The clever eeriness of Junji Ito

Junji Ito is a Japanese horror illustrator born on July 31 st, 1963. He is currently 53
years old and his work is recognized by horror fans all over the world. Though Ito
mainly produces manga (Japanese comic) short horror stories, he has also written
three graphic novels in his lifetime: Gyo, Tomie, and Uzumaki, which is my
personal favorite. Usually, his short stories are pretty simple; with few characters
and one main plotline that is also the source of horror. His stories generally end
with one single panel that covers the entire page, in which he meticulously
illustrates the most unsettling image of the story, most of the time, a strange
phenomenon that is left unexplained.

Also, the majority of Ito’s creations focus on body horror, taking advantage of
unsettling imagery to create an eerie impression on the viewer, but his spooky
stories also take great advantage of one tool that only comic writers have available:
the page turn. Though written novels also have pages, novel writers never need to
worry about page turns, because the amount of content on a single page is mostly
decided by the publishing company, and has little relevance on the outcome of the
book. Whereas, graphic novel writers must meticulously design each page, plan
each page turn, and craft the position of their dialogues. A good comic artist will
take this to its advantage, by either meeting the reader’s expectations or subverting
them. Ito takes advantage of this by subtly preparing the viewer for what I call the
horror punchline: the scariest image of the story. He does this by adding the
reaction of a character or group of characters on the last panel before a page turn.
Generally, the characters look extremely shocked or scared by what they’re
looking at, so the reader instantly knows that something scary will be next, and it is
up to them to turn the page to find out.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about Ito’s work is the thematic of his
stories. He never writes stories about common tales of horror such as vampires or
ghouls, but rather about common things; love, friendship, parenthood, etc. Take for
example the short story The Human Chair, which follows the struggles of a novel
writer that buys a chair at a local shop that mysteriously makes her write great
stories whenever she sits on it. After strange things start to occur around her house,
she stars receiving letters from a man that seems to know everything that’s
happening in her household, and it almost seems as if it was the chair itself writing,
for it also says things like ‘you haven’t been sitting in your chair lately, you don’t
know how lonely I’ve been’.

After her husband is murdered mysteriously while sitting on the chair, the
investigators open the chair to find a spot inside of it fitted for a human to inhabit.

But it doesn’t end there; it turns out that this woman lived many years ago, and the
chair is now being sold in a small antique shop. The seller is a strange young man,
and the costumer a young female writer who struggles with creativity. The young
man is telling the story, and at the end he reveals the inside of the chair, which has
the same small space fitted for a human body, but this time it is filled by two
corpses: one male, one female. The young man explains that, in the end, the
woman and the strange man in the chair got together and had children, and those
are their corpses. He then reveals that he is one of their descendants, and pressures
her to buy the chair: she just runs away, frightened. A couple of days later, the
chair is shipped to her house with no explanation. The comic ends as she is left
alone with the chair: a perfect cliffhanger that leaves the rest to the reader’s
imaginations.

Many themes can be found in this story: obsession, fame, envy, love, ambition, etc.
But in reality, what Ito is trying portray is the lengths that a human is willing to
take in order to obtain success, or even love. In his own words, he is just looking at
reality “backwards”. At the end of the day, what we should be most afraid of is
ourselves.

A similar thing happens in his renowned graphic novel Uzumaki, which is the
story of a small town that becomes haunted by the concept of a spiral. That’s it: no
ghosts, no zombies, just a simple spiral. But stay with me, it is a work of genius.
The story starts with two young lovers: a boy and a girl around 17 years of age.
The boy’s father becomes strangely obsessed with spirals, and soon starts to
exhibit odd behavior. He doesn’t go out of the house anymore and locks himself in
a room full of spiral-shaped things that he has collected. He then mysteriously
acquires the ability to turn his tongue in the shape of a spiral, which deeply
concerns his family. The first chapter ends as the father dies by becoming a spiral
himself. His ashes are burnt and form a spiral of smoke in the sky.
After this happens, the story focuses on the mom, who, in contrast to what just
happened, develops a visceral phobia of spirals. She claims that she can see her
dead husband in every spiral, including the ones in her hair and her fingerprints,
which she scrapes until they’re gone. She then realizes that humans have spirals on
the inside of their ears and becomes haunted by this fact until she extracts her
cochlea with a pair of scissors. After this, she loses her eye sight and her sense of
gravity, and ultimately lives in an endless spiral of vertigo until she dies. That’s the
end of the second chapter.

The details in his illustrations are what allows Ito to make the simplest things seem
eerie and unsettling. Notice the man’s eyes as he rolls his tongue; the absolute look
of obsession. The first image above this paragraph is also the dad, this time he’s in
a vision that his wife has where he reveals that there are spirals inside her ears.
And Ito’s craftsmanship is impeccable even without faces, which is the case of the
last panel above. That is why he is able to turn a simple concept like a spiral into
the most horrific thing. Every pen stroke is intensely focused on making the reader
feel as uneasy as possible.

It is through this that we can see one of Junji Ito’s core philosophies: to showcase
the disorientation of the natural world. And this goes a long way into making Ito’s
creations feel all the more alien and freighting. It completely removes us from our
horror comfort zones; everyone knows the rules to dealing with zombies or
vampires, but a spiral that haunts people? No, thank you. Ito finds horror not in
dark castles or forbidden woods, but in our everyday lives, where we cannot run
nor hide.

This is why a spiral is the center of the story; in the end, it’s not even about the
spiral, but about the human mind. Through unsettling imagery and brilliant
storytelling Ito narrates stories about ourselves. The obsession of a dad with his
work, which alienates him from the family; the compulsive behavior of a mother
that is scared by the things she cannot understand, and the list goes on. Each
chapter narrates the story of a person inside the town that becomes ‘haunted by the
spiral’ and starts to exhibit strange behavior, or rather, they start to viscerally push
their bad habits to its limits until they too ‘become the spiral’. And isn’t that what
humans do best? There is no explanation for the strange occurrences in this town
because nothing can match the horror of the murmurs of our subconscious; the
thought that we too might one day take things too far.

Ito’s brilliance ultimately comes from the idea of horror through perception. The
idea that there’s truths out there whose mere concepts, such as the spiral, are so
overwhelming and dangerous to our human psyche that the mere discovery of them
would destroy how we view reality, and thus, ourselves. Maybe it isn’t the spiral
that makes people go crazy, but rather people are crazy by nature and only a small
push is needed to drive them over the edge. Just like any great art, great horror
reaches deep down inside of us and makes us feel things we didn’t know were
there. The eeriness of our own lunacy, the absurdity in the things we pursue, the
poison of obsession and ambition are the very real dangers that even our
imagination can’t escape: the ultimate horror punchline.