Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 1994 Michael Almereyda film Nadja. Today, Bernhardt looks at the 1985 Toyoo Ashida film, Vampire Hunter D.
Now this is good, standard, by-the-numbers vampire fun. At least on the surface level.
Coming to Vampire Hunter D from Nadja is some extreme tonal whiplash; they are basically positioned at two extreme opposing poles of what it can mean to be a vampire film. They’re not all that different in length — Nadja comes in at 93 minutes; Vampire Hunter D at 80 on the dot — but everything from pace to story to tone to execution is completely different, as you’d expect between a mid-eighties Japanese OVA (original video animation) and a mid-nineties New York arthouse film. The OVA is based on the first entry in a series of light novels of the same name; there have been a number of them, and they’re quite famous both for the content of the novels themselves and the artwork done for them by Yoshitaka Amano, better known in the West for his Final Fantasy illustrations.
One thing about going back and watching pieces of media slightly before your time — I was born the year after this film came out, and so didn’t catch the tape when it made it over to America on VHS — is seeing the things that helped inspire characters or pieces of media you are familiar with. So one look at the titular vampire hunter named D and you go, “Oh, yeah, that’s where that guy’s from.” And not that guy, but all the guys who are like that guy, to some degree. Sephiroth isn’t this guy, but some of him is this guy, especially the super-long, super-thin sword and the coat. Van Helsing in the 2004 movie didn’t solely get his black pilgrim hat from this guy, but this is one of the guys he got it from. Similarly, the specific blend of post-apocalyptic fantasy mixed with magic mixed with advanced technology that shows up a lot in Japanese genre work starting in the eighties (and figured prominently in many of the Amano Final Fantasy games) is on full display here. The evil vampire count’s curved, spaceship-like castle contains both ancient crypts full of demons and creepy-crawlies and futuristic corridors with towering engine duct corridors like something out of the Death Star; the hardscrabble ranch of our downhome brother and sister in peril has high-tech but beaten-up and worn security fencing; D’s horse is a cyborg.
Likewise, you can see influences from earlier media at work here; Vampire Hunter D is much more of a western than I suspected it would be going in, with the initial frame — a stranger in black comes to town to save a homestead from the local Big Evil in charge of things in these parts, and maybe teach a young boy how to be a man along the way — more or less lifted straight from Shane (1953), just like half of all westerns that came after it did for years and years. Of the sibling pair, the film ends up caring about baby brother Dan a lot less than beautiful adult older sister Doris — some incredible conceptions of what appropriate and normal “Western” names are sneak through in this one; the vampire count being named “Magnus Lee” is another — because Vampire Hunter D is intentionally aimed and marketed at older teenage boys. You get some pro-forma nudity out of Doris in that direction, courtesy of a short shower scene and a tactically torn blouse, but the main appeal to the boys is action and blood, and there’s a whole lot of that.
The setting is an excuse to just throw a grab bag of every kind of monster in there for D to fight with — there’s golems, harpies, toad-guys, ghost-summoning shamans, weird siren-succubi-dragon ladies, and the head of the menagerie of undercard talent, Rei, who is a knife boomerang fighter that can teleport blades around in hazily-defined ways that more or less makes him unkillable to D, whose main method of violence is stabbing his enemies with his sword. There are werewolves in this world, and we see one on screen a couple times, but he avoids getting his comeuppance from D — as Doris tells us a couple times, there are different kinds of hunters; some hunt werewolves, and some hunt vampires, and since D is a vampire hunter, he shouldn’t be going around messing with the big dogs. That’s what got her father, a werewolf hunter, in trouble; he messed with bloodsuckers at some point before the movie got started and that was it for him.
The plot is very thin and business-like: Local vampire count Magnus Lee wants to turn Doris into a vampire bride, so he begins feeding from her. After a skirmish with Rei and the count’s daughter, Vampire Hunter D decides to take the fight to the count and attacks his castle directly; he gets bogged down and trapped in the basement with some succubi, so the count sees an opening to just kidnap Doris directly and bring her to the castle. D fights his way free and escapes with her, only for Rei to kidnap younger brother Dan. D goes out to handle that, and while he’s out, the kindly town doctor who has been like a father to Doris all this time lures her out to the castle because he’s secretly been turned into a vampire. (It’s very funny; Rei’s entire driving motivation is that the count has promised him he’ll finally turn him into a vampire, or Noble as they’re called in the setting, if he kills D; this old guy gets the vampire blessing for free just to make a kidnapping a bit easier, and still manages to screw it up.) D gets the better of Rei in their second fight and cuts off his hand when a special paralyzing candle doesn’t work on D; that’s because the mayor’s son switched it with a fake one to try to rescue Doris and impress her. Eventually Rei and D have a third showdown that Rei wins because he has the real candle this time, and “kills” D. The evil marriage ceremony begins as planned (after the count disposes of Rei for trying to use the candle on him this time, to establish that the head vampire is indeed a badass) until D shows up, having been revived by his cynical talking hand pal (more on him in a moment), and kills the count to save the day.
There’s a lot of back-and-forth from the castle to the homestead back to the castle back to the homestead, you may notice; Vampire Hunter D did not have the biggest budget in the world, and while the animation still looks great compared to the CGI-finished animation we generally get these days, you can tell background cels and locations are getting reused to save time and money, as was and remains standard practice (there’s one sequence of Dan shooting his rifle to scare off a cool, weird floating cloud bloodsucker monster that gets used in his introduction and then again almost cut for cut in his kidnapping). Not the fights, though — those get the most care, as D kills monsters, mutants, and vampires just about every way there is to kill them. Including with the help of the tiny face that lives in his hand.
I haven’t looked up what’s going on with this little guy. I know there is an explanation — the light novel series has some fifty-odd entries, there’s obviously an explanation — but the OVA isn’t particularly interested in offering one and I think that’s a fine tack to take. His deal is he’s cynical and world-weary, and constantly giving D grief about his past tragedies and current motivations in a decidedly expository way. While the plot is extremely standard and bare bones, I appreciate that around the margins the world of Vampire Hunter D is weird in ways it either doesn’t have the time or inclination to explain; the hand guy is one such thing, but so is the lineage of Dracula, who exists in this world as a Sacred Ancestor to all vampires and is, wouldn’t you know it, D’s father. D calls debased, fallen vampires like Count Lee “transient visitors,” which could be a quirk of translation but definitely calls to mind the idea that maybe the count’s castle doesn’t seem to resemble a spaceship merely for aesthetic reasons. Again, these are lore questions I presumably could answer with a deep dive on some wikis or by reading the books — but I don’t feel compelled to do that, and I think the movie is made better through not knowing.
If you haven’t seen it, give it a shot; the contemporary reviews of the thing are very funny, and I do think there’s something to the notion that a 2025 reviewer is going to give Vampire Hunter D a lot more praise than a 1985 reviewer is just because there aren’t a lot of things that look like it being made these days. At the time, Vampire Hunter D wasn’t just one of many fully hand-animated features out there; it was one of the lower-budget ones, at that. But there’s a dynamism and kineticism to parts of it that just don’t exist even in, say, the modern Castlevania Netflix animations, as good as they can be. (The Castlevania series will eventually have its day in this column and I suspect it will come out looking pretty good. It will if I’m the one writing it, at least.)
Next week we’re doing something a bit different. It’ll either be one thing or it’ll be another, second thing. I’m not gonna announce the two things so that no matter which one happens, I can act like everything went according to plan.
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