Column Anime Spotlight Country Fears, City Fears: How Setting Shapes Horror Anime Urban and rural living pose very different dangers, and inspire different kinds of dread. By Leah Thomas | Published on February 12, 2026 Credit: Shaft Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Shaft “They say when people step onto a train in Japan, they turn into monsters.” These are the words of a coworker, spoken after a friend showed up to work bruised by a furious woman who’d shoulder-checked her during the morning commute.  When I first moved to Tokyo from Tottori, I told myself I was immune to the infamous crush of Tokyo’s rush-hour trains. I once lived in Taipei, after all, and have battled more than a few crowds at anime and book conventions. I am tall and slightly impervious to elbows. However, my current commute takes me straight through Shibuya at 8 am. Inhaling the coughs of other people, helplessly pressing into a stranger’s face with your backpack or vice versa, being pushed by polite but persistent gloved hands into a train so that the doors can close—these are all daily occurrences. But, like many places around the world, Japan is currently experiencing a spike in racism and xenophobia. While my life remains decent and I benefit from the unwarranted privileges granted Caucasian residents, I’ve endured my fair share of distressing encounters on the train: a middle-aged woman muttering under her breath, calling me a “dirty foreigner”; a teenager deliberately blocking my path to the door and laughing when I tried to get around him; an old woman who shouted at a friend and me to “go back to where [we] came from.”  “I told her not to push me, and she accused me of pushing her instead,” my friend, Suzie, says. She’s just over 150cm, small as anything, but damned if she isn’t tough, and damned if her Japanese isn’t excellent. “It’s such a bad way to start the day.” Boy, is it ever. It’s enough to make you question humanity. The deliberate shoulder-checking of angry passengers, usually young men, has become such a prevalent social phenomenon that its instigators have a name: Butskari Otoko, or “bumping men.” Typically, their vitriol is directed at women walking in the opposite direction at the station; the inherent misogyny is another essay waiting to happen. Credit: Brain’s Base To make the mundane terrors of the commute more bearable, Suzie and I have gamified the experience. If you encounter one of the old dudes who hocks loogies on the sidewalk, that’s twenty points. Someone who stops just past the ticket gates to stare at their phone? That’s ten. A teenager who refuses to shuffle forward when people are trying to get on the train? That’s gotta be, say, fifteen. And if you can stand up to a Butskari Otoko, that’s gotta be a jackpot. “This never happened to me back in Yonago,” I said, shaking my head. Suzie snorted. “Did you even have to take the train in Tottori?” It’s a fair point. I rode a bike to work and never encountered a packed train unless it was a holiday or hanami season.  Even so, it’s funny how much easier it is for me to stomach or even delight in the supposed horrors of the countryside, and how quickly the minuscule horrors of city living have left me low. I was raised in the woods, and that may have something to do with it. I wonder if folks raised in the city find the countryside creepier than I do.  Weigh in with your thoughts, on this little exploration of how the anime horror genre dissects urban and rural life… The Monsters Are Us: Urban Horror in Anime Credit: Madhouse Anime series set in an urban landscape tend to focus on psychological terrors compounded by the stresses of city life. Be it the fear of vanishing in a crowd, the sensation of irrelevance a city instills in its occupants, or the little cruelties people indulge in after the workday ends, life in a Japanese metropolis may feel unsafe even when it is, statistically, not. Satoshi Kon was a master at highlighting the buzzing horror beneath the surface of the urban crush. I have written about Perfect Blue, which tells of a retiring idol being stalked by a hallucination that looks exactly like her. Kon’s final film, Paprika, features a heroine who uses dream-invading technology to help psychiatric patients, at the risk of losing herself.  Kon’s only anime series, the cult gem Paranoia Agent, documents how the rampant build-up of paranoia can destroy a community from the inside out. Set in Musashino, Tokyo, it chronicles the fallout of a series of brutal attacks by a bat-wielding kid on rollerskates. The series is more than an exploration of delinquency, but the grinning juvenile assailant addresses the apprehension Tokyo residents reserve for adolescents who begin stepping out of line.  