How Media Scares Us: The Work of Junji Ito

Normal horror fans: scared of: ghosts, monsters, vampires.. Junji Ito fans: scared of : spirals, balloons, Grease

not jumpscaring me was scarier than jumpscaring me

Favorite thing about Ito is that he creates some of the greatest horror manga in existence but when he's interviewed he's just Some Guy™ that loves his cats

Spirited Away freaked me out when her parents became pigs in the very beginning of the film. Something of it was very disturbing and grotesque as they slammed down food. No face as well had a very unsettling presence whether it be a neutral being or not. Another film that did this was The Last Unicorn. Although it's a sad story, there are plenty of horror aspects that stay in your brain whether you're a child or adult. Strange disfigured faces and disgruntled voices and bizarre creatures really feed that emotion of fear and stress.

“Jump scares are the equivalent to a comedian tickling you to make you laugh” -some tweet I read

i appreciated you not jumpscaring me.

Slug girl is the Junji Ito story that made me feel most uncomfortable, mostly due to personal phobias. It was like he knew exactly what would make me personally feel uneasy and amped it up to 10

Also in Junji Ito’s works there is a fair share of characters that know what they are doing / the situation they’re putting themselves in will turn into death or worse, and they are scared as hell by it, but also still feel compelled to go on and fall into the corruption and horror The same way we as the readers know that very likely by the end of the story we’ll get scared / unsettled as hell, sometimes for quite some time after finishing reading, but we still feel compelled to turn those damn pages until the end

i admire your sincerity of totally not putting a actual jump-scare in there, anyone else would have.

Funfact about Danny's actor, for years he never knew that he was in a horror movie until he actually watched The Shining himself. Kubrick didn't want him to get traumatized as a kid so he hid anything that might hint that it's a horror set to the guy. Once he accidentally got into the set where Jack Nicholson is holding the axe, and Nicholson immediately danced so the kid wouldn't ask questions.

I love how waiting for the Fake jumpscare scared me more than a Real one. Emotions are always stronger that reactions

I found Uzumaki years ago, and I thought it was enthralling. The disgusting wrongness of it all drew me in. The disgust I felt when seeing the mother's stomach about to burst with children fed on blood. It was exquisite.

"I kid you not, he turns himself into a spiral. Scariest shit I've ever seen."

I see horror as an organic thing, kinda like comedy in a weird way. It's not something you can force, it's something that should come naturally and evolve naturally.

junji's work is prime example of 'never let them know your next move'

Another media that (understandably) gets often overlooked when discussing horror is music. People have this idea that music has to be pleasant, so horror is automatically swept under the rug because unsettling is seen as opposite to pleasant. One of my favourite albums is Mutant by Arca, and the best description of it that I’ve heard is that it’s like an exorcism. I do enjoy listening to it a lot, and I think it’s one of the few albums I know of that I think could fit under the horror category, if such a genre were to exist.

A thing that terrifies me about Junji Itos work is that the horrific events always happen to innocent people without explanation

Horror is what cripples your mind, not your stomach.

Analog Horror like the Mandela Catalog, the backroom and even stuff like the trollge incidents demonstrates how the internet as a media can be used as a unique vehicle for horror

The entirety of Junji Ito's Cat Diary is him basically confronting his fear of cats because his wife wanted some. It's one of the funniest and most wholesome things I've ever read but he makes sure you understand why he's scared of them. Definitely worth a read.