Wicked City (1987): Kawajiri’s Neon-Nightmare Still Hits Like a Freight Train

I have a deep, possibly unhealthy obsession with the late-80s OVA era. Those years produced some of the most uncompromising, boundary-shredding animation the medium has ever seen, and nobody — and I mean NOBODY — embodied that ferocious creative spirit quite like Yoshiaki Kawajiri. So yeah, this review is going to be biased. Cheerfully, unapologetically biased.

Wicked City (1987) isn’t just a good film. It’s a defining artifact — a blood-soaked, neon-slicked fever dream that helped establish an entire aesthetic language for adult anime.

The Setup: Two Worlds on a Razor’s Edge

The premise is elegant in its bleakness. Humanity and the “Black World” — a parallel dimension crawling with shapeshifting demons — have maintained a fragile peace treaty for centuries. Now that treaty is up for renewal, and radical factions on the demonic side want nothing more than to watch both worlds burn. Enter the Black Guard, a covert human-demon police unit tasked with keeping a key diplomat alive long enough to sign the new agreement.

Simple enough, right? Wrong. Kawajiri isn’t interested in simple. He’s interested in paranoia, loneliness, and the creeping dread of not knowing whether your one-night stand is going to kiss you or turn into a sexy demonic arachnid. (That scene, by the way. I still think about that scene.)

Our protagonist, Taki, is a hard-boiled Black Guard agent — cynical, competent, emotionally sealed off from the world in that very specific way that noir protagonists tend to be. He’s paired with Makie, a demon-side operative, and their partnership carries the film’s emotional weight far more than the plot mechanics do. Taki isn’t a likable character, exactly. But he’s a real one, which counts for more.

Kawajiri’s Visual Language: Darkness as Architecture

Here’s where Wicked City absolutely earns its legendary status. Kawajiri’s visual approach is almost architectural in its precision — he constructs dread out of shadow the way a mason lays brick. Sharp character designs with almost cruel angularity. Elongated silhouettes swallowed by pools of darkness. A color palette drowning in cold blues and purples occasionally punctured by sickly neon yellows and reds.

It’s chiaroscuro as a storytelling device, not just an aesthetic choice. The light in this film is earned. When it appears, it feels like a wound.

And then there’s the body horror. Oh, the body horror.

Wicked City goes places that even seasoned horror fans might find genuinely unsettling — and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order. The demonic transformations here aren’t your standard monster-movie rubber suit fare. Human anatomy warps and splits into insectoid configurations, into lethal biological weaponry, into things that shouldn’t be able to exist and yet somehow do, rendered with visceral, unflinching detail. There’s a real Cronenbergian spirit at work, filtered through a distinctly Japanese sensibility that feels both ancient and hyper-modern simultaneously.

This visual DNA fed directly into Ninja Scroll (1993), also directed by Kawajiri, which took the stylized violence and supernatural menace and cranked everything up to eleven. But Wicked City came first, and it’s rawer for it — less polished, more dangerous-feeling, like something assembled in controlled chaos.

The Eroticized Horror Problem (Yes, We’re Talking About It)

I’m not going to pretend the film doesn’t have issues, because it absolutely does. Wicked City leans heavily into the sexualization of its demonic horror — female demons as erotic predators, violence fused with sexuality in ways that are sometimes genuinely provocative and sometimes just… uncomfortable. Makie, despite being a skilled operative, spends a disproportionate amount of the film in peril rather than agency.

Is it a product of its time? Partially. Does that excuse it entirely? No. The late-80s OVA scene was a wild, largely unregulated creative frontier and some of what got produced in that era reflects attitudes toward women that haven’t aged gracefully. Wicked City is not exempt from that critique. I still love the film. Both things are true.

The Hard-Boiled Surrealism

What I think gets underappreciated in discussions of Wicked City is how genuinely weird it is on a structural level. This isn’t just a horror film with noir window dressing. It’s surrealist fiction dressed in a detective story’s trench coat. The logic of the Black World bleeds into Taki’s reality (and by extension ours) in ways that feel genuinely dreamlike — unsettling in that specific mode where you can’t quite identify the moment things stopped making conventional sense.

Kawajiri clearly absorbed a lot of Western noir — the rain-soaked streets, the morally compromised hero, the femme fatale — and then ran it all through something that feels pulled from Domu or Araaki’s darker impulses. The result is distinctly, irreducibly Japanese while also being one of the most purely cinematic pieces of animation from that entire era.

The inter-dimensional diplomacy angle, which sounds dry when you summarize it, actually grounds the supernatural chaos in something thematically interesting: the exhausting, thankless work of maintaining peace between forces that fundamentally distrust each other. Taki’s cynicism isn’t just characterization. It’s the film’s thesis.

Should You Watch Wicked City?

If you’re already deep in the horror-anime rabbit hole — yes, obviously, what are you even waiting for. Wicked City is essential viewing and belongs on any serious list of influential adult animation.

If you’re newer to this territory and came here through something like Akira or Ghost in the Shell — watch it, but know what you’re getting into. This is darker, messier, and more explicit than either of those films. It has rough edges it never bothered to sand down, and I’d argue those rough edges are part of what makes it vital.

If body horror makes you genuinely queasy… maybe start somewhere else and circle back. No shame in that.

Wicked City isn’t a comfortable watch. Kawajiri made something that operates on the frequency of a bad dream — the kind you wake from at 3am, sweating slightly, unsure for a moment where the real world starts. That’s a genuinely difficult artistic achievement, and nearly four decades later, this film still pulls it off.

Classic Kawajiri. Essential horror anime. Highly recommended — with full acknowledgment that it will unsettle you in ways you didn’t entirely sign up for.