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Nightmare Fuel / Junji Ito

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A typical example from Ito.
Junji Ito's so very good at what he does that having pages for all of his major works wasn't enough to cover all the scary moments that he's put to paper.



Other

  • "Billions Alone":
    • The story is about people that are apparently murdered (without a single evidence of the perpetrator) and then sewn together. From only two people being sewn together, it went to six, twelve, around fifty, then around one hundred, and then the record was topped gloriously with FIVE FREAKING HUNDRED CORPSES SEWN TOGETHER. Just imagine waking up one morning, waiting to enjoy the holiday, only to find parts of the city furnished with hundreds of naked corpses sewn together to look like different kinds of Christmas decorations. There are even a few of them sewn on the Christmas trees.
    • Then there the Fridge Horror: Since the size of affected groups keeps increasing, eventually the criteria for a "big enough" group may reaches entire cities or even countries. We may very well be looking at an imminent apocalypse, but unlike the apocalypse in another Junji Ito's story, this one happens very slowly and gives the survivors plenty of time to contemplate their inevitable demise.
    • The plane that flies over at the end of the story is dispensing leaflets. This implies that whoever’s behind the sewing isn’t just one person, but potentially an entire organisation dedicated to furthering the madness. Who are they, and why do they plan on turning countless people into homicidal maniacs who kill and sew other people together?
  • After reading "The Licking Woman", there's a chance you'll want to avoid dark alleys in case some creepy woman tries to lick and poison your body with her pulsating, bloated, pimply, veiny, wriggling, drooling, infected, gigantic tongue.
  • If you were to look at the chained monstrosity in "Mystery Pavillion", you would think it was the hideous offspring between a bird and an Eldritch Abomination. The reality will make you wish this was the case. It's actually a hideous genetically modified now-extinct cormorantnote in the future. If that's not bad enough, the monster eats two onlookers. The man running the pavilion orders the beast to spit them out, which it does, but it's too late for the victims; as soon as they hit the ground, they start MELTING. And they're still alive.
  • Banette is scary on its own. Banette as drawn by Junji Ito? Terrifying. Gengar's even more terrifying.
  • "Layers of Fear":
    • Thanks to a curse, a young woman is revealed to have layers of her previous skin under her normal skin, structured in layers like a nesting doll. This appeals to her creepy mother, obsessed with babying her daughter and yearning for the old days of parenting a helpess child. Hoping she can peel off the layers and get her baby daughter back after calling her out of the past layers' consciousnesses, she begins to cut away. Sure enough, her two-year-old face is there... but due to the alterations of natural growth, not her two-year-old body.
    • The protagonist is also affected by this curse, having several layers of teeth.
    • The mother, now fully consumed by her delusions, believes that she too is afflicted by the curse, and thinks she can return to a younger age by peeling away her face. She is very much not cursed, and ends up just cutting off her face - and there's no Gory Discretion Shot here: we get to see the whole thing, including her flayed visage.
    • And the origin of the curse? 21 years before the events of the story, the girls' father, an archaeologist, uncovered the ancient skull of a child underneath hundreds of layers of clay and stone molded into the shape of a human body, and he was cursed for disturbing the child's grave. The father was driven to madness by the curse, which had spread to his young daughters, and mysteriously died nine years later. The kicker is that when the protagonist goes to her father's colleague and asks that he lay the skull to rest, she learns that it has disappeared without a trace.
    • The ending. The mother has become a mad recluse after the incident, forcing the protagonist to have to care for her full-time. The younger sister’s skin is regrowing, but according to the protagonist, the horrible peeling gave her a new base, and she isn't growing back the same way. And she still seems be of her two-year-old mind, thus indicating that her old self, her entire personhood, has been completely destroyed.
  • In Earthbound, the narrator's friend, the Chief of her volunteer group, asks her on a date. She declines and explains she's actually moving to a new apartment which he finds strange as she just moved a short time ago. Later on she reveals to the Chief that the reason she moves between apartments so often is because she was raped in an apartment so she is trying to be on the move constantly so the attacker can't find her a second time. Eventually she learns that Chief was the man who raped her when he ends up petrified by the Earthbound curse in her apartment.
    • When it's revealed that the Earthbound Curse is a caused by the ghost of murder victims binding their killers in place close to their death spot, we see a small montage of infected. One of them is a woman who keeps an infant's corpse in a plastic bag in her closet. What the hell happened there?
  • Human Chair is peak Paranoia Fuel. A young writer is interested in buying a new chair to work in, and the clerk shows her a special chair and tells her a very creepy story tied to it, about an ugly carpenter who would live in his chairs to become intimately acquainted with the users. Imagine someone living inside your favorite chair, and even walking around your house at night when you're asleep!

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