アニメ： 屍鬼 Shiki

Difficulty Ranking: 2
Subs: Episodes 1-22 here
Number of episodes: 24 (1 series + 2 specials)
Vampires are such a cliche subject that there's nothing interesting that could possibly come out of a vampire series right? Or is there? 

That is what I thought before I began watching Shiki. The problem with vampires that that they have become more about romance than horror (e.g the Twilight books, or in anime, the Vampire Knight series) in modern day pop culture. Shiki, thankfully, has "old school" vampires.

Story: The story takes its time to build at first, like any good scary story. The setting is a remote Japanese village, and by end you feel like you are a part of it. While the initial slow pacing may annoy some people, good things come to those who wait, and you won't be disappointed. The anime is based on a novel from the late 90s by  Fuyumi Ono, who is best known for her 十二国記 (Twelve Kingdoms) series of books, and you can really tell a lot of work went into creating the setting. The most of the first episode is just introducing the setting, but it gets better from episode 2 onward. A lot of really great series have less than great first episodes...I guess it takes an episode to introduce things and such. Anyway, most of it is pretty easy to understand, but two of the characters are a doctor and a Buddhist priest, and most of their talks can get pretty heavy, not to mention the medical terminology, so the rating is between 1 and 3 because of varying difficulty levels within the episodes.

Characters: Once thing I love about this series is that the motivations of both the vampires and the humans are well developed. There are about 1000 people in the village, and yet each one has their small role to play.Watching how all the villagers deal with the knowledge that vampires have been preying on the village has really interesting. After a while, the screen time is half split between both sides, and it deepens the story when you see events which were shown from the humans' side from the vampires' eyes and vice versa. Even the side characters have a story, and their own reasons for doing things.

Animation: Another of the strengths of Shiki is its animation. While the character designs could take some getting used to, everything flows really well, although it would have been nice if they hadn't made the contrast between the vampires and the humans so jarring, it might have made some plot points less easy to figure out.

Sound: All the voice acting was very good, and made it easy to empathize with the characters. The opening and ending themes were not great, but they fit in with the atmosphere. The soundtrack was one of the most haunting soundtracks I have heard, and really sets the tone of the series well.

Overall, this series is a much watch, unless you really can't stand horror. I should mention that the second DVD special isn't out yet, but the first special was excellent.

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IceCream's thoughts:

Well, i just finished watching this series, it was pretty good! It's aaaages since i watched anything with Vampires!

If i were to rank this series, it would definately be a 3 though. While there are many easy lines, like Bokusenou said, i think that there's enough of those difficult talks, medical terminology, shinto terminology, and vampire terminology to make it more difficult than an avergage anime (though i haven't seen as many as Bokusenou, so this might be why i think that).

Anyway, one of the things about this anime is that it's not exactly a straight horror, but quite a philosophical story about morality, and what it means to be "human". It plays on your natural in-group / out-group emotional response of supporting the humans against the vampires to create a scene that ends in moral dubiousness and uncertainty. The young priest reminded me of a Dostoyevskian character in many ways, though i couldn't like him, or believe he was right either. And like Bokusenou said, it's definately interesting to watch the different reactions of the people in the village, and the different character types associated.

The only annoying thing for me was how long some of the characters took to do anything about it at all, though this was a property of their characters, and contributes to your understanding of who they are, so it's like that for a reason...

thanks for the recommendation Bokusenou :)