English.
by Tsutomu Nihei
Yu's review of APOSIMZ — Tsutomu Nihei's sci-fi epic set on the frozen outer shell of a hollow planet, where humanity survives in the cold, a disease turns people into hostile Frames, and Etherow is pulled into a war over the planet's secrets.
by Haro Aso
Yu's review of Alice in Borderland — a survival horror manga where a directionless young man and his friends are pulled into a deserted Tokyo and forced to clear deadly games rated by playing cards, slowly uncovering what the Borderland actually is.
by Yuki Fujisawa
Yu's review of Bio-Meat: Nectar — BM, a creature engineered to eat Japan's garbage and be harvested for protein, escapes containment, devours everything organic, and breeds explosively. A group of students must survive a collapsing Tokyo. Survival horror with teeth, currently unlicensed in English.
by Setona Mizushiro
Yu's review of After School Nightmare — a psychological horror manga where students enter a shared nightmare to graduate, and the monsters they fight are made of their own deepest secrets. Mashiro Ichijo, raised as a boy but physically both, is forced to confront what he actually is.
by Kanoko Sakurakouji
Yu's review of Black Bird — Misao Harada can see spirits, and on her 16th birthday learns she is the Senka Maiden, whose blood, flesh, and marriage grant demons enormous power. Her childhood friend Kyo, a tengu clan leader, returns to protect and marry her. A bestselling, and genuinely controversial, supernatural romance.
by Yukito Ayatsuji (original) / Hiro Kiyohara (art)
Yu's review of Another — a horror mystery adapted from Yukito Ayatsuji's novel, about a transfer student who joins a class haunted by a decades-old curse: every year an extra person who is secretly already dead joins Class 3-3, and people start dying gruesomely.
by Masaki Segawa
Yu's review of Basilisk — when a centuries-old truce between the Kouga and Iga ninja clans is dissolved to settle a shogunal succession, ten warriors from each clan must kill each other; at the center are Gennosuke and Oboro, the clan heirs who love each other and now must watch their families annihilate one another.
by Gamon Sakurai
Yu's review of Ajin: Demi-Human — a horror thriller about immortal beings who cannot die, the government that experiments on them endlessly because they can't, and Satou, one of the most terrifyingly competent villains in modern manga.
by Makoto Sanada (story) / Kudan Naduka (art)
Yu's review of Angels of Death — a horror manga adapted from the RPG Maker game, in which a girl with no memory and a scythe-wielding serial killer make a deal to escape a building of murderers: he'll get her out, and then she'll let him kill her.
by Kaori Yuki
Yu's review of Alice in Murderland — Kaori Yuki's gothic horror where the nine adopted children of the wealthy Kuonji family are ordered to murder each other in a tea-party death game, and the meek heroine Stella hides a killer alter ego called Bloody Alice.
by Koushun Takami (story) / Masayuki Taguchi (art)
Yu's review of Battle Royale — in a fascist alternate Japan, a class of junior-high students is taken to an island, fitted with explosive collars, and forced to kill each other until one remains. The manga gives all forty-two students a face before it takes them away.
by Kentaro Miura
Yu's review of Berserk — the story of Guts, a mercenary born from a hanged corpse, who fights demons and corrupted gods with a sword the size of a door in a world where the divine is real and malevolent. The most influential dark fantasy manga ever made.
by Ryukishi07 (story) / various artists per episode
A review of Umineko WHEN THEY CRY — the 21-volume manga adaptation of Ryukishi07's 2007–2010 visual novel, structured as 8 episodes (4 Question + 4 Answer) drawn by a different artist each. Yen Press published the complete English manga across all eight episodes.
by Masaaki Ninomiya
Daigo Agawa transfers to Kuge village — a remote mountain community in the Japanese alps — after an incident at his previous police posting. The villagers are afraid of the Goto family. A drunk old man tells Daigo the Gotos eat people. The previous officer disappeared. Masaaki Ninomiya's 13-volume rural horror (2018–2021) is being released in English by Ablaze Publishing and was adapted as a Disney+ live-action series in 2022.
by Matsuri Akino
Count D sells exotic pets in Chinatown — each one perfect, each one with a contract that the buyer always breaks.
by Go Nagai
Devilman's apocalypse retold through Jun Fudo, a P.E. teacher who turns demon — Go Nagai going even darker than the original.
by Carnby Kim (story) / Youngchan Hwang (art)
A review of Sweet Home — the Korean horror manhwa about residents of an apartment building who must survive as the world outside fills with humans transforming into monsters driven by their deepest desires.
by Koji Matsumoto
Akira Miyamoto travels to a remote island called Higanjima to find his missing brother. He discovers the island is ruled by an ancient vampire named Miyabi, and the humans on it are livestock. The English release covers the brutal first 8 volumes of a 33-volume horror epic.
