Curated playlist
Dark fantasy anime and manga
- Berserk: The Golden Age ArcBerserk: The Golden Age Arc arrived in Japanese cinemas on the 4th of February 2012, promising something the franchise had never attempted before: a feature-film retelling of its most celebrated story. Produced by Studio 4°C and…
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba (TV series)Ufotable announced the anime adaptation of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba in June 2018. Director Haruo Sotozaki and producer Hikaru Kondo led the project. Character designer Akira Matsushima shaped the visual style for the series. The…
- Berserk (2016 TV series)Berserk, Kentaro Miura's sprawling dark fantasy manga, returned to Japanese television screens on the 1st of July 2016 with a new anime adaptation that picked up a story left dangling since 1997. The question hovering over that premiere…
- DevilmanDevilman is the manga series by Go Nagai that sent a 16-year-old reader named Nanase Ohkawa into a state of shock she never forgot, and eventually led her to write her own apocalyptic manga, X, decades later. That kind of reach is rare.…
- Berserk (manga)Berserk, the dark fantasy manga series created by Kentaro Miura, opens with a man born from the corpse of his hanged mother. That single image tells you everything you need to know about what kind of story this will be. Since its debut on…
- Berserk (1997 TV series)Berserk, the 1997 anime television series, opens not with a hero's journey but with a survivor's rage. Guts, a lone mercenary warrior, is shown already scarred and relentless in a flash-forward before the story proper begins. He has lost…
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no YaibaDemon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba began its life in Weekly Shonen Jump on the 15th of February 2016 as a quiet manga about a charcoal-selling boy whose family was slaughtered by a demon. Nobody predicted what would happen next. By July 2025,…
- Attack on Titan (TV series)Attack on Titan is a Japanese dark fantasy anime series that began as a manga by Hajime Isayama in 2009 and became, by nearly any measure, one of the most watched television programs on earth. On the 7th of April 2013, the first episode…
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train"Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba , The Movie: Mugen Train" became the highest-grossing film of 2020. That year, COVID-19 had shuttered or reduced theaters across much of the world. For the first time in cinema history, a non-American…
- Jujutsu KaisenJujutsu Kaisen is a manga series written and illustrated by Gege Akutami that debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump on the 5th of March 2018, and went on to become one of the best-selling manga series of all time. By December 2025, it had over 150…
- Puella Magi Madoka MagicaPuella Magi Madoka Magica arrived on Japanese television on the 7th of January 2011, and within weeks it had upended everything audiences thought they knew about magical girls. On the surface, the series looked harmless: rounded, cheerful…
- Tower of GodTower of God begins with a boy named Twenty-Fifth Bam who has never seen the sky. He has spent most of his life in the darkness beneath a vast and mysterious Tower, with only one companion: a girl named Rachel. When Rachel leaves him to…
- Black ButlerBlack Butler, the manga series written and illustrated by Yana Toboso, opens on a single night in Victorian-era London that changes everything. A twelve-year-old boy named Ciel Phantomhive stands at the center of a summoning ritual…
- Attack on TitanAttack on Titan begins in the year 845, when two enormous humanoids punch through the outermost of three great circular walls and leave a boy named Eren Yeager watching a grinning Titan devour his mother. That single image, a creature…
- Fullmetal AlchemistFullmetal Alchemist began in a single magazine page published on the 12th of July 2001 in Monthly Shōnen Gangan, the monthly anthology put out by Square Enix. Its creator, Hiromu Arakawa, had spent long nights reading contradictory books…
- DororoDororo begins with a bargain no father should ever make. A powerful daimyo named Kagemitsu Daigo strikes a pact with 48 demons, offering them anything they desire from his newborn child in exchange for power and prosperity over his domain.…
- Fate/stay nightFate/Stay Night began not as a game but as a story Kinoko Nasu wrote in college with no particular destination in mind. He only completed what would become one route out of three, set it aside in 1999, and then co-founded a small creative…
- Claymore (manga)Claymore is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Norihiro Yagi, and it opens on a world where the line between human and monster is drawn in silver. On a fictional medieval island, shapeshifting creatures called Yoma prey on…
- Blue ExorcistBlue Exorcist opens with a teenager pulling a sword from a scabbard - and discovering he is the son of Satan. Rin Okumura does not learn this quietly. He watches the man who raised him, Father Shiro Fujimoto, die to protect him. Then…
- Bastard!!Bastard!! is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kazushi Hagiwara, and it is named after its own irreverence. The title alone signals what it contains: a dark wizard named Dark Schneider, a world built from heavy metal band…