Junji Ito has said that he gets his ideas from ordinary existential and physical fears. This is what results in the spine tingling feeling in readers, long after closing the last page of any one of his stories. He usually begins his stories full of normality before they descend into a monstrous and supernatural madness that is usually never resolved.

As such, he has become very adept at never giving the mystery away. The author very much understands that the most effective way of spoiling mystery and tension is to give the mystery away. Junji is a master of suspense, body horror and supernatural otherworldly wrongness. The sweet, mild mannered, charming and calm man is remarkably different from the content and themes of his stories and art. Hideshi Hino is a film director and mangaka that is known for his “Guinea Pig” films and “Hell Baby.” With such illustrious storytellers as influences, Ito has made quite the legacy for himself. Umezu is one of the greatest mangaka’s in horror and created some of the most celebrated works such as Orochi: Blood. He slowly but surely made a name for himself in Japan and across the world as the king of terror that has beencompared to the likes of Stephen King.įollowing the horror boom in the late 1990s, “Tomie| was made into a film and since then several of his works have also been made for cinema and TV.Īs for his biggest influences, Junji Ito has cited Hideshi Hino, Kazuo Umezu as well as legendary creator of the cosmic genre and American author HP Lovecraft. It was not until the publishing of Uzumaki, his phenomenal horror series that he would come into his own. He would soon decide to pursue a comically bland career as a dental technician.

While it was quite a successful series of novels, Tomie did not propel him into the halls of famous artists and writers immediately. The writer made his writing debut with “Tomie,” when he was just twenty four and has never stopped writing since. Ito has been called a mangaka with his stories drawn and written with an off kilter, surreal and otherworldly eeriness. Born in 1963 in the Gifu Prefecture, he is a unique storyteller as he is not a short story writer or novelist in the conventional sense. Junji Ito is Japan’s most lauded and successful horror writer.

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