“What a wonderful night this has been! For the first time in one hundred years I haven’t been bored once!”

Al’s rating: Only his mom calls him by his full name, Vampire Hunter Delightful

Al’s review: Akira. Ninja Scroll. Fist of the North Star. Street Fighter II: The Movie. When I was in high school, these were among a small, precious collection of VHS tapes shared clandestinely between me and my classmates. We gave each blood oaths that once viewed, we would return them unharmed, because (A) we’d never seen anything like them before, and (B) we had NO IDEA where to get more. We didn’t even know the term “anime.” We only knew these films as “Japanimation.”

At the start of each video, we got a sizzle reel of other Japanimation movies with intriguing names like Wicked City, Dirty Pair, Golgo 13: The Professional. Those five-to-10 seconds we’d get from each movie were SO cool, and in a world without streaming or YouTube or IMDb, it was all we had entice us into the wider world of (cue trailer voice) “state of the art Japanese Animation.”

Vampire Hunter D was one of the ones I salivated over. No one had a copy locally, but the mysterious title and the glimpses of the bizarre monster designs set my imagination on fire. Then, one weekend, there it was: a kiosk in the Waterbury mall had a copy of Vampire Hunter D and sold it to me for the low, low price of $35. The purchase was, of course, a no-brainer. With my folding money gone but my new VHS clutched firmly in hand, I drove home and ran downstairs to claim a TV and experience the newest addition to our Japanimation movie collection. Who knew what weird, bloody treasure awaited?

Vampire Hunter D, it turns out, was not just cool poses and monster fights. It is the story of Doris Lang, a young farmer/amateur werewolf hunter in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Doris is bitten one night by an ancient, powerful vampire, Count Magnus Lee, who has reawakened after years of slumber and is looking for a new vampire bride. A chance encounter with our nomadic hero, D, leads Doris and her little brother Dan to hire him to defeat Count Lee before the bite irreversibly transforms her into one of the Nobility (AKA “vampire”).

D, we learn, is a dhampir, or half-vampire, who struggles to be around regular people lest he give into his darker impulses. He is drawn to Doris’s warmth and trust, as well as her kid brother’s relentless optimism, but, as Count Lee’s minions close in and jumpy townsfolk begin taking matters into their own hands, D must decide if he can save Doris, defeat the Count, and maybe find a bit of happiness for himself.

Does that sound intriguing to you? Well, take it with a grain of salt ,because I’m not sure how much of that is actually said out loud during this film and how much I’m making up to try to help this story feel like more than a teetering Jenga tower of ideas.

Each character of Vampire Hunter D looks distinctive but possesses a single personality trait… at most. The dialogue swings wildly from cringy to cliché to bizarre. Major plot and character moments are never explained, like why D’s left hand has a super-powered extra face that talks to him, or why Doris doesn’t own any pants. It’s windy in this town!

The movie certainly has crazy creatures, naked anime girls, a little moppety kid with an attitude, and violent action dripping with blood and viscera and goopy monster fluids. Yet after a handful of viewings, Vampire Hunter D mostly just gathered dust on my shelf. Japanimation or not, it was just one more flick that looked great but couldn’t deliver on its potential. And that was my opinion for about the last 25 years

It’s now the 40th anniversary of Vampire Hunter D, so a new print was released into theaters to celebrate. On a lark, a friend and I saw it one afternoon and, to my surprise and amazement, I finally GOT IT. Thirty feet high and in widescreen, I was blown away by the experience Vampire Hunter D creates: the surreal, blasted out landscapes and the small details of every weird mutant creature. D himself, shrouded in black and cloaked in mystery, is a striking, iconic figure. Count Lee looks like he has been carved from granite; huge and terrifying and eternal.

The movie hasn’t changed. The story and voice acting are still not stellar. If you are looking for plot and deep lore, you will be disappointed. As I recognized when I was 17, a lot of Vampire Hunter D just barely hangs together as a cohesive narrative. But the other thing I recognized way back when I saw that initial sizzle reel, is that Vampire Hunter D looks awesome. And that matters, too.

Why does D have a wisecracking, super powered hand with an extra face on it? Because it’s awesome. Why does the movie take place in the year 12090 AD? Because everything in the year 12090 AD looks awesome. Why doesn’t Doris wear pants? Still a mystery. Seriously, there is SO much wind in this movie. She must be cold all the time.

As an aside, its also astounding to think that this was all done BY HAND. No computers or pre-viz. Every character and monster and creepy crawly has been lovingly crafted in its grotesquerie. Every bloodspray and flopping limb and drip of saliva. Our brains have been so conditioned by Google and ChatGPT that it’s easy to forget what a person can create with imagination and a patient, steady hand.

Anime has undoubtedly been done better in the decades since Vampire Hunter D came out – better stories, more complex characters, and certainly smoother animation – but I see the DNA of this movie surviving into so much modern anime and pop culture. The far-future scifi/fantasy post-apocalypse is iconic. The music and the character design are pure Final Fantasy and Castlevania.

More than its footprint, though, I’ve come to appreciate the purity of this movie. It’s a tight 80 minutes devoted to taking its audience on an adventure. It isn’t going to change your life, but its going to surround you with atmosphere, see whether it can give you the creeps, and make sure you can look back on at least one thing and say, “Now THAT was awesome!”

Intermission!

• Vampire Hunter D is based on a Japanese novel series of the same name. Over 50 volumes have been published so far.
• Count Lee was named after Christopher Lee, who played Dracula in several Hammer horror films of the 1970s
• This movie uses Hammer Horror vampire lore rather than the standard Bram Stoker’s Dracula lore. In Hammer films, vampires can only be killed by a purely wooden stake, which is why D can be stabbed in the chest by one of the baddies and still shake it off.
• “I have lived in this world for ten thousand years, and yet you lack the capacity to understand what that truly means. When years cease to have meaning, boredom is a mortal foe. It is a war for constant stimulation, and if that means debasing our line with humans, then so be it. And after all, since we took control of their lands, the humans owe us something in exchange for the simple existences our efforts allow them. When you consider that, a human female every fifty years or so is nothing.”
• “I’d rather bite my tongue off and bleed to death!”
• “You can’t fight your lineage, can you? Deny it all you want, but when push comes to shove, the fangs are coming out!”
• “I wonder, do I really need two hands?”