by Garon Tsuchiya, Nobuaki Minegishi
A man is locked in a private prison for ten years. When he's released, he wants to know why — and Park Chan-wook turned this manga into one of cinema's great revenge films.
by Go Nagai
The unfinished demon king manga that became Devilman — Go Nagai's first attempt at his lifetime obsession.
by Various
The kamishibai-style horror anime adapted into manga — paper theater terrors in a more permanent form.
by Nobuaki Tadano
A review of Outer Zone, the Japanese anthology horror manga hosted by a mysterious woman named Mephisto that collects stories of the uncanny, the twisted, and the terrifying.
by Buronson, Ryoichi Ikegami
From the writer of Fist of the North Star and the artist of Crying Freeman — a club hostess and a fixer take on Tokyo's underworld.
by Kazuhiro Fujita
Ushio and Tora's creator returns with his bleakest, most ambitious horror — a haunted mansion that swallows everyone who enters.
by PEACH-PIT
Yu's review of Zombie-Loan — Michiru Kita has the shinigami eyes ability to see death rings around people's necks; two boys at her school, Chika Akatsuki and Shito Tachibana, have black rings indicating they should already be dead; they are alive because they made a contract with a Zombie-Loan office, exchanging their continued existence for debt repayment through zombie hunting.
by Douman Seiman
Yu's review of Voynich Hotel — Taizou Kuzuki, a man with a shady past, arrives at a remote island hotel staffed by witch maids and surrounded by assassins, ghosts, and other supernatural complications; Douman Seiman's dark comedy-horror is compact, strange, and genuinely funny in ways that shouldn't work.
by Mitsuhisa Kuji
Yu's review of Wolfsmund — in 14th century Switzerland, the mountain pass called Wolfsmund (Wolf's Maw) is controlled by the bailiff Wolfram; every episode follows those who attempt to cross the pass, and Wolfram's inhuman ability to detect deception and his willingness to use any method to stop them.
by Hideyuki Kikuchi / Saiko Takaki
Yu's review of Vampire Hunter D — set 12,000 years in the future in a world where vampires ruled humanity and have since fallen; D is a half-human half-vampire dhampir who hunts his own father's kind; stoic, nearly invincible, and accompanied by a parasitic demon in his hand, he is one of horror manga's most iconic loners.
by Junji Ito
A comprehensive review of Venus in the Blind Spot — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Ryukishi07 / 07th Expansion (various artists)
On the private island of Rokkenjima in 1986, the Ushiromiya family gathers for an annual meeting. A typhoon traps them. The murders begin. Then they repeat. A golden witch named Beatrice claims responsibility — and the manga spends 53 volumes across 8 Episodes arguing about whether magic exists. Adapted from Ryukishi07's visual novel.
by Junji Ito
Yu's review of Uzumaki by Junji Ito — a small town cursed by spirals, where the obsession spreads like a disease until the geometry itself becomes monstrous.
by Yusaku Hanakuma
Yu's review of Tokyo Zombie — Fujio and Mitsuo are factory workers who practice judo; the zombie apocalypse begins in Tokyo near a trash mountain called Dark Fuji; they fight zombies; eventually the rich use the zombie apocalypse as an opportunity to rebuild society in their favor; a one-volume black comedy that is angrier than it looks.
by Junji Ito
Yu's review of Tomie — a beautiful girl who drives men to murder her and then regenerates, again and again, in a horror anthology that is also a deeply uncomfortable portrait of obsession and violence against women.
by Sui Ishida
Yu's review of Tokyo Ghoul:re — Haise Sasaki is a half-ghoul CCG investigator with no memory of his past; he is, in fact, Ken Kaneki — the protagonist of Tokyo Ghoul — with his identity surgically suppressed; Sui Ishida's continuation of Tokyo Ghoul follows Kaneki's reconstruction through Haise as the war between humans and ghouls reaches its final scale.
by Sui Ishida
Yu's review of Tokyo Ghoul — 14 volumes about a boy who becomes something between human and monster, and must decide what that makes him. Dark, brutal, and heartbreakingly human at its core.
by Junji Ito
A comprehensive review of The Liminal Zone — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Jiro Taniguchi, Baku Yumemakura
Yu's review of The Summit of the Gods — a photojournalist in Kathmandu may have found the camera of George Mallory, who disappeared on Everest in 1924; the mystery pulls him into the story of Habu Joji, a climber of legendary ability who disappeared years earlier.
by Looseboy (Story) / Iori Furuya (Art)
Yu's review of Talentless Nana — at a school for students with supernatural powers, sweet transfer student Nana Hiiragi appears to be a normal girl; the series reveals in its first volume that Nana is an assassin sent to kill the students; the manga becomes a psychological thriller about Nana's mission, her growing complications, and the students who begin to suspect her.
