I couldn’t stop thinking about it…the spiral… The narrative style of Junji Ito can seemingly be non-linear and confusing, but this is also one of his strengths in creating an intriguing story. By the time I finished, the plane was preparing to land at my first stop on the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany. Uzumaki can be hard to get directly into. I felt anxious at the possibility that my mom or the person sitting behind me would glance over and see the pages of grotesque body horror in front of me–that’s just how Ito rolls. While everyone else was asleep, as it was a bit past midnight, I was reading Uzumaki in the dim atmosphere, the only light I had to assist with my sight was the one overhead of my seat. I am also one of those people who has a difficult time falling asleep on a plane (poor us). I was on my way to visit family in Albania, and the ride there from Pennsylvanian is always long and dull. I read one of his most popular works on an airplane a few summers ago. Even though his characters can be rather bland, transparent and unrelatable, his stores still offer refreshing tales of cosmic horror. In some of his other works, such as Hellstar Remina (2015) and The Enigma of Amigara Falls (2002), one cannot quite get a clear cut reason for why and how his stories play out. Ito seems to focus heavily on abstruse themes such as the dread of facing unexplainable and hopeless events. It was extremely absurd, but still had a certain charm to it, I definitely consider it one of the best chemical warfare/sea monster horror spin-off stories out there, although can’t say I know many anyway. The first story I read of his was Gyo (2002) during my sophomore year in high school. For me, I first got into his work, as most people might have, by reading some of his short stories that get mentioned on social media or used for aesthetic blogging purposes. Everyone has their own story on how they first heard of Ito. It’s a true moment of grotesque body horror that will stay with you for a long, long time.Junji Ito is a popular horror manga artist for very good reasons, his art adds something new and unique to the medium. Eventually, the reason why is revealed and it’s one of the most shocking, eerie, and unnerving moments in an Ito comic. When she meets the boy’s dad, he enters the room in a spider-like fashion and the top of his head is never shown. When a high schooler brings a girl he likes home to meet his dad, she has already suffered memory loss and trauma in the form of a dream about an enormous caterpillar. Nevertheless, it’s still a terrifying scene that comes at the end of this, one of Ito’s most viscerally unsettling and monstrous tales. That is, until he at last saw the director’s cut of The Exorcist and was disappointed to see it had already been done. There’s a funny anecdote surrounding this tale (found in Shiver), which is that Ito created something here that he was very proud of: a person running whilst lying on their back in an uncanny spider-like fashion.
Eventually, though, Ito left his almost comically bland career (especially considering how he is known today) behind and Tomie proved to be the beginning of a phenomenal career as Junji Ito steadily made a greater and greater name for himself as the king of terror, not only in Japan but across the world. Despite its success, Tomie did not project him into the world of famous writers and artists immediately, as Ito worked for several years as a dental technician. Over and again, Tomie drives the men who fall for her into madness.
#JUNJI ITO SPIRAL MANGA SERIES#
Ito’s debut story, written when he was only 24 years old, was Tomie, a series of stories about a young woman who defies death and ageing. His horror stories, both short and long, are all written and drawn with a surreal, off-kilter, otherworldly eeriness. What makes Ito unique in the horror world is that he isn’t a novelist or a short story writer in the traditional sense he’s a mangaka. Combining a deft artist’s eye with a boundless and terrifying imagination, Junji Ito stands head and shoulders above every other horror writer around.īorn in 1963 in Gifu prefecture, Junji Ito is Japan’s most successful and lauded horror writer.
Junji Ito is a mangaka who understands phobias, existential anxieties, and the terror of the unknown better than any other horror writer on Earth. Turn your eyes to Japan, however, and you’ll discover a writer and artist capable of injecting a far more potent amount of fear into his readers’ veins. The term master of horror is often attributed to American author Stephen King without any argument.
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