Since it wasn’t related to papa-katsu (compensated dating in Japan), I was going to let it go, but since someone had already answered, I figured I’d respond anyway, even if it is a bit late.
It’s written as though things are scary because they’re old anime, but quite a few recent ones are pretty frightening too.
A famous example is:
“Puella Magi Madoka Magica”
“Make a contract with me and become a magical girl!”
If you watch it assuming it’s a conventional magical-girl anime, based on the usual image of the genre, I think it can be seriously psychologically damaging.
That said, despite being called “recent,” it’s actually an anime from more than ten years ago.
The first episode alone makes it seem like a normal magical-girl series, so I don’t think you’ll understand how frightening it is unless you watch at least through episode three.
Another one is:
“Magical Girl Site”
“You’re so unhappy. So unhappy.”
That one feels pretty scary too.
There are probably more, but these are the only ones involving serious psychological damage that come to mind right away.
If you just mean things that are ordinarily scary, there are probably quite a few recent ones as well.
P.S.
> It was definitely influenced by Go Nagai’s “Harenchi Gakuen.” That manga was what awakened my sexuality.
So, in other words, it had exactly the effect the PTAs of the time were worried it would have. (笑)
“Harenchi Gakuen” was one of the first school erotic gag manga series. Morally conservative members of society wildly accused it of being “the root cause of the skirt-flipping craze” and fiercely condemned it.
At the time it was serialized, society was still generally negative toward manga as a medium, and the more conservative groups singled out the particularly conspicuous “Harenchi Gakuen” as an easy target.
Naturally, their protests were extremely aggressive and one-sided. Go Nagai himself pushed back against calls to ban the release of “Weekly Shonen Jump,” and the editor in charge joined him, causing the controversy to become even more heated.
Opposition movements spread nationwide, with principals’ associations, PTAs, women’s associations, and others issuing statements such as, “No one under eighteen should read ‘Harenchi Gakuen.’”
Go Nagai recalled:
“It was around the time that daytime talk shows were starting, and I was dragged onto all kinds of them. When I appeared, there would be rows of PTA members and schoolteachers sitting right in front of me.
They’d sit me down facing them, while an announcer beside me held a microphone toward me and played the role of asking things like, ‘Why did you draw a manga like this?’
Whenever I tried to say something, I’d be subjected to an incredibly hostile public shaming from the panel, with comments like, ‘Your manga is a form of pollution!’”
“They’d say things like, ‘All the children who grow up reading this manga will become sex offenders when they grow up!’ or ‘They’ll all become perverts!’ The logic was completely absurd.
I had only recently been a child myself, so I remembered very well how children felt. By around the middle of elementary school, boys naturally become interested in girls and start looking for adult magazines with nude photos.
Rather than exposing them to adult material like that, I thought it would be better for those things to be introduced gradually through children’s manga, so they could grow up more naturally.
I was reading erotic adult novels myself when I was in the lower grades of elementary school, but expressing those things through cute manga was definitely better.”
Incidentally, in 2018, an article was published titled:
“Historic Reconciliation Between Manga Artist Go Nagai and the Education Community: Half a Century After the ‘Harenchi Gakuen’ Controversy”
(It was an article about Go Nagai receiving the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award at the 47th Japan Cartoonists Association Awards.)
The theme song from *Humanoid Monster Bem* was my coworker’s karaoke signature, and I heard him sing the whole thing—including all the dialogue—so many times that I can only associate it with fun memories. But is it really that creepy? If you think something at that level is good, you should also check out *GeGeGe no Kitaro* or *Dororo*.
If you want something genuinely creepy, there’s *Eko Eko Azaraku* by Shin’ichi Koga. And *Orochi* by Kazuo Umezu, famous for *Makoto-chan*, is also straight-up horror manga.
As for movies, you should at least have *The Exorcist* and *The Shining* under your belt. Incidentally, “exorcist” is actually the name of a real position in the Catholic Church. Apparently, the Vatican has a chief exorcist. If they’d added just one more word, the abbreviation could have been CEO…
One night when I was 15, I saw that *Wait Until Dark* was going to be on a late-night TV movie slot. I thought, “This is definitely going to be something erotic♡” and watched it excitedly, only to find that it wasn’t erotic at all. I was furious.
There’s also a movie called *The Trembling Tongue*. Some people might mistake it for a biographical film about Osamu Saito, an old-school adult video actor, but they’d be completely wrong—it’s genuinely terrifying.
If you don’t believe me, search for “The Trembling Tongue trauma.” Back then, it was standard for terrestrial TV to show a movie at 9 p.m., and they actually aired *The Trembling Tongue* in that slot. It was nothing short of criminally inconsiderate. Just imagine how many boys and girls were caught off guard and traumatized… lol
These days, you can watch it on services like U-NEXT. The poor picture quality, typical of Showa-era films, makes it even scarier. You can experience a unique kind of horror that simply wouldn’t work with today’s high-definition, high-quality sound(^^)
Taro
I was in elementary school, but Bem wasn’t all that scary. Hideshi Hino’s manga were far more traumatizing. If you search for images, you’ll find some of the cover art, so you can at least get a feel for the atmosphere.
Looking back, Masami Fukushima’s Saint Muscle was pretty perverse too, with its obsession with muscles. It’s amazing that a manga like that was serialized in a regular boys’ comic magazine. Unlike today, there wasn’t nearly as much anime back then, so when it came to the world of two-dimensional media, I mainly experienced it through print—manga.
My particular fetish for getting girls naked and parading them around at mixed-gender hot springs or happening bars is unquestionably influenced by Go Nagai’s Harenchi Gakuen. That manga was what awakened my sexuality.
Osamu Tezuka’s Yakeppachi no Maria is pretty wild too. The female protagonist is a Dutch wife (love doll), after all.
P.S.
I found a site that features Hideshi Hino’s Doraemon parody. It’s funny because it’s a parody, but I think you can still get a sense of how creepy the original atmosphere was.
https://ameblo.jp/manken99/entry-12589229256.html
