Top 18 Best Edgy Anime [2024]

If you love blood, gore, death, violence, and murder, then you’re a psychopath—or you just love edgy shows!

These shows are as edgy as it gets. Not afraid or self-aware enough to dive deep into dark elements.

The brutality, uncensored point-of-view is not for everyone—some of these edgy shows could even be seen as comedies for trying too hard to be scary, but all of them will tiptoe the line of “going too far.”

If you love the dark and edgy— the physiologically horror and thrillers, then you will easily find a great show below to sink your teeth into.

Best Edgy Anime

18. Another

The death scenes may be edgy if you haven’t heard of this horror anime, but the mystery is worth sticking around for! Just be ready for gore and some gruesome deaths.

Kouichi Sakakibara transfers to notorious class 3-3 at Yomiyama North Middle School. This class has a special routine they follow to hopefully prevent the strange curse that haunts class 3-3.

However, things don’t go as planned, and several people begin to mysteriously die. It’s up to Kouichi and his friends to put an end to the horrifying curse before even more people die.

17. Hell Girl

This is one supernatural anime that you don’t want to gloss over, as it combines modern and feudal Japanese elements.

Hell Girl starts as a story about a website that is only accessible at midnight.

Through this website, you can send the name of the person you want to send to Hell as revenge and thus meet the Hell Girl, Ai Enma.

But what makes this anime particularly edgy is the various ways Ai and her subordinates claim these poor souls.

Throughout this anime, you learn more about Ai and the characters as well while still getting an episodic horror anime at the same time.

16. Deadman Wonderland

After a horrifying earthquake that left Tokyo in shambles, some managed to escape the disaster. Ganta Igarashi is a young 9^th grader who managed to survive and doesn’t remember the disaster.

However, Ganta faces the Red Man, the person responsible for killing Ganta’s entire class right before his eyes.

Ganta is arrested and sentenced to death for this and is sent to Deadman Wonderland, the only private prison in Japan.

With the help of the mysterious girl named Shiro, Ganta must fight to survive in this death theme park prison to prove his innocence.

With its death and different types of horror combined, this is an edgy anime classic!

15. School Days

Either seen as a masterpiece or edgy trash, School Days is about a love triangle gone horribly wrong.

High school student, Makoto Itou, begins dating school beauty Kotonoha Katsura but begins to cheat and sleep around with other girls, including his classmate and close friend, Sekai Saionji.

Makoto manipulates Kotonoha and Sekai and toys with their feelings for him, driving both girls over the edge and towards a very fateful end to this toxic love triangle.

14. Redo of Healer

A series about following the path of pure revenge. Keyaru is a Hero with the ability to heal any injure.

He is meant for the greatest but is instead met with immeasurable abuse and torture. Saving up his power, Keyaru is able to escape to the past. He rewinds time to before he was ever tortured.

From being a Hero to being ruled by vengeance in his tormented heart, Keyaru will punish the ones that would’ve abused him and use his healing abilities to torture them repeatedly.

13. Magical Girl Site

Bullied at school, abused by her brother, all 14-year-old Aya Asagiri wants is to die.

Fate as other plans for the suicidal middle school student in the form of a mysterious website called Magical Girl Site.

It grants Aya magical powers in the form of a magical gun.

She uses it to send her school bullies to their terrifying deaths. Aya isn’t the only girl who gained magical powers and will kill each other to be the last one standing.

Aya finds herself teaming up with classmate, Tsuyuno Yatsumura, to survive and learn the truth behind Magical Girl Site.

12. Happy Sugar Life

What will you do? How far will you go to protect the one you love? Satou Matsuzaka wouldn’t know.

She’s a school beauty who is loose with men. This all changes when she falls in love with 8-year-old Shio Koube, and they begin to secretly live together.

Satou has never known real love until Shio and will do whatever it takes to keep her—even kill.

11. Magical Girl Raising Project

Middle student girl Koyuki Himekawa always dreamed of becoming a magical girl. Her dream comes true in the form of an app game on her phone, but at what price?

Koyuki becomes Snow White, one of sixteen magical girls that now must fight for survival in this twisted death game.

Magical girls turn on each other, betrayer each other, and kill so they can live. Will Koyuki survive, will she survive, how far will she go to stay alive?

10. Future Diary

High school loner, Yukiteru Amano, doesn’t need anything except his cellphone diary and imaginary friends, Deus Ex Machina, and his servant, Murmur.