by Kazuo Umezu
Yu's review of The Drifting Classroom — a Japanese elementary school and all its students and teachers are suddenly transported to a desolate future Earth; the children must survive without adult leadership as food runs out and monsters appear.
by Junji Ito
A comprehensive review of Smashed: Junji Ito Story Collection — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Yuu Kuraishi
Yu's review of Starving Anonymous — passengers on a bus wake up in a facility where they discover the horrifying truth about what they're being used for.
by Fuyumi Ono (story) / Ryu Fujisaki (art)
Yu's review of Shiki — people begin dying mysteriously in a rural Japanese village during summer, and the doctors, priests, and survivors must confront what is happening and what they are willing to do in response.
by Junji Ito
Yu's review of Shiver — nine stories personally selected by Junji Ito himself as representative of his best work; includes Greased, Painter, The Rib Woman, Fashion Model, Hanging Blimp, Marionette Mansion, Futon, Tomio Red Turtleneck, and Back Alley; each story demonstrates a different aspect of his approach to horror.
by Junji Ito
Yu's review of Sensor — Kyoko Byakuya encounters a young man on the slope of Mt. Sengoku who leads her to a village where the inhabitants' hair has become golden threads connected to the volcano; the horror expands from local to cosmic as the story develops, becoming Ito's most ambitious statement about what lies beneath ordinary reality.
by So-ma-to
Yu's review of Shadows' House — Kate is a shadow noble whose face is obscured by soot; Emilico is her 'Living Doll' — a human servant who functions as Kate's face and emotional expression; together they navigate the mysterious house and begin to understand what it truly is.
by Norimitsu Kaihou / Sadoru Chiba
Yu's review of School-Live! — Yuki Takeya is a cheerful high school girl who loves her school and her friends in the School Living Club; the reality of their situation becomes clear in the first chapter and changes everything about how the series reads from that point forward; zombie horror structured as moe with psychological horror as its primary instrument.
by Yoshiki Tonogai
Yu's review of Secret — six students survive a bus accident that killed their classmates; now they're being killed one by one, and the killer is one of the survivors.
by Peach-Pit
Yu's review of Rozen Maiden — Jun Sakurada is a socially withdrawn boy who refused to attend school; a doll named Shinku arrives and he winds her key, forming a contract that makes him her medium; she is one of the Rozen Maidens, dolls crafted by the legendary dollmaker Rozen who must fight each other until one remains to become Alice.
by Mitsuru Hattori
Yu's review of Sankarea: Undying Love — Chihiro Furuya is obsessed with zombies and wishes his girlfriend would be a zombie; Rea Sanka is a beautiful rich girl with an abusive father who wants to die rather than continue living; when Chihiro experiments with a resurrection potion, Rea drinks it and actually dies and comes back; the zombie romance that asks what it means to stay with someone after everything changes.
by Sayaka Mogi
Yu's review of Pupa — Utsutsu and Yume Hasegawa are siblings; Yume is infected with a virus that turns her into a monster with an overwhelming need to consume flesh; Utsutsu has an accelerated regeneration that makes him able to survive being eaten; he allows her to eat him so she doesn't hurt anyone else; extreme body horror with sibling relationship at its center.
by Junji Ito
Yu's review of Remina — a scientist names a mysterious planet after his daughter, and when that planet turns out to be heading toward Earth to consume it, the terrified public turns on the girl.
by Tetsuya Tsutsui
Yu's review of Prophecy — an anonymous online collective called the Paper Bag Crowd announces crimes before committing them, choosing targets who represent social injustice that existing law cannot address; a police investigator races to identify and stop them while the public debate about whether the collective is criminal or heroic divides opinion.
by Yasunori Mitsunaga
Yu's review of Princess Resurrection — Hiro Hiyorimi dies in an accident saving a princess; she revives him with her blood, making him a Phoenix Warrior who can resurrect when he dies but must drink her blood to maintain the revival; she is Hime, a princess of the Monster World whose siblings are all trying to kill her to claim the throne.
by Kaiu Shirai (story) / Posuka Demizu (art)
Yu's review of The Promised Neverland — orphan children living a perfect life discover their farm is raising them as food for demons. A survival thriller that starts as one of the best manga ever made.
by Matsuri Akino
A comprehensive review of Pet Shop of Horrors: Tokyo — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Matsuri Akino
Yu's review of Pet Shop of Horrors — Count D runs a mysterious pet shop in Los Angeles's Chinatown that sells exotic animals; each purchase comes with a contract containing three conditions, and Detective Leon Orcot investigates the deaths that follow customers who break those conditions.
by Hideshi Hino
Yu's review of Panorama of Hell — an unnamed painter who uses his own blood as paint describes the hellish visions he depicts; the work is autobiographical in structure but the autobiography is a constructed nightmare; Hideshi Hino's most complete statement on horror as a response to historical catastrophe.