Paranoia Agent is not the only urban horror anime inspired by true crime. Boogiepop Phantom is a weird little series set a few years after a serial killer has devastated lives in Tokyo. In the wake of the killings, witnesses to the original crimes go missing. An urban legend claims that a figure known as the Boogiepop Phantom is responsible, but that’s just the tip of a much more interesting speculative iceberg. Erased, a doomed dive into regret and time-travel, indulges in melodrama but dares address the topics of child abuse and infanticide. Terror in Resonance, an underappreciated science fiction series by Shinichiro Watanabe, casts two young terrorists as its questionable leads. The pair seek revenge on a government that experimented on them as children, and blow up several skyscrapers to make a statement. An unlikely cousin to Terror is Penguindrum, the chaotic brainchild of Revolutionary Girl Utena creator Kunihiko Ikuhara. What begins as a zany, confusing jaunt involving a magical hat and a few weird kids becomes a meditation on the devastating impact of the Tokyo subway sarin attack conducted by the cult Aum Shinrikyo in 1995, which led to the deaths of 13 people during rush hour. But are these horror series, or just horrifying? What is the horror of city life, aside from being trapped in it? Modern escapism no longer means journeying to an onsen for the weekend. It could mean burying your head in an internet cafe cubicle or pouring free time and coins into addictive mobile games. Among the most popular in Japan are Gacha games—such as Genshin Impact and Nikke—which inevitably encourage players to pay for extra characters and items. More than anything, second-world fantasy games have contributed to the rampant popularity of isekai anime, many of which incorporate horror elements. A flagship series in the genre, Sword Art Online, features a boy bound to a visor, but mostly we see his VR adventures rather than visions of him wasting away in his bedroom.  What has become an adventure genre did not start that way. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, several anime used an overreliance on technology as a basis for horror storytelling. Serial Experiments Lain, an iconic series deserving of its own essay or ten, tells the story of a neglected little girl who befriends an entity online that claims to be the spirit of a classmate who died by suicide. The notion of abandoning a body to join the digital realm has scary implications, but the temptation to do so, given the gray world Lain must subsist in, is understandable. Credit: Brain’s Base Naturally, mobile phones play an essential role in 21st-century horror anime. In Future Diary, a boy is entered into a battle royale game with other people in the city. His phone, which now shares diary entries from the future, may be the item that saves him. In Durarara!!, all characters, human and monstrous, communicate anonymously through chatrooms, and urban legends are given life in those spaces. For all this, the most impactful subgenre of urban horror anime remains dystopian anime. From Akira to Ghost in the Shell, cities of the future have often been depicted as soulless neon hellscapes. Whatever warning that was supposed to provide, however, has often been eclipsed by cyberpunk’s, well, cool factor. But people romanticize cyberpunk because they don’t (yet) live in it. Psycho-Pass, heavily inspired by the works of Philip K. Dick, adopts a perspective borrowed from “The Minority Report,” suggesting that thought-crimes will determine a person’s social standing. However, surveillance has become the norm in our daily lives—so much so that many people film their own houses 24/7, so the idea that the government is watching has become a truth people are largely apathetic to. We put ourselves on the internet, and we don’t dwell on it much. Given the increasingly parasitic role the internet plays in our lives, it’s unsurprising that cyberpunk visions of the future have fallen out of fashion in the urban anime sphere. There’s more to say about that, and about where series like Ergo Proxy and Vivy fit into that mix, but that’s for another time. In general, clearly defined urban horror anime have become harder to pin down. It seems more common for horror elements to bleed into other, more popular genres. Successful shounen anime of the past decade have demonstrated this: Tokyo Ghoul, with its human and ghoul cast competing to live; Jujutsu Kaisen, set primarily in Tokyo, depicts a world in which curses manifest as monsters that must be destroyed. I have written previously about how Chainsaw Man uses gore and horror elements to address the disillusionment of modern adolescence.  Divisive fantasy/horror anthology Bakemonogatari depicts monsters as a more mundane, almost dull occurrence for disaffected, semi-vampiric teen Araragi. A harem anime redeemed by its unusual art direction (Shaft at its experimental peak) and supernatural elements, the series focuses on Araragi’s attempt to rescue girls in his vicinity from various curses and monstrous afflictions. As a rule, these ailments reflect real emotional distress the girls contend with alone. The city carries on—an indifferent, beautifully rendered backdrop of intersecting lines that begins to feel like a cage.  