Review of Shiki

Shiki is one of the rare horror anime to stand out at all, falling under a "revisionist/social commentary" kind of banner; it has a decently creepy atmosphere, imagery, and an adequate plot, though the gravity-defying rainbow hair and bizarre hip-hop-like music makes this an eccentric title. The writing can be fairly condescending with its depiction of ruralites and villagers: there's a cosmopolitan smugness expressed throughout, with the pink-haired girl, who only cares about cute boys in the city and being an idol, being the best representation of the contempt for the countryside. There's not much presented here that would make anyone yearn for a lifeoutside of the city.

For the relatively long running length of 22 episodes, it takes most of the protagonists a ridiculously long time to figure out what's really going on, as villagers are picked off one by one by a clan of vampires. Eventually, the humans fight back, and the prey becomes the predator, but it feels like these people are blind or oblivious for nearly the whole runtime, which becomes exasperating. Emphasis should be placed on the prey becoming the predator, or even the prey and predator being one and the same when boiled down to their essence, which is partially the message found in the monk's pretentious Cain and Abel-inspired story; this is reflective of a trend in horror fiction to humanize the monsters while also relying on gray areas of morality for the sake of social commentary about humanity. The show starts by depicting the shiki as being ghoulish in some early nighttime scenes, but, by the end, the villagers are portrayed in just as ghoulish of a light, if not greater.

Fans seem to relish this aspect, but the humans, while maybe becoming a bit more cruel and spiteful than is necessary when confronting the shiki at times—probably best emphasized by the segment where the villagers leave the shiki to a slow death, but one human delivers mercy killings, as well as the infamous tractor scene, or the murder of humans assumed to be in league with the Shiki—are acting in their own best interest for survival.

The shiki brought the situation upon themselves by terrorizing the once idyllic village. Due to the shiki's bloodlust, the villagers were left to watch their friends and family wither away and die. And among the villagers who die, some come back as shiki and are manipulated or groomed by the veteran shiki in preying on their remaining loved ones in a vicious cycle. Tatsumi, one of the higher-ranking shiki, is particularly sadistic in how he directs these newly recruited companions to prey on former family and friends. The shiki's intentions appear to be the death and/or conversion of all humans in the village. There are no benign alternatives conceived of amongst their ranks. One human appears to be an exception here, and the shiki seem to view him as a potential human ally, in what represents the standard symbiotic relationship often found in horror films, such as vampires having a werewolf or human who protects them during the day or carries out tasks that only they can perform.

Throughout the series, it's shown that the shiki can easily blend in with humans, other than their aversion to sunlight. They open stores in the village, have a city unit of shiki engaging in similar ways, own a moving company, and they can afford to purchase the obviously expensive and out-of-place European castle on the outskirts of the village, so they clearly have shiki-specific infrastructure in place, are well organized, and possess a lot of money.

Cows are featured prominently as livestock to emphasize that what the shiki are doing to the humans is similar to what humans are doing to other animals. Humans survive by devouring animals, but shiki only need the blood of humans to survive, meaning killing is not necessary for the latter. The Kirishiki family is shown consuming blood from wine glasses, an important story arc has one character trying to convince a shiki who was once his friend to coexist with humans and not kill them, and there is only one other subplot that features a shiki making an effort to survive on blood without killing. Couldn't they conceivably purchase human blood (whether non-human blood is viable or not is never addressed) and forego preying on humans altogether? This is never explored at all. In fact, the shiki seldom explain anything that they do, so one must question if their leader, a pseud 900-year-old goth loli vampire, ever had any plans at all.

But on some level, I accept the argument that what humans do to cows is no different than what the shiki are doing to the humans. One can even argue that humans don't require meat to survive either. We can become vegetarians. However, humans enjoy the taste of meat, and a balanced diet with meat, fish, etc., is nutritionally superior to vegetarianism. We also harvest the bodies of animals for many items we create.

However, the series makes it clear that the shiki are trying to survive and flourish. Similarly, shiki need more than just blood, because they cannot replicate themselves through DNA but have to instead convert humans into shiki. If we consider the instinct to reproduce in some form an imperative for all lifeforms, then how can the shiki really be blamed, for it appears to be a biological necessity for the shiki? They do what they must to survive and to "reproduce," yet it necessitates antagonism between humans and shiki. The shiki use every part of humans, not just blood; just as the humans use every part of cows.