by Hitoshi Iwaaki
Yu's review of Parasyte — the manga where alien parasites invade human bodies and one boy must share his arm with the creature that failed to take his brain, raising questions about humanity, empathy, and what we owe each other.
by Osamu Tezuka
Yu's review of Ode to Kirihito — Dr. Osanai Kirihito investigates Monmow disease, a mysterious illness that transforms its victims into dog-like creatures; the medical establishment suppresses his findings; Osamu Tezuka's 1970 medical horror manga about a doctor reduced to subhuman status while searching for a scientific truth powerful people want hidden.
by Kazuo Umezu
Yu's review of Orochi — a beautiful immortal girl named Orochi drifts through human lives, observing and sometimes participating in the horror that emerges when human desires and jealousies reach extremes; Kazuo Umezu's anthology horror with a supernatural narrator defined by beauty and detachment.
by Inio Asano
Yu's review of Nijigahara Holograph — two timelines, childhood and adulthood, converge around a group of children who threw a girl into a tunnel; what lives at the bottom of the tunnel, and what the act of throwing her in did to everyone involved; Inio Asano's most formally complex and disturbing work.
by Usamaru Furuya (Manga) / Osamu Dazai (Original Novel)
Yu's review of No Longer Human manga adaptation — Usamaru Furuya adapts Osamu Dazai's 1948 autobiographical novel into a contemporary setting; the protagonist Yozo Oba is a young man who cannot believe himself to be a human being in the same sense as the people around him; the manga follows his descent through addiction, relationships, and the inability to exist in the world.
by Mohiro Kitoh
Yu's review of Narutaru — Shiina Tamai finds a star-shaped creature she names Hoshimaru; the story appears to begin as a creature-companion adventure and becomes something much darker, examining what happens when children with real grievances are given real power.
by Shin Mashiba
Yu's review of Nightmare Inspector — set in 1920s Shanghai, Hiruko is a baku who eats nightmares at a tea house; each chapter is a client's dream that reveals their waking life; a gothic anthology horror manga with an elegant episodic structure.
by Waka Hirako
A comprehensive review of My Broken Mariko — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Masashi Asaki / Koito Tsutsui
Yu's review of My Home Hero — Tetsuo Tosu, an ordinary salaryman, discovers that his daughter's boyfriend is an abusive criminal; when he acts to protect her, he kills the man; what follows is a crime thriller about a completely ordinary person trying to conceal a murder while the dead man's yakuza connections start asking questions.
by Junji Ito
A comprehensive review of Museum of Terror — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Osamu Tezuka
Yu's review of MW — Yuki Michio is a beautiful, charming, amoral man who survived exposure to a chemical weapon as a child; the event destroyed his conscience; he works toward mass destruction while maintaining the appearance of a successful society member; a priest who loves him tries to hold him back; Osamu Tezuka's 1976 thriller about a man without conscience.
by Yoshimurakana
Yu's review of Murcielago — Kuroko Koumori is a serial killer with over 700 victims who was spared execution on the condition that she work for the government hunting killers too dangerous or too bizarre for conventional law enforcement; each case involves a different extreme criminal; the series balances extreme violence with dark comedy.
by Ryosuke Tomoe
Yu's review of Museum — a detective investigates The Frog Man, a serial killer who punishes ordinary human cruelty with elaborate, theatrical murders.
by Naoki Urasawa
Yu's review of Monster — a brilliant surgeon saves a boy's life over a hospital director's, ruins his career, and ten years later discovers the boy he saved has become a serial killer who is now hunting him.
by Eiji Otsuka / Sho-u Tajima
Yu's review of MPD Psycho — criminal investigator Yōsuke Kobayashi has multiple personalities, one of whom is a serial killer; the cases he investigates involve crimes that connect to a conspiracy wider than any individual murder; dark crime horror with extreme content and a writer (Eiji Otsuka) who is interested in psychology and conspiracy in equal measure.
by Rumiko Takahashi
Yu's review of Mermaid Saga — Yuta ate mermaid flesh 500 years ago and became immortal; now he searches for a way to die; each arc is a horror story about what immortality actually looks like when the people around you keep dying and the mermaid flesh keeps producing monsters; Rumiko Takahashi's horror masterwork.
by Tomoki Izumi
Yu's review of Mieruko-chan — Miko Yotsuya woke up one day able to see grotesque spirits; her strategy for survival is to ignore them completely and pretend she cannot see them, while navigating high school and increasingly complicated supernatural situations.
by Naoki Urasawa, Hokusei Katsushika
Yu's review of Master Keaton — Taichi Hiraga Keaton is a half-British, half-Japanese former SAS survival expert who works as an insurance investigator for Lloyd's of London while dreaming of becoming an archaeologist; each case takes him somewhere in Europe with a different mystery.
