By Sam Reeve
Today I’m sharing with you folks the anime series Hellsing, which had an original run of only 13 episodes. It’s based on a manga series of the same name by Kouta Hirano.
Set in modern-day England, the series follows several members of the vampire-extermination group called The Hellsing Organization. The series starts off with Alucard (‘Dracula’ backwards), a powerful vampire employed by the organization, converting a young female police officer during a mission. She joins the organization as well but doesn’t immediately take to being a vampire, and initially she refuses to drink blood.
The organization is seeing more and more vampires turn up, and finds out they’re being artificially created with some kind of micro-chip.
WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT: Alucard, though he actually doesn’t appear much in each episode, is a pretty bad ass anti-hero. He’s a pretty old vampire and has a lot of pride for the vampire race, and enjoys nothing more than destroying the immature, freshly-turned nobodies who just want to be vampires for kicks.
There are some pretty good scenes with creepy ghouls and vampires attacking people, and though I’ve only seen half of the episodes so far, it’s good enough that I’ll continue to the end of the series.
WHAT DOESN’T WORK: The only thing that really gets to me is the new vampire girl, Seras Victoria. She’s dumb, weak, and annoys the fucking pants off me because she can’t decide what the hell she wants to do or how she feels about anything. Maybe I’m just being picky, but every episode there’s at least one moment where I want to reach into the screen and give her a good smack.
It also sucks that Alucard, the coolest character, isn’t actually the one we see the most of, like I initially thought after the first episode. There’s another series called Hellsing Ultimate, which I haven’t gotten to yet, that seems to focus more on Alucard.
The show isn’t the creepiest, so if you’re looking to be scared this won’t be your cup of tea. The soundtrack actually does little to help it have a scarier or more actiony feel, since a lot of the music is pretty jazzy and seems like an odd fit for the show.
Here’s a trailer for the series, and below that I’ve posted the first episode in its original Japanese, with English subtitles. Cheers!
