Vampire Hunter D

"Okay, I'm suffocating now!"

"Transient guests are we."

THIS STORY TAKES PLACE IN THE DISTANT FUTURE. WHEN MUTANTS AND DEMONS SLITHER THROUGH A WORLD OF DARKNESS.[1]
—Opening to the 1985 animated film

A horror light-novel series written by Hideyuki Kikuchi, a Japanese horror novelist in the same vein as H.P. Lovecraft.

Vampire Hunter D is the story of a half human, half vampire vampire hunter, usually just called D, who is scorned by the world that he roams. With the help of a morbid and otherwise obnoxious (but very useful) parasite that lives in his left hand, D wanders to wherever he is needed in a post-apocalyptic world in the year 12,090 AD where monsters roam and humans live in fear.

Like Zeiram and other series of the mid-eighties, Vampire Hunter D focuses more on atmosphere than plot or prose, and pulls it off beautifully. It began as an extremely long-running series of light novels (twenty as of this writing, some of which are several volumes long) which spawned two anime movies. The first, based directly on the first novel, was simply titled Vampire Hunter D. It involves him being hired to protect a young woman who has become the chosen prey of an "Aristocrat" (what vampires call themselves in this world), the sinister Count Magnus Lee. In the second, titled Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (based on the third novel), he is called upon to find a girl who has run off with her vampiric lover, and finds himself clashing against a group of mortal hunters. As of now there's a manga adaptation as well.

Both the books and the movies possess a considerable sense of style, but are also quite disturbing, and not recommended for the faint of heart.

