Scariest Psychological Horror Manga

Key Takeaways

• Manga explores unique psychological horror themes through creative villains like aliens and serial killers.
• Stories depict how people’s primal fears can lead to drastic psychological changes and terrifying consequences.
• Manga such as “PTSD Radio,” “Seeds of Anxiety,” and “Zashiki Onna” offer chilling, thought-provoking tales.

There are some world-famous horror manga but only a few with truly mind-bending and terrifying stories that play tricks with readers’ psyche. Manga fans have fine options of sites to read manga online and explore deeply emotional and thought-provoking dark manga stories that’ll surely cause some sleepless nights and vivid nightmares. While these twisted stories are not the best manga for beginners, they do provide unique worlds, spine-chilling characters, and stories filled with plot twists for readers who are ready for mature manga.

Some of the best dark psychological manga around explore all kinds of themes and have creative villains, including aliens, serial killers, and never-before-seen monsters. They combine regular horror tropes with ones that mess with a reader’s mind, making it clear why this brand of horror works so well and is cerebral enough for fans of quality media to be invested in if the execution is on point.

Updated November 24, 2024 by David Heath: Sometimes, the scariest things lurk within the human mind. People can escape monsters, killers, etc., but they can’t escape their own primal fears. One bad day can turn even the most ordinary person into a threat, or make them susceptible to some other malign influence. A good psychological horror story can play on that and show how far a person can fall when things get turned upside down.

That’s why this list has been updated with more of the scariest psychological manga going around. The original list and last update saw some big hits from famous mangaka like Junji Ito and Shuzo Oshimi. This time, it’s been updated with a few hits that flew under the radar. At least by comparison to those strips. Nearly every manga fan is familiar with Uzumaki, even before its anime adaptation, but they should also look into Shiki and The Summer Hikaru Died for similar, psychological thrills.

1 PTSD Radio

The Manga That Derailed the Creator’s Career

PTSD Radio didn’t completely stop creator Masaaki Nakayama from working. He’s still active here and there. But it was while working on the manga that he suffered through his own horrors. He and his team discovered his workplace covered by a broken shrine, followed by them spotting strange shadows and flickering lights. His team fell ill, and Nakayama himself developed an autoimmune disorder that made him bleed heavily from the mouth, resembling a scene from PTSD Radio.

The manga itself saw the spirit Ogushi avenge itself by traveling from person to person through their hair, tormenting them by distorting people’s looks, making them see apparitions that aren’t actually there and other dreadful sights. Nakayama’s penmanship masters the uncanny valley to turn recognizable people into horrors that linger in the mind. Unfortunately, Nakayama’s health and experience led him to put the manga on indefinite hiatus.

2 Seeds of Anxiety

Lives Up to Its Name By Planting Itself In Readers’ Minds

Nakayama may have stopped working on PTSD Radio, but he’s still making fresh chapters of Seeds of Anxiety. It’s quite similar to PTSD Radio, except that manga tried to tie all its short stories into one story, where characters from one story could appear in another as they figure out Ogushi’s involvement. Seeds of Anxiety (also called Fuan No Tane) doesn’t get so complicated.

Its own short stories are all self-contained tales, where its lead characters encounter different, lingering threats. Nakayama’s art is still potent with nightmare fuel, with deformed faces staring into the readers’ souls, or horrors that literally only exist in people’s heads. For example, one story is about Ochonan, an imaginary friend to children with creepy vertical eyes and mouths. But he says he’s a good guy. It’s his tilted-eyed twin kids should be wary of. If they’re good, they won’t see him. If not, they’re in trouble.

3 Zashiki Onna

A Tale About An Unstoppable, Stalking Terror

Being a victim of stalking is a horrible experience that no one should go through, but it is one too many people have experienced. It’s a true psychological horror and one that has inspired many horror stories. Zashiki Onna became a smash hit on its 1993 release because it captured how horrible it was to be constantly watched, as college student Hiroshi comes across an unkempt woman trying to reach his neighbor’s apartment.

After catching her attention, she starts going after him instead, knocking on his door, ringing his phone, and going as far as getting a copy of his key to get into his apartment and vandalize it. As her obsession with him grows, his nerves get more on edge. It isn’t particularly gory, nor is the stalker especially horrific to look at. Yet this grounded approach makes it more horrifying as it feels more real and likely to happen to anyone — even the reader.