by Reiji Ōta
Yu's review of Me & The Devil Blues — Robert Johnson, the legendary blues musician, makes a deal at the crossroads and suddenly can play the blues like nobody alive; the manga follows his rise alongside RJ, a friend trying to understand what Johnson has become; a horror manga set in the 1930s American South that takes its historical setting seriously.
by Kentaro Sato
Yu's review of Magical Girl Site — Aya Asagiri is abused at school and at home; she is given a magical weapon by a mysterious website and discovers she is part of a network of magical girls, each broken by abuse, and that their powers are draining their life force.
by Housui Yamazaki
Yu's review of Mail — private detective Reiji Akiba carries a gun loaded with special bullets and a job: send the dead to where they belong; each story is a ghost encounter, a backstory, and a resolution that may or may not be comforting; procedural ghost horror with a quiet protagonist.
by Kentaro Sato
Yu's review of Magical Girl Apocalypse — ordinary high schooler Kii Kogami watches a magical girl appear at school and kill everyone; the magical girls appear in large numbers and begin a massacre; this is an extremely violent horror manga that uses the magical girl aesthetic as the vehicle for a zombie-apocalypse-style survival story with time travel complications.
by Asari Endou / Pochi Edoya
Yu's review of Magical Girl Raising Project — sixteen girls are selected by a mobile game to become real magical girls with real powers; then the game announces that only eight can remain, and the magical girl who collects the fewest candies each week will be eliminated — not deselected, eliminated.
by Usamaru Furuya
A comprehensive review of Litchi Hikari Club — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Junji Ito
A comprehensive review of Lovesickness: Junji Ito Story Collection — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Keiko Suenobu
Yu's review of Life — a girl driven to self-harm by bullying and academic pressure becomes the target of a vicious bully, while struggling to find any reason to keep going.
by Keiko Suenobu
Yu's review of Limit — a school bus carrying students on a field trip crashes; five girls survive in a remote forest; Mizuki Konno, who was part of the class's bullying hierarchy, finds that survival has inverted the social order — the girl they bullied controls the only tools; the series examines how quickly social structures collapse and reform under extreme conditions.
by Kei Toume
Yu's review of Lament of the Lamb — Kazuna Takashiro discovers he has inherited his family's vampiric curse: an overwhelming thirst for blood; when he finds his estranged sister Chizuna, who has been living with the curse alone, the series becomes a gothic study of two people trying not to become what they are.
by Tekka Yaguruma / Toshiya Higashino
Yu's review of Life Is Money — ten strangers agree to participate in a locked-room psychological game for a prize of 100 million yen; the rule is simple but brutal: they must maintain their sanity across ten days of engineered terror; those who break lose everything.
by Takashi Noguchi
Yu's review of Kurozuka — Minamoto no Kuro, a 12th century samurai, meets the immortal Kuromitsu and drinks her blood; he wakes up in a post-apocalyptic future with fragmented memories and the certainty that Kuromitsu still exists somewhere; a violent horror manga spanning historical Japan and dystopian future.
by Somato
Yu's review of Kuro — a girl and her mysterious black cat navigate a world where the supernatural is always just at the edge of the ordinary.
by Eiji Otsuka / Housui Yamazaki
A comprehensive review of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Nobuaki Kanazawa / Hitori Renda
Yu's review of King's Game — Nobuaki transfers to a new school hoping to escape his past; his entire previous class was killed when they received orders from 'the King' via text message and anyone who disobeyed died; the new class receives the same messages; Nobuaki must watch the same horror unfold again; Renda's adaptation of Kanazawa's horror novel about a game where the King's orders must be obeyed.
by Yuji Iwahara
Yu's review of King of Thorn — 160 people with a terminal virus are cryogenically frozen in a castle; they wake up to find the castle overgrown with massive thorns and filled with monsters; the six survivors who wake must escape while uncovering what happened during the time they were unconscious.
by Kyoko Okazaki
A review of Helter Skelter — Kyoko Okazaki's final completed manga, serialized in Feel Young 1995–1996 and collected into a single volume by Shodensha in 2003. Vertical Inc published the English edition in 2013.
by Junji Ito
A comprehensive review of Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Shin'ichi Sakamoto
Yu's review of Innocent — Charles-Henri Sanson is the son of France's royal executioner, raised with privilege and the assumption that he will inherit his father's role; his sensitive nature and artistic gifts make him unfit for execution, yet circumstances force him to become one of France's most famous executioners, operating during the period leading to the French Revolution.
by Yoshiki Tonogai
Yu's review of Judge — nine people who have committed sins that went unpunished are locked in a building wearing animal masks; they must vote to execute one person every twelve hours or everyone dies.