Tropes used in Vampire Hunter D include:
  • Adaptation Distillation: Bloodlust sheds a lot of the more... unpleasant aspects of the third novel.
  • Adaptation Dye Job: By some reason, in the first movie Larmica has black hair and Doris is the one that is blonde.
  • Adaptation Expansion: The Bloodlust movie added an incredible amount to the original story it was based on (Demon Deathchase) as well as changing a lot of details. Most notable was the introduction of a proper Big Bad and a Bittersweet Ending rather than the Downer Ending of the original, which was virtually a Shaggy Dog Story.
  • Adjective Noun Fred
  • After the End: Two separate catastrophes: a nuclear war that destroyed human civilization, and a rebellion that overthrew vampire civilization.
  • Animesque: Yes, even a text novel can be this, though considering when it was written it may have been the Trope Codifier for a lot of things we take for granted in anime. For example, throwing something so fast it's just a flash of light (in this case a wooden stake, thrown so fast it glows from air friction!) or the "create lots of images of yourself by running around really fast."
  • Aristocrats Are Evil - In this setting, "aristocrat" is a euphemism for "vampire"
    • The novels translate the term as "Noble", probably for the sake of brevity. Still, the trope applies: the high-class rulers of the old civilization were vampires, thus earning their new name.
  • Badass Longcoat: D has one, not surprisingly.
  • Badass Long Hair: Again, D.
  • Barehanded Blade Block: Justified in that only someone as powerful as a vampire could possibly hope to pull it off. Double justified in that even a vampire would have to practice this. Count Magnus Lee learned this trick from the Sacred Ancestor himself.
  • Beyond the Impossible: Even in the first novel, the combat is ridiculously over-the-top. D throws stakes so fast that they're a flash of light. Not because they're silver, no, they're wood; because he's throwing them so fast they're incandescing from the air friction.
  • Bigger on the Inside: In the novels it is often described how the vampire castles, carriages and even coffins may be vastly huge on the inside thanks to the space-warping technology the Nobility used to possess. There are tales of people entering a vampire's coffin and never finding the way out again. They were often built to accommodate their owner for centuries, yet another way the Nobility tried to forget their own decline.
  • Bishounen:
    • D, who is described as being impossibly beautiful and has everyone he meets falling for him left and right.
    • Vampires and dhampyrs in general are described as being unearthly beautiful creatures, when they aren't showing the monstrous side of their appearance.
  • Blondes Are Evil: Count Magnus Lee's daughter, Larmica. (Inverted in The Movie, where Doris and Larmica's appearances are inexplicably swapped).
  • Boring Invincible Hero: D is as much a plot device as he is a character. More, in some stories.
  • Cape Wings: In Bloodlust, Meier plays this straight and D subverts it (his cape distinctly looks like wings in the scene just before the page pic, but that's all it does).
  • Celibate Hero: In the movies and novels both, D either ignores or pushes away anyone who comes on to him. He does get to first base with Doris in the first novel, but he leaves at the end of the book before things can go any further. In the first movie, Doris tries to put the moves on him, but it starts to bring out his vampiric side and he shuts things down before he loses his self-control.
  • Character Exaggeration: Both followed and inverted by the Marcus Brothers in Bloodlust. In the original story, they are as much the villains as the Barbarois; they are vicious, murderous, and regularly rape Leila (even the invalid Grove). In Bloodlust, the evil aspects of their personalities are removed. However, their weaponry and abilities are enhanced to near-superhuman levels, much more so than as portrayed in the original story.
    • Not so much on the second part. Due to having more page time in the novel, they are shown to be more powerful and have more varied abilities than in the movie.
    • In the novel, the Marcus Brothers are genetically enhanced super humans with a wide range of powers. In the movie, they are Badass Normal. This arguably makes the movie versions, despite being significantly weaker than their novel counterparts, more impressive because normal humans tend to be very ineffective in this setting with a few exceptions. Even the weakest Dhampir is significantly more physically powerful, faster, and has better reflexes than a normal human.
  • Chickification: Doris Lang sadly falls prey to this after making a strong first impression in both the novel and movie. It's not directly stated that the Lees drained her willpower or whatever, she's just too tired to be an Action Girl any more.
  • Cross-Melting Aura: Meier Link is to crosses as psychics are to spoons.
  • Cruel Twist Ending: The end of Pale Fallen Angels.
  • Death Faked for You: Leila says she and D will claim Charlotte is dead so that she and Meier can go in peace.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Lefty often, but D could be one at times depending on how you take some of his comments in his downtime.
  • Depraved Bisexual: Rin-Ginsei is implied to be one of these in the novel.
  • Determinator: D fits this trope to a D.
  • Dhampyr: It's worth noting that the dhampirs of this series have radically different powers (if ANY powers); there's, like, no baseline.
    • There's really no baseline for anyone else, either. Vampire, human, mutant, construct, anything can range from minimal threat to insanely powerful. Though vampires are a bit scarier, on average, due to having spent the past ten thousand years dominating the planet.
    • The problem with assessing the powers of dhampirs is that, outside D, almost no actual dhampir actually show up in the novels, and the few that do almost never really show off their abilities. Most of the comments about dhampir could qualify as Unreliable Narrator and in a few instances are heavily implied to actually be D, who is much older than he appears. Even then, some of the dhampir that do show up, including D, are either artificially created, genetically enhanced or in some non-descript way modified.
  • Damsel in Distress: Doris Lang in the first movie and novel. Subverted in that she's an Action Girl too, but not tough enough to stop a millennia-old Noble on her own.
  • Downer Ending: Several stories end like this.
  • Dracula: The Nobility calls him the Sacred Ancestor, the god of their people. D calls him... well, a lot of things, mostly bad. The author himself gives Dracula different interpretations. At times, he makes Dracula out to be a heroic figure, even once fighting an perverse and evil vampire to save a human village in the backstory for Novel 7. Other times, like in novel 2, he's portrayed as more of a villain, apparently being the one responsible for transforming the kidnapped children into strange, kinda-sorta vampires. This is more Well-Intentioned Extremist however, since he's attempting to create vampires immune to sunlight - it's implied that such vampires would hve the best qualities of humans and vampires.
  • The Dragon: Rei-Ginsei after he makes a deal with Count Magnus to become one of the Nobility. In the movie his role is drastically reduced and this is pretty much all he is.
  • Dub Text: The Streamline dub inserts a direct Shout-Out to Shane in the originally wordless ending scene.
  • Even the Guys Want Him: D - most men in the novels commented how seeing D makes them wish they were women(!).
  • Evil Counterpart: Rei-Ginsei to D. He's quickly blown away. Later books feature several others; a couple even bring in an Evil Twin of one sort or another.
  • Eye Scream: Subverted in the first movie. Count Magnus Lee gets a dagger thrown right in his eye. He doesn't react, doesn't even blink, just pulls it out and regenerates the damage with a bored expression.
  • Exposition of Immortality: Count Magnus Lee provides a pretty good example of this, though he paints a less pleasant picture of the passing of ages than a lot of immortals:

I have lived for 10,000 years. Believe me, you have no idea what that means for me: boredom. Everlasting, hideous boredom. A never ending search for ways to pass the time, and mating with a human woman is one of the few I enjoy.

