It's OVA between us. Yes, it's time to take a deep devil may care dive down the Devil Gate Drive of daemonic anime, a world first opened up to me, like some parting curtains revealing the chthonic world of night, when i was around twelve years old and some schoolmate like a serpentine tempter lent me a VHS of legendary monster hentai fever dream Urotsukidoji and i began to wonder if cartoons could even do that kind of thing. Eager for more, like an adept tempted into an arcane library in search of some siren's call of revelatory mysteries, i got myself down to the video shop and rented what seemed to be the nearest thing (Japanese cartoon: check, demons: check, violence: check) to what i'd seen. This would prove to be the initial original to video animation based upon Go Nagai's manga Devilman, and my young self would sit rapt for fifty minutes of eldritch fun before being slightly baffled by the cliffhanger ending that he would not see the resolution of for the best part of thirty years.
"The primaeval dwellers of the Earth. The demons. The devils, to be precise."
Starting out by showing us tales of a primaeval Earth when the daemons dwelled (and they did dwell well) and death was but a dream, betwixt the sparkling rivers Acheron and Styx 'neath a starlit sky, we see the ancient days of old - of faerie folk dancing in the moonlight (and, yes, now that awful fucking Toploader song is stuck in my head and i hope it is in yours) whilst the wyrms of the Earth surge to the surface to devour with their unholy maws. Flash-forward about a billion years, and we arrive in the present day to join in with the daily trevails of young Akira Fudou. Akira (no, not that one - i saw that a few months later) is a teenage orphan whose day is just getting progressively worse as he goes about his routine of feeding the school's rabbits only to find their hutch starkly violated and the pets slaughtered by a gang of bicycle chain-wielding toughs who like to practice their maimings on mammals.
Rescued from his home time head-kicking by the quite kawaii Miki Makimura (try saying that three times fast while drunk) - the girl with whom he has found himself living after his parents' death - Akira finds himself in a more awkward struggle than a physical beating from goons as she tends to his wounds and the sexual/romantic tension becomes thick enough in the air to cut with a sai, as Miki makes her attraction to him plain and he bottles it and ruins the moment like a goon thus proving himself to be my spirit animal.
It is into this febrile situation that an interloper injects himself - this being Ryou Asuka, an old friend of Akira who comes from out of nowhere (my glance turns to a stare) to demand that Akira accompany him immediately. Cutting a bishonen figure with his Super Saiyan spiky blond hair and swishy trenchcoat (which contains a Kyle Reese style sawn-off shotgun - he's not just pleased to see you), Miki mistakes their intense closeness for a bit of yaoi zowie and watches forlorn as Akira is swept away by this charming stranger in his cool red hot car with suspected Squarepusher intentions. Ryou takes Akira to his home, a gated mansion that has fallen to ruin, and explains to him that his father recently took his own life after a period of instability which exhibited such mild signs as slaughtering a songbird in its cage (Freddy's Revenge style: as if things needed to get any more homoerotic round here) and decapitating a dog - though he did offer to replace it with an even bigger, jucier one that would be more worthy of slaughter in a mad Renfield like outburst that mistook lunacy for lucidity - before pouring petrol over himself and immolating like a protesting monk.
"The only way to fight demons is to become a demon yourself."
The rhyme behind the reason for this, Ryou explains, is that Asuka Senior had discovered the truth. On an expedition into the Mayan ruins of the Mesoamerican rainforests he uncovered evidence of a pre-human, antediluvian civilisation that walked the Earth long before the dawn of man like one of Graham Hancock's wildest masturbatory fantasies. The land of the demons glimpsed in the past prologue, a pre-Piri Reis mappa mundi, now lies beneath the Antarctic ice pickled in time like the justified ancients of Mu-Mu in a jar. Akira's parents had been killed on a polar expedition which encountered the fiends frozen like Frankenstein encased within glaciers, who then proved to be not as dormant as a dormouse as the sleeper must awaken.
"In the dreadful cold, Lucifer, the bat-winged King of Demons is buried up to his chest in ice suffering in motionless torment."
After their conversation is interrupted by an arachnoid manse raider (no, not Ciaran Hinds from Game of Thrones), Ryou finally unfurls his plan to Akira: to find someone pure enough in heart to be able to bond with a demon in order to become... I want to say 'the Hybrid' but it's giving me serious Doctor Who series 9 flashbacks.... a creature who can take on the demons themselves. To this end, Ryou takes Akira down to the convenient basement nightclub that he has had installed wherein a Bacchanalian rave is taking place upon the Sabbath. Seizing a broken bottle and glassing a few revelers like it's a Saturday night in Newcastle's Bigg Market, Ryou unleashes the demons in the hopes that they will inhabit the bodies of all present and that either he or Akira will be pure of heart (with or without wolfsbane blooms) enough to absorb the daemonic energy and destroy all monsters.
Spoiler: it's Akira, who becomes one with the demon Amon and metamorphoses into the horned and goat-legged Devilman to tear all around asunder and stand alone, victorious yet bloodied, amid the ruins of myriad corpses.
"Truly a legacy of horror!"
His Satanic majesty, by request.
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