The zombie subgenre is popular around the world, and the walking dead have wormed their way into Japanese animation as well. There still aren’t as many zombie anime shows and movies as there are live-action horrors, but it’s only a matter of time until anime catches up with the world of practical and digital effects. Already, there are a ton of zombie anime available for streaming.
Zombies represent a deceptively big tent and not every zombie anime is focused purely on shambling, rotting dead things. With stories like Tokyo Ghoul and High School of the Dead populating the genre, anime lets viewers see the undead’s point of view alongside their foes’ and victims’.
Updated by Matthew Z. Wood on June 17, 2023: Zombies never seem to die forever. Zombies are as popular in anime as in other media and new and longtime fans alike are always hankering for new zombie shows, animated and otherwise, to consume. CBR has updated this article’s formats and entries accordingly.
15 Soul Eater
2 seasons, 51 episodes
While Soul Eater doesn’t revolve around zombies, they’re a common threat that the Reapers and Weapons face. A combination of supernatural action and comedy, it follows the students at Death Meister Academy as they learn the ins and outs of taking souls and protecting the sanctity of death.
Soul Eater is all about the balance between life and death. While the series is more focused on the battles between the Academy and the Witches who threaten it, the zombies are important symbolic foes for the avatars of death-in-training to face.
14 Hellsing Ultimate
1 season, 10 episodes
Hellsing Ultimate is an OVA created after the original Hellsing anime finished. However, this version of Hellsing actually follows the manga better than the original anime. This series is not solely about zombies, but zombies are part of its supernatural horror world.
Hellsing Ultimate focuses on the secret Hellsing Operation trying to control the supernatural monsters plaguing England. The classic character Abraham Van Helsing is the main character and, while he’s a vampire hunter at heart, no undead are safe from him.
13 Sankarea: Undying Love
1 season, 12 episodes
Sankarea is a romantic comedy and supernatural horror anime focused on high schooler Chihiro Furuya, who falls in love with a zombie. It’s a comedy series for the most part, but it also has some surprisingly horrifying and intense moments.
Chihiro’s fascination with zombies prompts him to make a resurrection potion, accidentally turning his classmate Rea Sanka into an undead. Fortunately, she eats hydrangea leaves and not brains, but it’s still discomfiting. Somehow, the two fall in love and have to make the best of their weird half-existence.
12 Sunday Without God
1 season, 12 episodes
Sunday Without God is a fantasy, mystery, supernatural anime about a world where humans can no longer procreate or die. The idea is that God abandoned his creations and then left behind gravekeepers, supernatural entities who help the living dead find rest.
The “zombies” in this anime are different than conventional walkers, but they operate under a similar logic. When people die in this world, they keep moving and don’t decay. The series’ young protagonist, Ai, works with an immortal gunslinger to learn the truth about their world and put the living dead to rest.
11 Is This A Zombie?
2 seasons, 24 episodes
Is This A Zombie? is about zombies, but it’s also a pure comedy. The show revolves around Ayumu, who is tragically murdered by a serial killer. However, silent and adorable magical girl necromancer Eucliwood Hellscythe resurrects him, only to have him killed again.
This time death doesn’t stick, though, as Hellscythe’s magic animates his undead body. It’s a series about ridiculous romance and peril, as the two evade demons and murderers, and Ayumu learns about his true nature.
10 Highschool Of The Dead
1 season, 12 episodes
Highschool of the Dead is arguably the best zombie anime to date. It’s also very similar to a traditional Western zombie apocalypse story but that doesn’t keep it from being exciting and scary in turns.
As Highschool of the Dead’s title implies, the short series follows five high school students working together to get to safety after their high school is overrun by zombies. Highschool of the Dead’s fan service can be excessive at times, but its solid characters and devotion to realistic violence more than make up for its shortcomings.
9 Kabaneri Of The Iron Fortress (Koutetsujou No Kabaneri)
1 season, 12 episodes
Set in the Industrial Revolution, Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress is often called the steampunk Attack on Titan, populated with hard-to-kill undead monsters called Kabane instead of titans. The most obvious reason for this comparison is the fact that Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress keeps humanity safe from the Kabane with stations and massive walls.
When a steam locomotive hijacked by the Kabane crashes into one of the stations, a young engineer named Ikoma creates a weapon that can slaughter the monsters. This has world-changing implications, as the young hero steps up to save the world from its undead ravagers.
