So for this week I revisited some of the Junji Ito stories that I used to read in the past, as well as re-reading some of the Fuan no Tane collection again. As much as horror scares the shit out of me, I do enjoy these visual novels a lot.
So, for starters, I went back and re-read The Enigma of Amigara Fault, which at this point is a well known 'classic' amongst most people who have even been on the internet in general, due to its strange nature in the manga. It's your bog-standard style of manga, and looks harmless enough from the outside. The plot is pretty simple, stating that a large fault has created this huge rift that exposed a giant mountain filled with human shaped holes.
From there, the horror aspect comes from the fact that people are coming from all over the world to go into these holes, as they believe they were 'made for them'. The main character ends up going into them at one point, slowly contorting into a strange, deformed monster that is seen through the smaller version of the holes on the other side of the fault.
What makes this scary, for me at least, is the visual effect of the distorted humans that you see at the end, because they're still just human enough to be seen as people, but still morphed in horrible ways. The use of onomonopea is also very good in this manga, with the unsettling 'drr drr drr' made by the 'humans' as they approach the end of the tunnel in Amigara Fault.
Most of Junji Ito's works are like this, which makes them pretty good for people who can be easily spooked by horror mangas, because at least his look really pretty, even with the gore or deformations.
Fuan no Tane is the same way with Junji's horror stories, but to me rely much more on the visual horror as well as unsettling nature of the way the characters or horror things in the series look. It's a collection of small horror manga's that are usually only a few pages long, and don't really have a huge, cohesive relation to each other. The short size of them make them really easy to binge on, despite how scary they can be because of their visual horror. Most of the visual horror includes huge, deformed, shine-less eyes that stare without a reason, and large smiling mouths that don't really have any teeth but are nonetheless unsettling.
The short-story horror mangas also tend to focus more on some serious topics like suicide, murders, etc, while Junji Ito's tend to be more of the fantasy-horror route. It's got its own fair share of weird horror, but not in the way where it's the typical western way of being very exaggerated and over the top.
Here's a link to read Fuan no Tane also!
https://mangarock.com/manga/mrs-serie-100084031/chapter/mrs-chapter-100084043
No comments:
Post a Comment