by Haruto Ryo
Yu's review of Ibitsu — the urban legend says that if you encounter a girl in a gothic lolita dress sitting by trash bags at night and she asks you if you have a little sister, you should not answer; Kazuki answers.
by Hideo Yamamoto
Yu's review of Ichi the Killer — Kakihara, a masochistic Yakuza enforcer, searches for his missing boss while a mysterious figure named Ichi — a young man who weeps while killing with extraordinary violence — is being used by a manipulator named Jijii to eliminate criminals; the series examines violence, pain, pleasure, and complicity with unflinching and disturbing directness.
by Hideo Yamamoto
A comprehensive review of Homunculus — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Kengo Hanazawa
Yu's review of I Am a Hero — an unsuccessful manga artist becomes, entirely against his nature, a survivor of the Japanese zombie apocalypse.
by Daisuke Sato / Shouji Sato
A zombie outbreak begins at Fujimi High School during a normal afternoon and ends Japan within hours. Seven students and a school nurse fight their way out. The series ran 7 volumes before the author Daisuke Sato died in 2017, leaving the apocalypse mid-sentence.
by Ryukishi07 / Various Artists
Yu's review of Higurashi: When They Cry — Keiichi Maebara moves to the small village of Hinamizawa and befriends a group of girls; every June, during the annual Watanagashi Festival, someone dies and someone disappears; the story resets and repeats from different perspectives, each time revealing more of what is actually happening.
by Masasumi Kakizaki
Yu's review of Hideout — Seiichi Kirishima takes his wife to a deserted island intending to kill her and stage it as an accident; before he can act, they encounter something on the island that alters the situation entirely; what follows is survival horror with a protagonist whose hands are already guilty.
by Miura Tsuina
Yu's review of High-Rise Invasion (Tenkuu Shinpan) — high school girl Yuri Honjo finds herself in a world of skyscrapers connected by suspension bridges, populated by masked killers who force trapped people to jump; she must survive, find her brother, and discover what this world is and how to escape it; a survival horror manga with action elements.
by Kouta Hirano
A comprehensive review of Hellsing — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Shuzo Oshimi
Yu's review of Happiness — Makoto Okazaki is attacked and bitten by a vampire girl who then disappears; he begins transforming and craving blood, and is pulled into a world of people who are all becoming something that is no longer human.
by Tomiyaki Kagisora
Yu's review of Happy Sugar Life — Satou Matsuzaka has never felt love; when she finds the girl she loves — a small child named Shio — she becomes willing to do anything to protect what she calls her 'happy sugar life,' including murder.
by Inio Asano
Yu's review of Goodnight Punpun — the manga where Punpun is drawn as a small bird in a world of realistic humans, following him from childhood to adulthood as trauma accumulates and the world refuses to be better than it is.
by Junji Ito
Yu's review of Gyo — dead sea creatures with mechanical legs begin walking onto land; the smell is overwhelming; it escalates; Junji Ito's most viscerally disgusting work is also a meditation on what we find most fundamentally repellent about death and corruption.
by Sun Takeda
Yu's review of Gleipnir — Shuichi Kagaya transforms into a monster suit — a hollow mascot-like costume — and a girl named Clair climbs inside him to use his power for her own goals; she wants to find her sister, who is involved in a violent game where participants collect coins to make a wish from an alien being; the horror of the premise deepens as the game's rules become clear.
by Yana Toboso
Yu's review of Godchild — Cain Hargreaves, the young Earl of Hargreaves, possesses knowledge of poisons and an aristocratic curse that draws murder and tragedy to him; set in Victorian England, he and his devoted manservant Riff investigate dark cases while the shadow of his sinister father looms over everything.
by Shiho Inada / Fuyumi Ono
Yu's review of Ghost Hunt — Mai Taniyama begins working as an assistant at Shibuya Psychic Research, a paranormal investigation firm run by the teenage Kazuya Shibuya (Naru); the firm investigates haunting cases with a team of specialists including a monk, a shrine maiden, a Catholic priest, and a spiritual medium.
by Nagabe
Yu's review of The Girl From the Other Side — a small girl named Shiva lives with a cursed creature she calls Teacher in the forest outside the kingdom; Teacher cannot touch her or she will be cursed; their relationship across 11 volumes is one of manga's most quietly devastating stories.
by Katsuhisa Kigitsu
Yu's review of Franken Fran — Fran is a surgical creation of the legendary Dr. Madaraki; in his absence, she uses her extraordinary surgical skill to help people with their problems, always successfully, never in the way they intended.
by Hiroya Oku
Yu's review of Gantz — two teenagers die in a subway accident and wake up in an apartment with other recently deceased people, commanded by a black sphere to hunt and kill aliens for points.
by Kazuo Umezu
Yu's review of Fourteen — a mutant chicken embryo is born with a human face in a polluted food facility and grows into Chicken George, a being who has experienced human horror and decided to respond to environmental and social catastrophe; Umezu's most ambitious and strange work.