  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink: You can expect just about any creature, power or trope from horror or fantasy traditions to make an appearance in some shape or form during the novels. Even Atlantis receives a mention!
  • Faux Action Girl - Doris Lang becomes one, eventually. Supposedly, it's due to her relying on D way too much (and falling in love with him).
    • This happens to a lot of the female characters in the novels. And the male characters. Everyone who isn't D or the main villain, really.
  • Fan Service: During their fight in the novel, Doris Lang tries to distract D by dropping her clothes. It only distracts him on a very small scale, but for a completely different reason....
  • Giant Poofy Sleeves: Charlotte
  • Half-Human Hybrid:
    • D, thanks to Dracula's constant experiments.
    • In the first movie, Larmica was also one. This was completely absent from the original story.
    • There's also the Barberoi, an entire village of monstrous hybrids. They're pretty scary, but the elder of the village in the novel remembers how hard it was for all of them to survive and is quite reverant to D when he realizes who D must be. This sympathetic characterization was largely absent from the movie version of Bloodlust.
  • Hammer Horror: A major inspiration for the series.
  • Heroic Willpower: D, despite being a Dhampir, is far stronger than most of his opponents because of his willpower and resolve not to become a monster. It helps his dad was the Big D.
  • Hey, It's That Voice!: Quite a few examples...
  • Ho Yay: This often happens with several male characters who encounter D. Some are subtle, while others say things that require Brain Bleach. There's also a bit of Foe Yay tossed around from time to time.
  • Human Mom, Nonhuman Dad: D's mother was human. His father was the Sacred Ancestor himself.
  • In the Blood: Rather literally with Vampirism. It's not until Bloodlust that we even get a hint that vampires are capable of love.
    • Well, in the first novel there was Larmica, who was a full vampire in this version.
    • Also, isn't it pretty much stated in the first novel that the dear Sacred Ancestor really did love a human woman, resulting in, of course, D?. Of course, given his sometimes-hero-sometimes-monster portrayal between novels, it's really uncertain exactly WHAT he was doing...
      • The implications aren't very good considering that in novel 6 he explicitly rapes a young woman to produce another dhampyr descendant. Though since she goes her way to mention how sad he looked in the act, he probably wasn't getting kicks out of it, either.
  • Implausible Fencing Powers: D lives and breathes this trope. The impossiblity of some of the stuff D pulls is mentioned repeatedly by other characters and the narration. One example from the novels is when he cut a hologram...and rendered it incapable of reforming.
  • Long Running Book Series
  • Mechanical Horse
  • Monster Town: The Barberois town, high in the mountains.
  • Multiple Head Case: The Three Sisters and D himself, sort of.
  • Naughty Tentacles: The Three Sisters' hair, which immobilizes their victim with pleasure, followed by unpleasant execution and digestion.
  • No Ontological Inertia: In the movie, this was the cause of the Count's castle crumbling to dust when he died. In the book, though, it was due to Larmica's betrayal.
  • One-Letter Name: D
  • Organ Autonomy: D's left hand is alive. And it won't shut up. There's an upside when your hand can survive being severed for a while and has every reason in the world to give you CPR...
  • Our Vampires Are Different: They follow most of the traditional Vampire traits and weaknesses, but there are always a few exceptions - it's mentioned a few times that some vampire lines have different talents. It gets quite a LOT of attention when a vampire acts abnormally (such as the one that can move through water freely).
    • This trope really comes into play with the other Dhampirs. Their abilities almost never resemble D's.
      • Dhampir other than D are quite rare. The few that show up are usually artificially created or genetically modified, which further explains the range of powers beyond simply the unpredictable results of cross-breeding two different species.
      • D is also explicitly stated to be the only successful attempt to create essentially a super Dhampir. The fact no other Dhampir have his powers is, if anything, required by that plot point.
  • Out with a Bang: The Three Sisters is/are a very weird and Squicky example.
  • Panty Shot: Frequently from Doris, due to her very short skirt.
  • Pragmatic Adaptation: The original movie was a very simplified version of the first novel (most notably the Fiend Corps were reduced to a group of mute monsters and Rei Ginsei became simply Count Magnus' Dragon), but this improved the pacing of what was a very slow book.
  • Puppeteer Parasite: One shows up in the novel that formed the basis for Bloodlust. It's from the village of the Barberois, but it's only got a passing interest in actually helping Meier Link and is more concerned with raping and taking over people's bodies. It's also apparently related to the talking hand thing that D has.
  • Purple Prose: The early novels have bits of memorably overripe prose. For instance Doris Lang is described as having "a naked form so celestial none save the goddess Venus herself could have fashioned it." This decreases some in later novels.
