Updated August 27, 2020 1.1K votes 455 voters 23.1K views
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Vote up the Halloween episodes that best get you in the mood of the holiday.
It may come as a surprise to western anime fans, but Halloween is also celebrated in Japan - albeit a little differently. Because pumpkins, ghosts, and witches are just as popular in the east as they are in the west, Japanese media reflects this - which is why there are some awesome anime with Halloween episodes to enjoy during the spookiest season of the year.
Halloween anime can be scary, like it is in Blood: The Last Vampire or The Cowboy Bebop Movie, but it usually isn't. More often than not, anime about Halloween are episodes in a longer series that bring in a version of the Halloween aesthetic that's adorable rather than scary. For instance, no one is going to be terrified by the girls in Soul Eater NOT! singing the Pumpkin Song.
No matter what mood these anime are trying to get across, all of them have the power to get viewers excited about the holiday. So break out the candy, put on your costume, and watch a few!
Ouran High School Host Club manages to combine Halloween festivities with some powerful emotional realizations. In the Halloween episode, entitled "Until the Day it Becomes a Pumpkin!", Class 1-A has divided up into teams whose goal is to scare one another in a Halloween-themed haunted house. In the midst of the wacky hijinks, there's a moment when they're talking about the Cinderella story, where a carriage turns into a pumpkin. To Kaoru, this story has symbolic value - he sees the carriage having to eventually become a pumpkin as analogous to the friendships that the members of the Host Club share having to eventually end, too.
When an anime is hundreds of episodes long, sometimes it's important to take a break and have some fun. Episode 304, "Gaiden Again! This Time's Enemy Is A Monster?"is a Halloween-themed dream from Ichigo's mind. Rukia, who is dressed as a succubus, drags Ichigo to a Soul Society meeting where he finds Orihime dressed as a pumpkin ghost, Uryū dressed as a vampire who can't drink blood, Hitsugaya dressed as a wolf, and more. From there, they have to defeat a group of monster hunters. It's a fun episode that isn't hugely consequential to the rest of the plot, but is still worth watching for all the great costumes.
"Soul Eater NOT!" is a side story in the Soul Eater universe that focuses on the less talented students at Death Weapon Meister Academy, whose goal is to control their powers well enough to avoid killing anyone with them, rather than become a skilled fighter. However, more talented students are also present.
In episode 9, a few of these students, Tsugumi, Meme and Anya, are trying to grow pumpkins in time for Halloween. To encourage their growth, they sing to them. In the midst of putting up decorations and preparing the pumpkins, the students are also prepping for Battle Festival that will take place on Halloween.
If you're looking for something Halloween-themed that's actually scary, look no further than Blood: The Last Vampire. On the night before Halloween, a teenage vampire slayer named Saya is dispatched to help destroy the bloodsucking monsters. This is a visceral, lovingly animated horror flick that will leave you shaking, so be prepared.
Most anime about Halloween are cute instead of terrifying, but Cowboy Bebop doesn't really do adorable. Instead, the movie is about a biological weapon that's about to be unleashed via a Halloween parade on Mars. Vincent is the last survivor of a brutal experiment involving a deadly pathogen that's actually a series of nanobots. Desperate for revenge, Vincent tries to spread the pathogen to as many people as possible, and plans to kills everyone at the parade and beyond by exploding pumpkin balloons filled with it. Meanwhile, Spike and company are trying to get ahold of the vaccine and save the population.
The first episode of the Himouto! Umaru-chan OVA isn't focused entirely on Halloween, but because it aired in October, the creators made sure to add a little bit of festivity to the episode. Umaru and her friend Kirie dress up in wolf and witch costumes, and try pumpkin-based snacks surrounded by Halloween-themed decorations.