4 No Longer Human

The Downfall Of A Man With Sociopathic Tendencies

No Longer Human is one of the most popular novels to come out of Japan. Written by Osamu Dazai, it’s a quasi-biography about a man who pretends to relate to others and be sociable. But this is a facade. He can’t relate to others, and his attempts to do so see him either get abused or succumbing to self-destructive behavior. It’s been adapted into movies, an anime (via Aoi Bungaku), and two different manga.

Usamaru Furuya’s manga adaptation is good, but Junji Ito’s is a chilling story full of his classic brand of artwork, where every turn of the page becomes a dreadful prospect. Watching the downfall of the main character is uncomfortable. On top of it being ironically relatable to anyone who’s dealt with depression and mental health issues, Ito’s art brings it to life in graphic detail, which can make it too real for some. The manga deals with some truly disturbing content, so reader discretion is advised.

5 Blood On The Tracks

How Far An Overprotective Mother Will Go To Keep Her Child Safe

Blood on the Tracks has a spine-chilling story that delves deep into the dark aspects of a mother-son relationship, as Seiichi witnesses his mother Seiko almost kill his cousin. She succumbs to a personality disorder that makes her an overprotective monster, and Seiichi is torn between keeping her safe and fleeing her clutches. Their struggle shows in Oshimi’s meticulous artwork, which perfectly paints every nuance of emotion, from fleeting discomfort to full-blown panic.

It showcases how Seiko has become one of the greatest manga villains of recent times with its blend of psychological tension and dark realism. Readers can feel the overbearing stress through each panel via its superb framing and artistic skill. It’s perfect for manga readers who enjoy thought-provoking psychological horror stories that explore themes about love and obsession and take them on horrific but highly entertaining rides.

6 Jagaaaaaan

How People Can Turn Into Monsters By Suppressing Their Emotions

Jagaaaaaan is a fascinating manga with a unique story that dives deep into the psyche of its characters as well as its readers. The manga tells the story of a man who fights off monsters, which sounds like a fantasy or action series. However, horror fans who give it a shot will end up exploring a one-of-a-kind tale in which people can transform into grotesque creatures if they suppress their desires and frustrations.

These terrifying monsters are an allegory for people repressing their feelings, as when people bottle everything up, it can develop into more serious problems later on. Jagaaaaaan just makes it more literal, and protagonist Jagasaki is on the verge of joining them if he doesn’t come to terms with his own issues. This manga is an entertaining exploration of the human mind with a pinch of dark humor and plenty of grotesque and twisted action scenes.

7 Kasane

A Woman Uses Lipstick to Change Faces, Losing Herself in the Process

Daruma Matsuura’s suspenseful horror story, Kasane, is a chilling tale that discusses the pressure women face to stay beautiful and live up to society’s standards. If they’re not feminine enough, curvy enough, or obliging enough, then nothing else they do matters. Kasane realizes this when, despite having brilliant acting abilities, she struggles to succeed because she doesn’t look as pretty as her famous mother. That changes when she uses her mom’s lipstick, which allows her to temporarily switch faces with whoever she kisses.

Now she could look as stunning as she likes, and get her revenge on her bullies. But what happens to her true self when she’s stealing other people’s faces? Is she the confident schemer that the lipstick makes her? Or did it change her into someone or something else? This weird but thought-provoking story makes it a great choice for manga lovers, and for those who appreciate beautiful and iconic art styles in anime and manga.

8 Tomie

Junji Ito Takes the Succubus Back to Its Scariest Roots

Tomie is one of Junji Ito’s more well-known works. It’s been adapted into nine movies and has appeared in all of Ito’s short story anime adaptations thus far. It’s essentially the tale of a woman whose infectious charm wraps men around her finger, driving them to perform acts of brutality. Even if they kill her, she comes back in different forms to continue feeding off their energy until they’re dead.

It sounds more like a monster story, but Ito’s work slowly builds up to its climax, showing how its characters fight against or fall to Tomie’s will. Their psyche is twisted by their obsession with her, making them edgy, jealous, and prone to physical outbursts, until they kill others or themselves. Ito’s artwork captures these moods perfectly, alongside how Lovecraftian Tomie truly is when they realize she’s beyond human.

9 Manhole

Horrifies Readers With Its Revelations

Tetsuya Tsutsui’s Manhole is an anxiety-inducing manga that combines a crime mystery tale and psychological horror. Inoue and Mizoguchi are detectives trying to uncover the truth behind a string of murders and a virus caused by a rare and strange parasite. As it spreads to epidemic levels, they try to find out whether the two are tied together and stop the city from falling into mass panic.

