Masters of Horror - Pt. 3, Junji Ito

According to Google Analytics, I notice that traffic increases every time that I post scantily-clad women on these blogs, whether they are comic/anime women - such as Bomb Queen, or real-life bodacious women - such as Yaya Han or the ladies from the cosplay photo shoot. So with that knowledge in mind, I thus completely and intentionally ignore sexy women for this outing. In fact, I am going to post the exact opposite and continue on my series of The Masters of Horror. This time around concerns the all-time grand champion Mister Disturbo gross-out king Junji Ito. Most of his works have now been converted into television shows (one starring Miho Kanno) and movies in Japan but in truth, it's his manga that stands apart for just how completely sadistic and balls-out creepy they turn out to be. It would be of no surprise that Ito-san is probably the most normal looking bloke in Japan and favors cheesecake while listening to The Carpenters. Those people have dark dark secrets, let me tell you.

In his collection of short stories - Flesh Coloured Horror, I would guess that he rather dislikes cute girls, especially the cutesy-kawaiiiii! Japanese schoolgirls that are the fetish of many a salariman. When girls kill each other simply because one of them *thinks* killing each other would work to stem off their own deaths by disease, I would guess there is some little neuroses at work. In fact I would guess that he hates society as is, enough to show how it decays from some abstract and nameless horror that only by cannibalizing each other is there some form of escape. Another particular favorite has a girl's long black hair come to life and with a homicidal will of its own, go to extreme prejudice in order to maintain its own survival from say, a much-needed trim at the hair salon.

In his opus, Uzumaki, there is no escape from the doom of the Spiral, as each issue shows how a little village slowly descends into ultra-disgusting horror and madness. One week, people are turning into snail creatures, the next week, people are now eating those snail creatures, cuz... well, they're yummy, I guess. The next week, people who ate those snail creatures are being contorted into the spiraling shapes of those snail shells and on it goes. There is no way out, no redemption, no shelter from some rather barf-inducing concepts.