  • Prehensile Hair: The Three Sisters.
  • Power At a Price: Grove is bedridden, sickly and barely able to move, but when he shoots up with a powerful (and toxic) drug, he's able to create an astral projection of himself made of pure energy that blasts anything to ashes with ray beams. Oh, and apparently the power trip makes him feel awesome, because he's usually smiling beautifully during all this.
  • Power Floats: Grove in Bloodlust.
  • Quirky Miniboss Squad: The Fiend Corps
  • Really Seven Hundred Years Old: D appears to be a young man (and is in fact repeatedly described as such by the narrator in the novels) but is actually ancient. In at least one instance the deeds he performed in a certain area have literally passed into legend by the next time he returned there.
  • Redemption Equals Death: Larmica
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: Most vampires when they're angry, if they don't have it all the time. If D gets Red Eyes, it's time to run.
    • No, wait, too late. You're dead all ready.
  • The Remnant: Human civilization is coming back full force and the "Aristocracy" of vampires is on the decline. Vampires can only be found in the hills of the Frontier away from the Capitol at the center of the continent. In their little micro-fiefdoms, though, they still exercise a degree of might.
  • Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Demon Deathchase ended up being one of these. EVERY character except D & Leila died a pointless and unpleasant death and Mayerling's entire journey was meaningless from the start, as the spaceport he'd be heading to had been ruined for centuries. There was no real Big Bad and there were almost no sympathetic characters (especially the Marcus Brothers, who are complete scumbags in the book). This is what makes the Adaptation Expansion of the Bloodlust movie so much better- it has a real (and awesome!) climax and a really heartwarming ending.
  • Shout-Out:
    • Count Magnus Lee is named after MR James's famous ghost story "Count Magnus" and Christopher Lee.
    • Larmica is a anagram of Carmilla, from an early vampire story by J. Sheridan LeFanu.
    • Carmilla in the second film is also obviously a shout-out to the literary Carmilla, as well as the historical Countess Bathory.
    • In Mysterious Journey to the North Sea Part 1, the seventh novel of the series, there is a town named Cronenberg, after, of course, horror film director David Cronenberg.
      • In the same novel there's also a village called Lugosi, obviously paying homage to Bela Lugosi who famously played Dracula in the first official adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel.
      • There's also a vampire named 'Meinster.' Given Hideyuki's love of Hammer Horror, the fact that this is the villain of The Brides of Dracula is assuredly not coincidence.
  • Sliding Scale of Vampire Friendliness: On the low end.
  • Spell My Name with an "S": The Balkan word for the child of a human and a vampire is "dhampir". When that word was transliterated into Japanese for the novels and then back into English for the American release of the movies, we ended up with "dunpeal". The novels correctly use "dhampir."
    • Similarly, in Bloodlust, the main villain Noble is referred to in both text and dialogue as "Meyer Link", despite the fact that a handwritten letter shown partway through the film spells it "Mayerling". The novel uses "Mayerling" consistently.
  • Sophisticated As Hell: D on a few occasions.
    • When he learns that Lefty failed to protect their current employer "Useless little bugger."
    • Seeing a giant get beat down by phantoms "They're beating the hell out of him."
  • The Stoic: D. His parasitic hand Lampshades this occasionally.
  • Streamlined: A pretty good dub in the style of Carl Macek (first movie).
  • Super Loser
  • Sword Sparks: Memorably going to the point of a 'hot blade' Blade Lock where one blade was a vampire's wing.
  • Too Many Mouths: D has one on his palm.
  • Transhuman Treachery: Generally, vampire thralls end up evil, and which of the mind control tropes it is varies.
  • Unnecessarily Large Interior: The vampires love these both in the movies and novels. The novels explain that the vampires attempted to delay their inevitable decline with increasingly ambitious projects, from building miles-tall highrises to sending expeditions to other galaxies, even though it would take thousands of years and serve no practical purpose.
  • The Vamp: Larmica, quite literally
  • Vampire Hunter: Obviously, but D doesn't do it as much as one might expect. In the time frame of the movies and novels vampires are mostly extinct, and D's jobs are often related to the Nobility only tangentially.
  • Vampire Monarch: Count Magnus Lee, and Carmilla in Bloodlust.
  • Vampire Refugee: The plot of the first novel and film.
  • Vein-O-Vision: How vampires see humans. It's made a point of in the novels how even the most kindhearted of Nobles will inevitably succumb to their instincts if they have to spend long periods in the company of mortals. When exceptions are seen, they tend to be huge plot points.
  • Walking the Earth: Hunters must do this constantly, D, obviously, being no exception.
  • Warm Bloodbags Are Everywhere
  • The Western
  • Yoshitaka Amano: Illustrated the novels and designed the characters for both movies.
  1. ↑ No, not that one.
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