While I think we may as well limit suffering, it's a natural part of life. We only make ourselves weaker by creating an ideology centered around removing suffering altogether. A utopian example of this ideology is actually the idea of the humans and shiki co-existing, which strikes me as the end goal of the tedious moralizing the series engages in. "Extreme" attempts at removing suffering tend to result in much more suffering overall. In theory, the two could co-exist. Humans and shiki could live amongst each other, without it being an arrangement similar to the predator-prey relationship of the Eloi and Morlocks of H.G. Wells Time Machine. With a sufficiently small number of shiki, humans could donate enough blood to sustain them. Too many shiki would necessitate suffering and death for the humans, but they could also have controlled replication. Some humans would obviously like the chance of becoming immortal, like the shiki, rather than dying, so there could be a quota system to prevent their death and bolster the population of the shiki. Surveillance technology could enforce this system even better. This is an arrangement that works well in theory, and you could probably make a simulation of this in a video game and perfectly micromanage a win-win outcome. Nonetheless, reality is messy, and humans and shiki are naturally at odds with one another. It's unlikely that you could stop the two from feuding or prevent the shiki from manipulating the humans along the way of completing this grand utopia that will never be. It would also inject many problems into society, with elites controlling the shiki's "immortalization" process.

Just as wolves are predators and sheep are prey, we have a similar relationship with our livestock. The shiki are a natural predator of humans. Is it really immoral for predators to hunt prey as food? Certainly no one would consider a non-human animal consuming another animal as immoral. It only becomes a topic of morality for humans because of their sentience and insecurities. Due to our ingenuity and problem solving, many will debate that having alternatives makes this process inhumane and morally objectionable. Of course, for a coherent worldview, one must realize that morality is a subjective construct to enforce order; individuals have a personal morality that interacts with a consensus morality of said society, and that consensus morality is enforced by violence. a society has to have some kind of morality to function and sustain itself, and morality should be beneficial. Yet the morality on display in Shiki is often framed in a way that is injurious to the humans, and the authors are saying it is a good thing, often resorting to injecting manipulative evil bastardisms into their writing.

The killing of humans by other humans without a justified cause would almost universally be seen as immoral by the standards of today. Could the same be said of relations between shiki and humans? Certainly there are many similarities between shiki and humans, but is an equivalence in intelligence and other criteria more important than the nature of being predator and prey, when it comes to evaluating whether or not something is moral? The shiki may have once been human, but they must be regarded as a completely different species, and something altogether different than even denisovans or neanderthals, which are other species humans mated with in the distant past. My assumption is that shiki are probably parasites that can "resurrect" a recently dead host, harnessing their memories. Just because the shiki possess the dead human's memories does not mean they are one and the same.

Essentially, the shiki are in direct opposition to humans. Both are engaged in competition for resources as various creatures would be in an ecosystem, while also engaging in a predator-prey relationship, eventually resulting in a predator-prey reversal as the humans gain the upper hand. The shiki, as the minority, must always be fearful of the human majority exterminating them, and the humans must always be fearful of the shiki surreptitiously parasitizing them and taking over their society, as can be seen when the shiki replace the entirety of the local government, with aims of taking over the village.

The focus on morality that the show has, where they went to great lengths to make the humans seem wicked or "just as bad" was insipid and cheap. In many cases I'd say the humans are portrayed by the writers as far less sympathetic than the shiki, the true aggressors here. I'd rather have been spared the moralizing tone and the pathologizing of the villagers. Both the humans and the shiki can be "humanized" in their own right with a recognition of them being competing entities, concerned first and foremost with their own survival and growth in numbers. You can portray a person doing something one might find objectionable without giving them evil-looking expressions set to sinister music, which this show was often guilty of in the second half.

One point that will sometimes be made is that Ozaki, who led the bloody campaign against the shiki was too brutal. Yes, they would have been obligated to kill many of the aggressive shiki, but they could have imprisoned some of them or brought in the government to contain them in some way. Even the shiki couple who decided to stop preying on humans, unconscious in their cell, were killed by the humans. Amusingly, characteristic of this show's try-hard brand of trashy social commentary, Ozaki even says something like, "We need to clean this up," indicating the bloodshed needed to be concealed from any outsiders or non-local government. Not only do people conflate what happened to actual genocides, but the writers seem to be suggesting as much. Sure, they didn't have to kill all of them, but shiki, who have an overwhelming desire for blood and can pretend they're humans, are extremely dangerous, and eradicating them altogether would be for the best. All it takes is one shiki to deceive the humans, convert more humans into shiki, and have the same incident all over again. They could quickly take over entire cities.

I realize people want to make these kind of productions into metaphors about the human condition and humans massacring or genociding other humans for social commentary and moral preening, but the shiki are undead. They shouldn't even exist in the first place, not to mention all of the other points that make them an enemy of humanity.

I never questioned "who the true monsters were." I always sided with the humans, though I often had sympathy for the shiki, given that they were forced to become shiki without any regard for their own wishes and were manipulated, not only by their newfound hunger, but by the shiki leaders. From the perspective of the humans, I see the shiki as something to be exterminated for the benefit of humanity, as we usually view vampires in fiction, but I can also respect that the shiki are acting to benefit their own group, though it goes against human interests.