The story plays out like a biological take on Saw, as the detectives end up biting off more than they can chew when they realize the truth. It’s an intense tale where the leads’ situations get as grim as the infection itself. Even if the mystery gets solved, things don’t work out well for everyone, making it a great suggestion for fans who like terrifying mystery stories as well as body horror.

10 Museum: The Serial Killer Is Laughing In The Rain

A Serial Killer Wreaks Havoc In A Frog Mask

Museum: The Serial Killer Is Laughing in the Rain is Ryosuke Tomoe’s weirdest and most disturbing manga, and revolves around a strange serial killer who murders people while wearing a frog mask. While the story is intriguing, it never gets too gory or hard to follow, making it a good introductory manga for beginners to psychological horror.

The story puts the reader in Detective Sawamura’s shoes as they try to find the killer, figure out who they are, and stop them. Just when it seems to be framing one character as the killer’s next victim, it throws in a curveball that sets them back and expands the mystery. The killer ends up torturing Sawamura as much as their victims as they escalate their crimes, and taunt him through messages and packages, a la Jack The Ripper.

11 Gyo

A War Experiment With Nightmarish Twists And Turns

Junji Ito turns up often on this list because most of his work focuses on the human psyche and how it can be warped and stretched until the mind itself becomes as horrifying as the cosmic terrors they encounter. Such is the case in Gyo, in which a couple, Kaori and Tadashi, whose relationship is on the rocks, end up fighting to survive against a military experiment gone wrong.

The body horror stands out the most, as the experiment is a biomechanical virus that turns life into robo-zombies powered by a gas known as the ‘death stench.’ However, the psychological horror is still present. Instead of being driven insane by the sight of the visual horrors, Kaori and Tadashi, and any other survivors, are gradually driven to the brink by the ‘death stench.’

12 Blame!

A Psychological Horror In A Dystopian Cyberpunk World

Blame! follows Killy’s dangerous and challenging journey through ‘the City,’ a gigantic megastructure in space that covers nearly all of the Solar System. He explores its cyberpunk dungeons, fighting off cyborgs and other creatures to find the Net Terminal Gene that will allow humanity to regain control of the City’s computer network, known as the ‘Netsphere.’

It’s predominantly a sci-fi action thriller, though it’s no stranger to psychological horror. Alongside Nihei’s dark art style and creatures, the sheer scale of ‘the City’ emphasizes how huge the odds are against Killy. It could take centuries to go from one end of it to the other, where threats could be hiding around any of its foreboding, shadowy corners. As hard as Blame‘s sci-fi is, it always has something that makes the reader’s skin crawl.

13 Dragon Head

A Post-Apocalyptic Horror Manga Where Survival Is Key

Dragon Head is a dark survival story that only gets darker as it goes along. It’s bad enough at first, as a train crash kills all but three members of a school class on a field trip. One of them, Teru, tries to lead the others to safety. But once they make it back to the outside world, they discover Japan has fallen into the apocalypse. Natural disasters have destroyed all settlements, society has collapsed, and people have succumbed to their worst impulses.

No one knows what caused the disasters, but that lack of knowledge adds to the fear that what’s left of humanity suffers. It snaps some people’s minds, making them see things that aren’t there. Others commit mass suicide to avoid dying of hunger. Most mass disaster media focus on the spectacle of the event. Dragon Head goes into the horror of it, and how it can break people.

14 Nijigahara Holograph

A Complex Psychological Horror That Takes No Prisoners

Nijigahara Holograph offers a thought-provoking story about how urban legends can hold an allegorical truth. It starts with Arie telling the story of a girl sent by God to warn people of a monster that threatens to devour them. They sacrifice the girl to appease it, but it doesn’t work. It starts a cycle where the girl is reborn to warn others each time, and each time she fails, the monster grows bigger from feeding.

Arie’s classmates bully her for telling the story and shove her down a well. The fall leaves her comatose, and the guilt drives her classmates into silence. But it also makes their existing neuroses worse as they repress the trauma. Arie will awaken one day, but her classmates are now devoured by their own personal monsters. It’s a complex story that’s sad, horrifying, and weirdly beautiful with Asano’s exquisite artwork.

15 Multiple Personality Detective Psycho

A Detective’s Mind Is Wrecked After Witnessing His Wife’s Death

On top of being a strong psychological horror manga, Multiple Personality Detective Psycho is also one of the best detective manga for those who love violence and mystery-filled stories. It follows Yosuke, a homicide detective who murdered the killer he was investigating after they killed his wife. He was imprisoned but served his term and began a new life as a private investigator.

