Now bitten, Doris has to kill Lee without delay, before falling entirely under his power, but she lacks the strength to do so herself only a fully-trained vampire hunter will do the job, and she's lucky to cross the path of just such a man, a taciturn, tall and slender fellow who simply goes by D (Shiozawa Kaneto). Doris (Tomizawa Michie) is the young heir to a monster-hunting dynasty, and on a thoroughly atmospheric night of windswept terrors, her hunting puts her in the path of Count Lee (Kato Seizo), an enormously powerful 10,000-year-old Noble. The name of the game here is to build out that world and saturate in a mood of almost comically ominous forboding, not to tell a story, so it's no surprise that the actual narrative is pretty thin. Possibly as a result of all that nuclear radiation, possibly as a result of the war ripping open barriers to demonic planes - the film doesn't suggest anything, it just depicts the present state of things - the countryside has been overrun by monsters, of which the most dangerous are the Nobles, vampires who have set themselves up in the best-preserved castles of the old world, to act as something akin to feudal lords. The setting is thousands upon thousands of years from now, in a future where nuclear war leveled humanity, which has since managed to regrow itself up to roughly the point of 18th or 19th Century Europe, in the barely-lingering ruins of the old world. While you're watching it, Vampire Hunter D doesn't feel like the vanguard of anything: it's just a down-and-dirty violent horror movie with some terrific world building and creature design to take advantage of the fact that, in animation, an eldritch monstrosity of incomprehensible origins isn't really all that much harder or much expensive to put across than a run-of-the-mill human. But more narrowly, its director, Ashida Toyoo, went directly on to make Fist of the North Star, and while I can imagine the subsequent history of anime developing more or less the same way without both of those films, I have a much harder time imagining the same thing with neither of them. This doesn't mean that we can breezily state that a whole branch of Japanese animation is directly descended from this film, of course. Vampire Hunter D came into the world as an original video animation in 1985, adapting the first in a successful series of novels written by Kikuchi Hideyuki and illustrated by Amano Yoshitaka, and it proved to be quite a substantial success, helping to legitimise both the growing direct-to-video animation market and the graphic content that market encouraged. It hardly needs saying that this was never as true in practice as in the popular imagination, but that there was and still is a tradition of ultra-violent animation designed for a narrowly-targeted audience of young men can hardly be denied, and we have here one of the key films in kicking that tradition off. And once it got out of its "this is just for kids" phase, it very quickly arrived at its "some of this is very specifically just for adults" phase, and soon we have all the geysers of blood and violent sexuality that were, for a good long stretch in the '90s, the dominant stereotype of anime in the West. As we all know (and like many of the things we all know, it's only partially true), Japanese animation got through its "this is just for kids" phase much earlier than the animation industries of every other country.
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