In all of these anime, the true horror is the knowledge that life continues unimpeded. In a city of millions, the plight of a few is mostly business as usual. No matter how the world develops, the most fearsome monsters are human beings themselves, and/or the awful mundanities and casual cruelties of human society. Monsters Defy Us: Rural Horror in Anime Credit: CygamesPictures Rural horror anime, by comparison, remains far more preoccupied with inhuman fears. Tread on the toes of a forgotten mountain god at your own peril. Dare to forget the prevalence of yokai, and you may not live long. The collision between ancient creatures and modern inhabitants is sumptuously explored in my favorite series, The Summer Hikaru Died. A teen named Hikaru goes missing in the mountains only to suddenly reappear weeks later. Only his best friend realizes that this is not Hikaru at all, but an ancient supernatural entity impersonating him. Even so, in the isolation of the inaka, even a substitute friend is worth clinging to. In many anime, the countryside itself is cursed. Junji Ito’s Uzumaki is an iconic example of this trope: the village of Kurouzo-cho is afflicted by a infectious spiral pattern that causes all kinds of bizarre mayhem, culminating in the complete mutation of the landscape. People are transformed into snails. High school girls weaponize their twisting spiral curls. Bodies contort into twisting spirals, and eventually the town itself, plagued by typhoons, becomes a spiral itself.  Another oft-unsung but solid horror anime, Shiki, documents a village’s slow demise when what initially appears to be a deadly epidemic reveals itself to be something more sinister: the town is beset by vampires. When They Cry, a horror anime full of gory bad endings and do-overs, relies on the endless trill of cicadas not only for its title, but for its dire atmosphere. Japan’s many species of cicadas combine until they have an uncanny weight, their cries as tense as violin strings, relentless as tinnitus. While cicadas thrive everywhere in Japan, in the countryside they have little competition when it comes to noise pollution. They are perhaps just loud enough to drown out the whispered warnings of old gods, curses, and monsters. Credit: P.A. Works Impossible to ignore is the abandonment of once-thriving spaces. Sankarea, an anime that somehow balanced ecchi elements and necrophilia without completely alienating its audience, is a peculiar romance. A local girl takes her own life to escape further abuse by her wealthy father, but is reincarnated by a boy obsessed with zombies. Their sickly love story unfolds in a small town complete with fields of hydrangeas, a derelict mansion, and an overgrown shrine. Another, a ghoulish take on a deadly classroom urban legend, traps its characters in a town that feels misplaced in time. The croak of crows, an uncanny porcelain doll shop, and a poorly-lit hospital make the desolation more apparent. Nature is creeping back into town, a reminder that human beings are temporary things. And yet, for all the monsters and empty spaces that proliferate through rural anime, the setting is often imbued with good will. People fear the countryside only as much as they romanticize it. Countless anime series present the monsters of the inaka not as horrific, but as benign or even kind. Away from urban stressors, human beings and yokai seem capable of learning to live harmoniously. This idea is explored in My Neighbor Totoro, Natsume’s Book of Friends, and Poco’s Udon World. Overall, there’s a sense that mankind can never fully domesticate the countryside. Maybe it’s not just the quest for financial stability that inspires people to flee the inaka. But for those who stay, perhaps there is not much to fear after all. Perhaps old monsters are good monsters. Those who’ve been reading my odd little column for a bit may or may not recall that I used to live in Tottori, near the birthplace of yokai mastermind Shigeru Mizuki, the stomping grounds of horror writer Lafcadio Hearn, not far from a mountain said to be occupied by a crow-tengu. I had nothing but immense affection for my local ghosts. In August, I moved to Tokyo, and far from having fallen in love, I regret the decision almost daily. It’s not really fair to a vibrant city with so much to offer, and it’s certainly not Tokyo’s fault that I took a job that turned out to be yet another corrosive, heartless workplace. But the grind of encountering the many miniscule daily terrors of Tokyo depresses me far more than any rural monsters. I pine for a future that may never come to pass: one in which the horrors of modern life begin to feel as manageable and, perhaps, comfortable, as the ghosts in the mountains do.[end-mark] The post Country Fears, City Fears: How Setting Shapes Horror Anime appeared first on Reactor.