by Junji Ito
A review of Fragments of Horror — Junji Ito's 2014 short-story collection from Nemuki+, containing eight stories: Futon, Wooden Spirit, Tomio · Red Turtleneck, Gentle Goodbye, Dissection-chan, Blackbird, Magami Nanakuse, Whispering Woman. VIZ Media's English edition is complete.
by Yuu Kuraishi (Story) / Kazu Inabe (Art)
Yu's review of Fort of Apocalypse — Yoshiaki Maeda is wrongfully sent to a juvenile detention facility; on his first night, the zombie apocalypse begins; the facility becomes a survival fortress as the inmates — criminals, violent offenders, and Maeda among them — realize the prison walls are the only thing keeping the dead out.
by Lynn Okamoto
Yu's review of Elfen Lied — Lucy, a Diclonius with invisible killing 'vectors,' escapes a research facility in a bloodbath, takes a head wound, and wakes up as the childlike Nyu on a beach in Kamakura. Two students take her in, never knowing what she did or what she carries.
by Masaya Hokazono
Yu's review of Emerging by Masaya Hokazono — a man collapses spraying blood at a Shinjuku crosswalk, and an unknown hemorrhagic fever called 'Japanese hemorrhagic fever' spreads while doctors and a government that would rather hide the truth scramble to respond. Medical pandemic horror serialized in 2004, years before COVID.
by Minetaro Mochizuki
Yu's review of Dragon Head — a school-trip train derails inside a mountain tunnel and three classmates crawl out into a Japan destroyed by an unexplained cataclysm. Minetaro Mochizuki's 10-volume survival horror about fear itself, the thing that breaks people faster than the disaster does.
by Maybe
Yu's review of Dusk Maiden of Amnesia — a girl's ghost has haunted her old school for sixty years with no memory of how she died, until a boy who can see her decides to find out the truth.
by Yoshiki Tonogai
Yu's review of Doubt by Yoshiki Tonogai — six players of a phone werewolf game wake up locked in an abandoned hospital with barcodes tattooed on their bodies, and the killer game they used to play for fun becomes real.
by Junji Ito
Yu's review of Dissolving Classroom — Yuuma Azawa apologizes so much that the people around him melt into sludge, because his apologies are prayers to the Devil. His little sister Chizumi drinks the leftovers. A single-volume Junji Ito horror collection from Vertical.
by Kamui Fujiwara (manga), based on the novel by Hiroshi Aramata
Yu's review of Kamui Fujiwara's manga adaptation of Teito Monogatari (Doomed Megalopolis) — an immortal sorcerer tries to destroy Tokyo by waking the curse of Taira no Masakado, and the 1923 earthquake is the result.
by Go Nagai
Yu's review of Devilman — a gentle boy merges with the demon Amon, becomes Devilman to protect the people he loves, and then watches those same people tear the world apart from the inside.
by Ryo Hanada
Yu's review of Devils' Line — in a modern Japan where vampires called devils live hidden among humans, half-devil detective Yuuki Anzai falls for graduate student Tsukasa Taira while fighting the bloodlust her presence awakens. A vampire romance that treats the monster as a genuine, ongoing danger instead of mystique.
by Yoko Matsushita
Yu's review of Descendants of Darkness (Yami no Matsuei) — Tsuzuki Asato is a shinigami in the Ministry of Hades who investigates deaths that refuse to stay quiet. His new empath partner Hisoka was murdered by the doctor Kazutaka Muraki, the same man who is fixated on Tsuzuki, and the Kyoto arc finally drags Tsuzuki's seventy years of self-hatred into the open.
by Go Nagai / Rui Takato
A review of Devilman Grimoire — Go Nagai and Rui Takato's school-set retelling of the Devilman myth, the only version where the horror ends in survival.
by Jinsei Kataoka / Kazuma Kondou
Yu's review of Deadman Wonderland — a middle schooler is framed for massacring his class, sent to a privatized prison that doubles as a theme park, and dragged into a hidden death game. But the real story is a girl named Shiro and a lullaby his mother wrote.
by Tsugumi Ohba / Takeshi Obata
Yu's review of Death Note — 12 volumes of the tightest psychological thriller in manga. A bored honor student finds a notebook that kills, and the world's greatest detective comes looking. Neither one of them will stop.
by Kenichi Kondo
Yu's review of Dark Gathering — Keitaro Gentoga is a spiritually sensitive tutor who attracts ghosts; his student Yayoi Houzuki, a grade-school genius, captures evil spirits and uses them as weapons in her hunt for Kuubou, the entity that took her mother's soul.
