Normally when I watch a movie, there are so many filters it has to pass through on its way into my perception. There are preconceptions of story, or character, of setting. We have expectations on how it should sound and what movie music is like. One of the fascinating things about film, I think, is that you have to use quite a lot of your brain to even receive what is being thrown at you, because there are so many sensory and cognitive processes which are relevant to the form.

I don't want to get overly psychoanalytical about it all, but I just mention that because Vampire Hunter D hit me in a completely different way to a "normal" movie. It's like it bypassed all those conscious faculties and drove straight into my subconsciousness. This movie appealed to me in a way which I'm not sure I can even articulate. But rather than consider things like storyline and character, I was more preoccupied in just reacting to the raw imagery, and the aesthetic - the music, the atmosphere... There's something about the subject matter itself which is just innately attractive to me. I like stuff like vampires, werewolves, mutants, post-apocalyptic settings, science fiction, samurais.... Vampire Hunter D just takes all that iconography, stuffs it all into a blender, adds a few drops of LSD, and then shoves that dial up to "High".

What pours out is a heady concoction. Presented as it is in that slightly antiquated old-school anime format - the traditional manga style where people have massive eyes and they react in conversations by stretching their mouths into improbably large gaping maws, and where (in all the English dubbed version I've seen of this stuff) the voice seems somehow mismatched - it's in synch to the movements, but the tone of voice never seems to quite match the facial expression, so wide-mouthed looks of terror are accompanied by someone saying "Ah" in an understated way. To me, this brings to mind some of the Japanese kids cartoons we used to get in the 80's, like Astroboy and Battle of the Planets. So, there's this resonant id-memory flowing through all this gothic, blood-soaked imagery which turns the whole film into something akin to an hallucinogenic chemical trip of some kind.

Honestly, story was a secondary, maybe even a tertiary, consideration for me here. I got it - it was all basically pretty simple once I got my head around the world building stuff. None of that makes a huge amount of sense. The world is in a post-apocalyptic future, and now "vampires and mutants" roam the land. The way this is presented seems a non-sequitur to me - there may be reams of detailed explanation as to how one thing led to another in printed manga form somewhere - but it doesn't matter for the film. The world here is different, dangerous, teeming with monsters of one sort or another. If you get bitten by a vampire, you need a Hunter to come and take out the one who bit you, otherwise you will become one yourself. Enter D, our archetypal, Leonean hero-interloper. A man of few words but much violence.

I could immerse myself in this world for months.