At least, they thought they were imaginary until Deus gives Yukiteru a “future diary” and throws him and into a survival game with fellow classmate Yuno Gasi and ten other people who wield future diaries.

The winner will become the new god. Yukiteru and Yuno know they can’t both win, but how long will it takes for them to turn on each other?

9. Elfen Lied

College students and cousins Kouta, and Yuka, take in an injured woman, and both of their lives are changed forever.

If they couldn’t tell by her bright pink hair, the woman, Lucy, isn’t a normal human, she is a “Diclonius,” a breed of human-created the shadow world side of the government.

With a pair of horns and unseen telekinetic abilities, Lucy managed to escape the government’s torture but leaves a trail of bloodshed behind her and continues to follow her all the way to Kouta and Yuka.

8. Aoi Bungaku

An anime adaption of six short stories from Japanese literature. “No Longer Human” follows a high school student who isolates himself from society, going through the stages of life, and questioning his humanity and place in the world.

“The Spider’s Thread” is about a ruthless criminal named Kandata being punished in Hell. He shows compassion for a spider.

His kind act offers him redemption by climbing out of Hell by a spider’s thread.

“Hell Screen,” tells the story of a painter named Yoshihide living under a tyrant named Horikawa.

Wanting Yoshihide to paint him an image of Hell, Horikawa tortures him to push him close to death and hopeless darkness.

7. Higurashi When They Cry

In 1893, 14-year-old Keiichi Maebara moves to the small town of Hinamizawa and makes quick friends with his schoolmates.

Keiichi begins to learn about murders and disappearances that have occurred recently, but his new friends suddenly get quiet, and he starts to question his trust in them.

The mysteries surrounding Hinamizawa begin to rear their ugly head, and Keiichi is faced with the madness and physiological horror that follows.

6. Black Lagoon

To escape his mundane life and job in Japan, Rokuro Okajima takes a business trip to Thailand.

He ends up in Roanapur, a safe haven for convicts, becomes ruled by crime and the heartland of illegal crimes yet without any corruption where he immediately gets into trouble.

He is kidnapped by a group known as Black Lagoon. Trying to live, Rokuro becomes a member of Black Lagoon and fights against his morals and values with his new criminal life full of thrills and bloodshed.

5. Parasyte –the Maxim–

High school student Shinichi Izumi becomes targeted by an alien parasite that tries to take over his body.

It’s unable to take control of his mind and only ends up in his right hand.

The parasite named Migi has to work together with Shinichi to survive. With this flimsy agreement in place, the two fight against other parasites that want to eliminate humans.

4. Attack on Titan

15-year-old Eren Yeager and his people have lived a hundred years behind three giant walls to protect themselves by humanoid monsters called Titans that nearly wiped out the human race.

They haven’t figured out what Titans are or how to get rid of them in that time.

This fragile peace ends when a colossal Titan breaks the outer wall and begins the fight again for humanity’s survival.

This time, Eren would be there as a member of an elite military unit known as the Survey Corps.

3. Perfect Blue

Mima Kirigoe decides to leave her idol group to have a solo career as an actress. She gets a role in a crime drama series.

The demands of her new job and news that her former idol group is seemingly doing better without her are the least of Mima’s problems when an old fan begins to stalk her.

As Mima’s mind and life start to become more disturbing and sickening, she begins to lose sight of what’s fantasy and what’s reality.

Her life becomes very more horrifying when a string of murders begins—and all the victims of Mima’s employers.

2. Death Note

Student prodigy Light Yagami is bored of the routines and sick of society and the injustice of the world.

Something within him awakens when he finds a notebook on the ground titled the “Death Note” and attached to it, Ryuk, a god of death.

With their name and face, you can kill anyone you write down in the Death Note. Light sets out to kill every single criminal in order to recreate the world with him as their god!

Looks like someone’s got a god complex. The police don’t see it the same way as Light.

They see an unknown serial killer that targets criminals and call up the greatest detective in the world to catch him: L.

1. Monster

Kenzo Tenma is a talented neurosurgeon who is just a puppet to his fiancé’s father, his hospital director.

When Dr. Tenma stands up against the director, he manages to save the life of a normal boy over the town’s mayor.

Although he loses his job and social standing, it is quickly restored when the director and two doctors mysteriously die.

Dr. Tenma learns about the monster he saved that day goes off to stop him and repair the damage his decision caused.