The Junji Ito Touch: An Introduction And First Story

This fall, I got into a Junji Ito kick while drafting a secret project. I needed to get into the zone of a horror writer and to remember how to create an atmosphere. While I enjoy writing horror, nailing the fear is always the hard part. October is no better month to process my thoughts and what I have learned from reading about a dozen different stories with varying tones and scares.

Junji Ito is a Japanese horror manga artist. He knows how to turn the ordinary into the supernatural and make us fear the random. From a balloon hanging randomly in the distance to a drain that starts groaning into the night, you learn to fear them, rather quickly. All a person can do is survive the nightmare, or pray for a quick end. The reader waits for the moment where either a twist happens, or the protagonist cannot truly escape.

Many of the standalone short stories have one thing in common: the protagonist faces a situation that threatens or strips away their dignity. In most cases, they are screwed, trapped, and doomed to suffer to the end. They lose their control, and how they react determines the ending that they receive. It can suck for them, especially when the reasonable solution doesn’t work. One YouTuber has cited that people don’t read these stories for the characters, but for the spectacle in which they are trapped. If you are…