by Mikoto Yamaguchi (story), Touta Kitakawa (art)
Yu's review of Dead Tube (DEAD Tube ～デッドチューブ～) — a high schooler agrees to film a beautiful classmate for two days, on one condition: he can never stop recording, no matter what the camera catches. By Mikoto Yamaguchi and Touta Kitakawa, an ongoing 18+ horror thriller about an underground video site where the lowest view count pays for everyone else's crimes.
by Yoshiichi Akahito
Yu's review of Corpse Princess (Shikabane Hime) by Yoshiichi Akahito — Makina Hoshimura, a murdered girl reborn as a gun-wielding undead Corpse Princess, must destroy 108 rogue shikabane to reach heaven while hunting the Seven Stars who slaughtered her family. Bound to Ouri Kagami, the boy raised by her dead first monk, she discovers the 108 promise is a lie.
by Nozomu Tamaki
Yu's review of Dance in the Vampire Bund — Mina Tepes, the centuries-old queen of all vampires in the body of a child, reveals vampires to the world and buys the Bund, a sovereign island in Tokyo Bay; werewolf Akira Kaburagi, bound to her by a childhood oath, protects her through the political and violent fallout. A 14-volume political vampire epic complete in English from Seven Seas — and a series whose loli fanservice you have to know about going in.
by Kazuo Umezu
Yu's review of Cat-Eyed Boy — Kazuo Umezu's anthology horror about a half-human, half-nekomata outcast who lives in the attics of strangers and watches the supernatural and human cruelty that finds them. Disturbing, dream-logic horror with one of manga's strangest narrators.
by Makoto Kedouin / Toshimi Shinomiya
Yu's review of Corpse Party: Blood Covered — the horror manga where a friendship charm drops a class of high schoolers into Heavenly Host Elementary, a demolished school folded into a pocket dimension by the rage of a murdered child.
by Shuzo Oshimi
Yu's review of Blood on the Tracks (Chi no Wadachi) by Shuzo Oshimi — Seiichi Osabe is an ordinary middle schooler whose devoted mother Seiko pushes his cousin off a cliff during a mountain hike, and the boy becomes the only witness. A 17-volume slow-burn study of maternal possessiveness as horror.
by Asuka Katsura
Yu's review of Blood+ — Asuka Katsura's 5-volume manga retells the Production I.G anime through a darker, more intimate lens, where Saya's blood is the only thing that can kill the monsters, and Haji is the man she once loved.
by Junji Ito
A comprehensive review of Black Paradox — plot, characters, art style, and whether it's worth reading.
by Setona Mizushiro
Yu's review of Black Rose Alice — Dimitri, a tenor turned vampire in 1908 Vienna, offers a dying Tokyo schoolteacher named Azusa a deal: he saves her lover if she gives up her soul and lets him place it in the preserved body of his long-dead love. Reborn as Alice, she must choose one of his vampires to mate with — knowing the male dies after reproduction. A gothic josei romance that treats its vampire premise as genuine horror.
by Ha Il-Kwon
A review of Duty After School — the Korean webtoon about high schoolers conscripted to fight blob-like aliens, and how it ends not in glory but in a quiet, furious question: why did any of them have to die?
by Tsunoda Jiro
A boy whose protective spirit is named Hyakutaro fights ghosts and curses across postwar Japan — the foundational paranormal horror manga.
by Carnby Kim (story) / Youngchan Hwang (art)
Seon Jin is a sickly, partially disabled teenage boy in high school. He is bullied. He has no friends. He cannot fight back. He also has a secret: his charismatic, beloved, successful father is a serial killer — and Seon Jin has known this his entire life. He has survived by helping. Carnby Kim and Youngchan Hwang (Sweet Home creators) wrote one of the most acclaimed Korean horror webtoons of the 2010s. Free on Webtoons; Seven Seas now publishing the physical English release.
by Shigeru Mizuki
A review of GeGeGe no Kitaro, Shigeru Mizuki's foundational yokai manga that defined how modern Japan thinks about supernatural creatures.
by Hiyodori Uneji
A regular high schooler can see the dead — and they want him to solve their murders. Sometimes brutally.
by Osamu Tezuka
Count Dracula moves his castle to Nerima Ward and tries to drink blood in a Tokyo that doesn't believe in vampires — Tezuka's gentlest, silliest slapstick comedy.
by Miyuki Eto
A review of Hell Girl, the manga about a website that lets you send people to hell — at the cost of your own soul.
by Go Nagai
Go Nagai retells the legend of Shuten-doji, the legendary demon king of Mount Oe — with all of his usual ferocity.
by Shigeru Mizuki
A review of Kitaro of the Graveyard, the darker original version of Mizuki's yokai character — before Kitaro became a defender of humanity and was simply something risen from a grave.
by Junji Kojima
A man wakes up wearing a zebra mask, told he's now a hitman until his target finds him. A live-action film made it briefly famous.