What Is Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust?

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000) is Kawajiri’s return to Hideyuki Kikuchi’s frontier of vampires and bounty hunters, fifteen years after the 1985 Vampire Hunter D film built a Western cult. Fan demand for a follow-up set it in motion; production began at Madhouse in 1997, with Kawajiri writing and directing. For the novels, the art books and the 1985 film, this page’s subject continues over in the Vampire Hunter D archive.

The source is Demon Deathchase (1985), the third of Kikuchi’s D novels: the hunter D is hired to recover Charlotte Elbourne, taken by the vampire Baron Meier Link, and finds a love story where he expected a kidnapping, with the mercenary Marcus brothers racing him to the prize. Yoshitaka Amano, the novels’ illustrator, designed D himself; animation director Yutaka Minowa translated Amano’s fine, drifting lines into a style the whole cast could be drawn in. The result is regularly named among the most beautiful anime films ever made.

Its strangest fact is a production one. The film was built for the international market from the start: the animation was made in Tokyo, the post-production done in California, and the English soundtrack was recorded in 1999, before any Japanese dialogue existed. The mouth movements match the English. Bloodlust premiered at the Fantasia festival in July 2000; Japanese cinemas received it on 21 April 2001 in English, with Japanese subtitles, and Urban Vision opened it in the United States on 23 September 2001. A Japanese dub was recorded later, for Japanese home video.

That history explains a collector’s oddity: outside Japan, Bloodlust has always been an English-only film on disc. The Japanese licensor does not permit the Japanese track on foreign releases, so Urban Vision’s DVD (which reached number 7 on Billboard’s Top DVD Sales chart in March 2002) and Discotek’s 2015 Blu-ray are English-only by contract. The film returns to North American screens and shelves in force in 2027, detailed in Watching Today.