When she meets the boy’s dad, he enters the room in a spider-like fashion and the top of his head is never shown. When a high schooler brings a girl he likes home to meet his dad, she has already suffered memory loss and trauma in the form of a dream about an enormous caterpillar. Nevertheless, it’s still a terrifying scene that comes at the end of this, one of Ito’s most viscerally unsettling and monstrous tales. That is, until he at last saw the director’s cut of The Exorcist and was disappointed to see it had already been done. There’s a funny anecdote surrounding this tale (found in Shiver), which is that Ito created something here that he was very proud of: a person running whilst lying on their back in an uncanny spider-like fashion. Eventually, though, Ito left his almost comically bland career (especially considering how he is known today) behind and Tomie proved to be the beginning of a phenomenal career as Junji Ito steadily made a greater and greater name for himself as the king of terror, not only in Japan but across the world. Despite its success, Tomie did not project him into the world of famous writers and artists immediately, as Ito worked for several years as a dental technician. Over and again, Tomie drives the men who fall for her into madness. Ito’s debut story, written when he was only 24 years old, was Tomie, a series of stories about a young woman who defies death and ageing. His horror stories, both short and long, are all written and drawn with a surreal, off-kilter, otherworldly eeriness. What makes Ito unique in the horror world is that he isn’t a novelist or a short story writer in the traditional sense he’s a mangaka. Combining a deft artist’s eye with a boundless and terrifying imagination, Junji Ito stands head and shoulders above every other horror writer around.īorn in 1963 in Gifu prefecture, Junji Ito is Japan’s most successful and lauded horror writer.

Junji Ito is a mangaka who understands phobias, existential anxieties, and the terror of the unknown better than any other horror writer on Earth. Turn your eyes to Japan, however, and you’ll discover a writer and artist capable of injecting a far more potent amount of fear into his readers’ veins. The term master of horror is often attributed to American author Stephen King without any argument.

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