8 School-Live! (Gakkougurashi!)
1 season, 12 episodes
School-Live!’s animation is so cute that it’s hard to believe it’s a zombie anime at first. It’s not that surprising, however, as the Japanese animation industry’s take on the zombie genre often deviates from the West’s.
When viewers watch the first episode and see cute school girls doing cute things and learn that they’re the only survivors of their school in a post-apocalyptic zombie world, School-Live! can feel a little dissonant. However, with a MyAnimeList score of 7.62, entertainment is guaranteed. Fans can watch these cute girls try to maintain some normalcy while they try to outlast the zombie apocalypse.
7 Seoul Station
1 film
If viewers enjoyed the South Korean zombie movie Train to Busan, they’ll definitely love its animated prequel, Seoul Station, which came out in 2017. The zombie anime film has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Seoul Station follows a young woman who tries to survive after downtown Seoul is overrun by Busan’s terrifyingly fast zombies. Focused on three characters, its a straightforward, fast-paced film with an awe-inspiring twist that no zombie fan will want to miss!
6 Gungrave
1 season, 26 episodes
Based on a popular third-person shooting game, Gungrave is a serious zombie anime that focuses on Brandon Heat’s path to revenge. Now called Beyond the Grave, or Grave for short, he’s looking for revenge on his former best friend and partner in organized crime.
At best an antihero, Grave is a nearly invincible undead revenant. He’s animated only by his desire for revenge on the syndicate that killed, killing his fellow undead on the side.
5 Tokyo Ghoul
4 seasons, 48 episodes
Tokyo Ghoul follows the journey of a normal, quiet 18-year-old college student named Ken Kaneki. His life is turned upside down after a near-death accident, where he’s saved by receiving an organ transplant from a ghoul. The transplant transforms him into a human-ghoul hybrid who must now eat human beings to live.
Ken must figure out how to preserve his humanity while hiding the fact that he is now a ghoul. Unlike regular flesh-eating zombies, ghouls try to live normal lives in society, keeping their monstrous identities secret. However, it’s not like they have a choice, and humanity hunts and mistreats them to a degree that it’s hard to take sides in this world without heroes.
4 Corpse Princess (Shikabane Hime: Aka)
2 seasons, 25 episodes
While Makina Hoshimura may not look like a zombie and doesn’t eat brains, the Corpse Princess is definitely one of the undead. She’s reanimated after being killed alongside her family and now needs to kill 108 other revived corpses to join her family in heaven.
Makina’s ultimate goal is avenging her family’s death by defeating the undead group known as Seven Stars. A cool female character with formidable physical skills, Makina uses dual MAC-11 machine guns to destroy her enemies, making her unique among anime’s many zombies.
3 The Empire Of Corpses (Shisha No Teikoku)
1 film
In an alternate 18th-century England, scientist Victor Frankenstein discovers a method of reanimating the dead. However, after his famous Creature dies, others discover a more stable way of reanimating corpses, paving the way for zombies in manual labor in the 19th century. However, unlike Victor’s method, this newer method isn’t able to return the corpse’s soul back to the body.
John Watson, a medical student, is later tasked by the British government to obtain Frankenstein’s notes on reanimating a corpse with a soul. The unique and interesting plot, as well as the characters who are based on historical and popular literary figures, makes The Empire of Corpses an interesting and fun zombie anime.
2 Zombie-Loan
1 season, 13 episodes
In Zombie Loan, Chika and Shito are zombies who preserve their un-lives by hunting down other zombies. Later joined by a girl named Michiru, who has the ability to see a ring around a person’s neck when they are about to die, the three are trying to survive, whatever that means in a world populated by the dead.
Chika and Shito use Michiru’s special ability to track the undead so they can pay off their debt to Zombie-Loan, the company that brought them back to life. They hope for a quiet existence together, on the other side of this violent slavery.
1 GYO: Tokyo Fish Attack (OVA)
1 OVA
The 75-minute GYO: Tokyo Fish Attack OVA (Original Video Animation) is based on the horror manga of the same name written and illustrated by the popular horror mangaka Junji Ito. As the title indicates, instead of human corpses, here Tokyo is under attack by incredibly stinky undead fish, made more dangerous by the infectious disease they carry.
In the middle of this chaos, a girl named Kaori goes on a quest to find her missing boyfriend. Easily one of the weirdest zombie anime, it’s happy to go to absurd lengths to make its points, even granting the fish-zombies metal legs to make them a more credible threat on land. It’s silly, disturbing, and surreal all at once.
