Meet the surprisingly un-spooky Junji Ito in this trailer for Adult Swim's Uzumaki adaptation
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The people who create horror don’t necessarily have to be scary themselves, but certain people—your Stephen Kings, your Guillermo del Toros—certainly do lean into the spooky lifestyle. So, given how fucking nightmarish some of the imagery that Japanese author and artist Junji Ito has unleashed on the world of the years, you might expect him to be a little unsettling as well, like maybe with a face that turns into a spiral or a mountain with freaky people-shaped holes… or maybe a dead sea creature that washes up on a shore, its intestines full of people who were lost at sea and had been swallowed up by the horrible thing, cursed to witness the horrors of the deep ocean through its translucent skin? Well, according to this new teaser for Adult Swim’s anime adaptation of Uzumaki, Junji Ito is just a normal guy who likes writing scary stories.
Is it disappointing? A little bit, but we’d take a normal guy over something that haunts our every waking thought like those damn spirals we keep seeing everywhere! Anyway, Adult Swim’s four-episode adaptation of Uzumaki is coming in 2020
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This looks to be perfect. Surely better than the early 2000s film adaptation.
Tomie was shit too. The Uzumaki movie was campy, and good for riffing but a waste of potential. I know that they couldn’t add every story in, but there were some that disturbed me even more than the washing machine incident. Like, I dunno, the freakin’ babies who sewed themselves back into their mothers? The lighthouse that roasted people alive in the stairwell? The kid who became a member of Coily’s Army of Darkness when his spine turned into a spiral and he jack-in-the-boxed his way out of a grave?! Ito took a ridiculous concept and turned it into something truly terrifying.And ugh, thanks article, for reminding me of The Enigma of the Amigara Fault. Fucking claustrophobic nightmare fuel.
I think I have PTSD from some of those stories.
Oh yeah don’t get me started on Tomie. I was so excited to see there was a Tomie film series, expecting to ease my ex into the horror of Junji Ito. Absolute garbage (at least the 2 I actually watched, I’ve heard the third one was a soft reboot and not too bad).
Haha, Coily’s Army of Darkness, that’s fucking great. I think it was actually the spring (shocks?) from the car crash that stuck in Jack in the box guy, but in the movie he just smashes his head on the windshield making a spiral after the car gets twisted up.“Mike, where does Coily fit into God’s plan?”Also, I was just reading the wiki for the Uzumaki movie and apparently it was produced before the manga was finished so they had to come up with their own ending. Unlike Akira, which had the benefit of the unfinished manga’s creator guiding the film and coming up with an ending, the movie makers of Uzumaki went a completely different direction from the manga coming up with a that dumb mirror plot to try and explain things best left unexplained.
The ending of the Uzumaki manga was pretty bleak, and really freaking disturbing. If I remember correctly, the type of houses the people of Kurozu-cho ended up in was Ito’s inspiration for the manga itself. Closed ferns creep me out now, thanks to Uzumaki. 😜Speaking of bleak endings, I always imagined Gilbert going mad and getting arrested for trying to turn his wife and ex-golf buddies into springs, Ito-style. One clod says one thing and the whole world pays.The Japanese band Do As Infinity made a neat little music video for the film.
NO SPRINGS
He began writing and drawing manga while working as a dental technician. Getting up close and personal with the human body probably helped develop his gift for very detailed body horror.
As a rule, creating good horror requires a healthy dose of personal normalcy. This sounds contradictory … but unless you’re intimately attuned to the norms that a horror yarn spends its time breaking, it’s tough to break them to maximum effect.
Poe, Lovecraft, Shelly, Stoker, and Wollstonecraft raise glasses of absinthe to toast the folly of your ‘Personal Normalcy Rule’.
I’ll give you Lovecraft, but most of those others were deeply bourgeois under all the affectations.
Poe (like Lovecraft) was desperately poor despite his attempt to be seen as a “gentleman”, so he was definitely proletariat. Maybe even lumpenproletariat.
Social class and income have always been orthogonal … especially in parts of America. But even if one grants your point, it’s as Chesterton put it—the rich are the ones who can afford to be Bohemian. The respectability that a rich man can afford to put on & take off like a party mask is something a poor man.can least afford to take for granted. We might find Poe’s benders romantic, but I can tell you at least one man to whom they weren’t: Poe.
As Franklin Barr points out, Poe lived desperately – but also wildly. As to the rest – ‘bourgeois’ status was what, along with their decidedly-unconventional upbringings and lives, AND their persistent and numerous ‘affectations’, set them WELL APART from their readership – at the time and for centuries to come. They did not exhibit in the least this ‘personal normalcy’ you profess is required for horror authorship.Perhaps you meant to imply ‘contemporary horror authors’? I wouldn’t profess to know how King, or Straub, or airport-bestseller-writers live their lives. But your rule clearly didn’t apply to the pioneers.
I never said it was required—just that it’s very handy, and lacking it can pose some obstacles of imagination. But regardless, folks like Shelley were the very prototypes of the kid of comfortable origins playing at being outré, but who can’t hide his to-the-bone conventionality. I don’t even mean that as an insult; it helped them.
You: “As a rule, creating good horror requires…”All your silly backtracking and obfuscation just serves to underline my point and undermine yours. But since you need to last-word the matter so badly, I’ll leave it with you.
At the risk of seeming like that guy who has to have the last word … the lead-in “as a rule” pretty much acknowledges the existence of exceptions in large flashing neon. (Oh, blast—I just played into your hands.)
And if he was some edgelord dude who looked goth or metal or had crazy hair or something it would diminish the horror for me. Its way creepier that these nightmarish images and scenarios come from this unassuming, kinda dweeby looking dude observing regular life and imagining what lurks in the crevices and shadows (which is also how I would describe Stephen King, so the whole premise of this article is kinda silly and forced, even Guillermo is an unassuming goofball if you don’t know that he basically lives in a horror museum).
Yeah, the King mention threw me. He’s not exactly terrifying to behold.
I just watched Evangelion, and subsequently End of Evangelion, for the first time in my thirty years the last three days.
Rarely have such twisted visuals been tied to such meaningless, hollow, blithering nonsense and first-year philosophy insights. Had the creator been well-adjusted, maybe on some decent medication to help him with his depression and bitterness issues, those visuals would have effectively conveyed a sense of horror, rather than a sinking sense of dread that you are trapped on a bus with a very angry guy trying to justify his wife beating to anyone who’ll listen.
You want to connect with other people you have to be able to see outside your own head first.
I hope it’s better than the Junji Ito anime from 2017. Uzumaki deserves a competent adaptation. Love that manga.
One of his best works is about him raising and owning two cats and it barely has any horror at all in it.
I’m still kicking myself for missing him at TCAF. The writer GETS IT though, his worlds are detailed and beautiful and strange, so I have hopes here
If anyone is interested in watching Ito work here’s the Manben episode with him.
I really love how serious Adult Swim/Cartoon Network is playing this up.
Ito, Waita and the others…They are not for everyones taste and need to be approached carefully.I would not know anyone who i could recommend it to.