Junji Ito and the aesthetic of Horror

 

Content Warning: This creative's work includes themes of suicide, body horror, and other possibly disturbing content.

Junji Ito is a prominent manga artist and writer known widely for his intense psychological and physical horror. Growing up in a small town on the outskirts of Nagano, Ito found himself drawn towards the terrifying world of horror and horror manga at a young age with a kind of fascination of the aesthetic and atmosphere of horror told through a paper-and-ink medium.

Ito managed to get his first story published at the age of 24, a story that would later be serialized and collected as Tomie. The story was selected for award by a panel of judges with professional manga industry experience, including Kazuo Umezu himself who served as the earliest source of intrigue into the world manga for the young Ito in his childhood.

Ito’s work stands as a collection of various sources of inspiration from throughout his life, including watching major occult films such as The Exorcist when he was young, his time in medical school, commonplace childhood situations, and even childhood dreams as Ito recalls that, “The impressions you have as a child are very strong and stay with you for the rest of your life.” (www.grapee.jp) In an interview by Ben K of grape.jp, Ito recalls the dark, underground bathroom that was the source of much consternation in his childhood home. He talks about fearing what spirits lay in wait at the end of the passage and the more real insects that scared him along the way. One of Ito’s recent collections, Sensor, features large insect creatures that contain the souls of suicide victims that jumped from the nearby cliffside. These creatures, whose nature induces them to leap underneath the feet of passerby, visually resemble the spider crickets that pervaded the bathroom passage, with large, rounded backs and powerful hind legs for leaping. Ito says that this process of thinking backwards allows him to instill a sense of dread and awe into a simple concept. Others of Ito’s works draw from his background as a dental technician. Uzumaki and Black Paradox both incorporate human anatomy into plotlines and incorporate them into Ito’s body horror. Tomie is based off of Ito’s feeling after the death of a classmate due to a traffic accident. He says that witnessing the hole left behind by such a lively classmate struck a chord and made him ponder what would happen if he came back, as does one of the central characters in Tomie.

Ito describes the process behind his work as very aesthetically focused. Before the plot comes the concept and the mood. Ito attributes this necessity of atmosphere before plot to manga’s existence as a visual medium. Entire pages may be taken up by the eerie imagery of distorted human forms and supernatural goings-on that help to elicit from the reader a wide range of emotions from fascination to revulsion and the way these dichotomous feelings are connected. From Ito’s description, it seems as though the first images of a concept form the divergent aspect of creation while later convergent work revolves around seeing how a story may or may not flesh out around the image or original concept. In the afterward to Sensor, Ito describes how the characters began to diverge from the roles he wanted them to play as he continued to write the story, reflecting, as is common for so many publishers of serialized art, how the story forms around these central characters as opposed to having the plot laid out beforehand.

Sources:

https://grapee.jp/en/116016

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interview/2019-09-17/horror-manga-mastermind-junji-ito/.151216

https://vagabondedlife.tumblr.com/post/19759189727/the-junji-ito-interview-a-conversation-with-the