However, things aren’t quite that simple, as the experience left him with dissociative personality disorder. Sometimes he’s the cool-headed detective Kazuhiko Amamiya. Other times, he’s a psychopath called Shinji Nishizono. Some personalities seem to move from one person to another or linger within him. The story is mainly a crime thriller, though Yosuke’s struggle to maintain a grip on reality is a familiar, mind-bending ground for psychological horror fans.

16 Doubt

Social Deduction Taken to Its Most Lethal Extreme

Doubt is a bloody manga based somewhat on the “Werewolf” social deduction game. Yuu, Rei, Haruka, Mitsuki, and Eiji are friends brought together by ‘Rabbit Doubt,’ a cellphone game where, like ‘Werewolf’, players pick rabbit avatars and try to determine which one of them is actually a wolf in disguise before they kill the others. When they meet up, they’re knocked out and trapped in an abandoned hospital by a figure in a rabbit mask.

Now the five students, alongside a small boy, have to play the game for real as they have to figure out who trapped them there. If the building’s death trap challenges don’t catch them, their paranoia will. Each slight, imagined or otherwise, ends up being ‘proof’ of one of them being a wolf. Doubt is an effective display of how a killer doesn’t necessarily have to get their hands dirty to kill their victims when they can manipulate them instead.

17 Helter Skelter

Self-Image Issues Become Terrifying To Behold

Like Kasane, Helter Skelter explores the lengths people, particularly women, go to maintain or improve their looks since society makes them as important (if not more so) than their other values as a person. But instead of Kasane‘s identity issues, Helter Skelter has it drive its lead, Liliko, into the worst excesses of vanity and greed until she’s driven into self-destruction.

Liliko became a fashion icon and supermodel through her looks and maintained them through multiple plastic surgeries until she looked nothing like the ordinary girl she once was. However, no surgery can keep her body from aging and wearing out. Her desperation to stay on top drives her to harm herself and those around her, directly and indirectly. She can make her facade as pretty as she likes, but it can’t fix the person behind the mask.

18 Fraction

A Serial Killer’s Gory Rampage Meets a Treatise on Manga Making

Fraction is one of Shintaro Kago’s scariest horror manga, which is saying something as Kago made his name drawing what critics call ‘fashionable paranoia.’ Most of his work involves extreme themes, like assault, gore, and horrifying body modifications. He often uses it for satire, as Fraction is partly a murder mystery and partly a fourth-wall-breaking display of how manga tells stories.

On the surface, it’s about the Slicing Devil, a serial killer who discovers he’s got a copycat imitating his murderous methods. Next to it, Kago himself explains how his work, and manga in general, tell their stories and direct the readers’ focus. One chapter has readers seeing a series of bloody murders and the paranoia the victims and killer suffer. Another has Kago telling them about his collection of obituaries. It’s a fascinating read, though it requires a strong stomach to get through.

19 Homunculus

A Man Almost Loses His Mind When He Discovers What Lurks Inside Other People’s Heads

Homunculus rivals Junji Ito’s scariest stories in terror. It follows Nakoshi, a homeless man who agrees to trepanation surgery (drilling a hole in the skull) to earn enough money to free his impounded car. At first, the procedure didn’t seem to have done anything. Then he begins seeing ‘distortions.’ People who look normal begin to look like animals, trees, or monsters when he looks at them with his left eye.

Dr Itoh, the scientist behind the experiment, identifies them as homunculi. Like Jagaaaaaan, they’re weird figures who represent the person’s inner neurosis. Only Nakoshi can’t punch them out, as they’re still people. He’s just able to see their mental health issues in a visual form. Even friends and family can become some horrifying monstrosity and leave their mark on him.

20 Monster

A Doctor Tails a Serial Killer

Monster delves into the consequences of a person’s actions, no matter how benign they perceive them to be. Driven to let a poor worker die so he could operate on a celebrity, Dr Tenma goes against the hospital’s next rule and operates on a young boy instead of the Mayor of Düsseldorf, letting him die, so the child can leave. It initially ruins his reputation until his worst critics end up dead and the boy is gone.

Years later, he learns the boy grew up to be Johan, a notorious serial killer. Urasawa’s work is a horror manga in the same way Silence of the Lambs is a horror movie. Both have more elements of crime thrillers in their ink than horror stories, yet they’ve got enough horror in there to count, particularly as it goes into Tenma and Johan’s opposing moralities on the value of life. The doctor says he values all life, yet he still sees some lives (the worker and Johan) as more deserving of his treatment.