Junji Ito's Horror World (Topic)

Games and horror movies often don't even try to scare us. They stay true to screamers, mental hospital stories, and cliched characters. One gets the feeling that we are being led along the trodden path. If the screen is dark, get ready to see the screamer. The hero is sick in the head, so we will scare you with sophisticated methods of murder. But where is the fantasy? Where is the disgust and stories that are uncomfortable? And where, in the end, is the shock from what he saw? If you've asked yourself these or similar questions, the answer is Junji Ito's manga.

Horror Born

Junji Ito is probably one of the greatest horror manga artists of our time. He looks like a modest person, always with a calm face - nightmarish plots are born in his own head, which he draws with a pencil and then outlines with ink. He writes all his manga only for one person - for himself. That is why, plunging into the dark maelstrom of his work, you understand that he is not going to feel sorry for some kind of wide audience, and pours everything he comes up with on paper. His plots, characters and of course monsters - all this is unique and distinctive.

Junji Ito was born in 1963 in Japan. Even as a child, a couple of events happened to him that influenced his future work. The house Ito lived in as a child was large, and one of the most distant parts was the toilet. To get there, you had to go down to the bottom of the house below the first floor and walk down a long, dark corridor.

The most difficult thing was going there if you wanted to relieve yourself at night. For a child, such a path is comparable to going to the lair of a monster, and it was there that little Junji first experienced fear, which later gave birth to monsters in his head. As you read his manga today, you can often see references to that childhood fear. This is especially evident in the stories about Get off.

The second important event happened when his sister gave him a horror comic book by Umezo Kazuo to read, which really impressed him. Immediately after reading, the boy took a pencil and began to draw his own dark stories.

However, it was just a hobby. Ito grew up, went to study to be a dentist, and after graduation worked in his specialty, from time to time drawing manga. This was until 1987 when he decided to send one of his works to Nemuki's Halloween Monthly and get it published. After that, he started sending his comics to other publications. When it started to generate income, he quit his job and took up manga professionally.

There is no greater nightmare than what happens to you

So what is so special about his work? Junji in his stories goes much further than describing a horror story or a situation in which a murderer and a defenseless protagonist find themselves one on one. On the pages of the manga, he describes the metamorphoses that occur with the person himself. After all, there is nothing more terrible than not knowing what is happening with your body. And it is this, most often the leitmotif of his stories, when people encounter the unknown in themselves, or the unknown in others. Examples.

The girl wakes up and realizes that she cannot speak. She goes to the mirror and sees that her tongue has turned into a huge, living slug.

Outside the window is the 19th century, a little girl of 9 years old sits, reads a book and does not understand why her parents are scared. They are in a real panic, as their beloved daughter fell ill with a strange disease that gradually turns her into a doll ... Her skin stiffens, her eyes turn glassy, and when she speaks, she does not move her lips, because they are frozen in a doll smile. Over time, it turns completely. But the process does not end there, but goes on. In front of her parents, she begins to decompose more and more.

Often times Ito takes something simple that we see every day and twists it. This is why his stories are so easy to follow. For example, for the sake of economy, the owner of a restaurant carries out the hood directly to her house, because of which everything in it becomes covered with fat, and her son develops an addiction to him and, like a pig, begins to absorb more and more fat.

Junji Ito's stories - stories about obsession, sick people, encounters with otherworldly forces and psychosis. In one of his stories, he tells about a girl who has a special fetish - she enjoys being dissected. She sneaks into medical university morgues where corpses are kept for training, and pretends to be dead so that young medics cut her open. In the story, she begins to chase her doctor friend so that he rips her stomach open.

In another manga, a girl refuses to date a guy. He begins to live in the plumbing under her house to drink the water in which she bathes, and constantly watches over his beloved. In the third story, the heroine learns that her whole family is constantly watching her, wherever she is, but neither her father, brothers or mother will ever confess, even if she catches them red-handed, but will continue to follow.

Close-up fear

Not only insane concepts are shocking in his works, but also their visualizations. Ito loves to scare us with close-ups of "sick" images. You grab the edge of the page, turn it over, and there you will find a huge drawing for the entire spread, so detailed that it can be viewed for a very long time. All his monsters or horrors are always unique. Ito himself admits that he can spend a whole day drawing one such spread.

Ito's characters can sometimes behave strangely and unreasonably, but they act as guides for the reader to whip up the atmosphere more and more.

Junji has a main lineup of Junji Ito's Horror Collection manga with novellas, and whole volumes of solo stories. Here are examples of Junji Ito's manga for dating.

Tomie

Tomie is an unusual girl. She is so beautiful that she falls in love with any man so much that everyone in the end wants to kill and dismember her. But that's not all, Tomie regenerates from each of his parts. She is a negative character who manipulates people, makes them kill, change and maim for the sake of her ego. Each story with her, or rather with her part, is something unique. Novels about Tomye are presented in the first two parts of Junji Ito's Horror Collection, as well as in a separate manga: Tomie: The Return

Spiral

This is the most popular work of the master. She talks about a city in which mysterious things related to the spiral began to happen. The father of one heroine is so obsessed with them that he drags stuff like a spiral into the house, draws it everywhere, and in the end he decides to break his bones and twist his body into a spiral.

The girl has a small pimple on her head, which, as a result, turns out to be a spiral funnel, which increases on her head. The first two volumes tell a set of scary stories related to the spiral, while the last one tells how the city itself is slowly starting to twist ...

Mimi's Ghost Stories

This solo album is a set of stories about the girl Mimi and her strange life. She learns that her neighbor is completely made of sharp metal structures. This creature begins to chase the girl. She moves, but resources only allow her to rent an apartment not far from the cemetery, every night Mimi hears the graves move, and in the morning they are all turned to face her windows. Each story is an eerie tale of how the otherworldly pursues her and her loved ones.

Fish

This is a story about the end of the world, which began with the fact that strange foul-smelling parasitic fish began to creep out onto the land. Anyone they scratch will rot from the inside and fill with gas. The parasites take control of the body and start feeding on this gas. Over time, it turns out that these are machines, and humanity is faced with the horror of its own genius.

Hell Raemin's Star

The scientist discovers a new star and names it Remina - after his daughter. Because of this, the girl becomes very popular and will get on television screens and in the cinema. However, something is wrong with the star Remina, she moves towards the Earth and destroys everything in her path. It turns out that this is a living hell star, the purpose of which is destruction. The closer she is to us, the greater the panic. People decide that the only way to stop her is to kill the one after whom she is named.

Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Mu and Yeon

And finally, I advise you to read the cat diary. This is a story about Ito himself and his fiancee who have adopted two cats. This is everyday life through Ito's eyes, which gives an exaggerated and terrible look even to such a small thing as playing with cats.

Welcome to the horror world of Junji Ito, whose manga will definitely make you wince or at least be surprised at least once.

The Topic of Article: Junji Ito's Horror World.
Author: Jake Pinkman