"Dad was such a drag. Every day he'd eat the same kinda food, dress the same,
sit in front of the same kinda games.
Yeah, he was just that kind of guy"
Nothing is more comfortable than routine. The repetition of day to day life is part of human nature.
It gives us a sense of place in the world.
But what happens when this routine gets disrupted by something unforeseen and we realise that all is not as it seems?
How the universe is controlled by eldritch cosmic forces,
patterns that we as humans are almost incapable to perceive - let alone comprehend.
Such revelations can cause us to question our very existence
and whether we are really the ones in control.
We start to realise just how thin the line between sanity and madness truly is.
This notion of insanity lurking beneath mundane everyday life is a popular theme
in the horror genre, but no one captures this existential angst quite as artfully and elegantly
as the famous Japanese Manga artist Junji Ito.
Silent Hill fans will probably recognise his name as Ito was revealed to be one of the key artistic directors
for Kojima and del Toro's Silent Hills.
Since the project was cancelled we may never know the full extent of Ito's involvement,
but it's easy to see his influence in both Silent Hills and its teaser PT.
But just who is Junji Ito?
Despite being massively influential in defining an entire generation of Japanese horror
he is notoriously reclusive. He rarely speaks in public and he is renowned for his shy and reticent demeanour.
So, today let's take a look at this introverted artist who brought us
some of the most terrifying visions ever put to the page.
As we trace his history and influence we'll learn the true story of
an undisputed master of the uncanny and dreadful.
Let's follow Junji Ito's Spiral Into Horror.
There aren't enough adjectives to describe Junji Ito's works.
Surreal
Disorienting
Haunting
Nightmarish
He is a true master of the horror genre and his style is instantly recognisable.
Whether it's a long-running series or a one-off piece, Ito's comics centre on a handful of recurring themes.
His protagonists are regular every day people who become victims of sinister forces
that are beyond human comprehension.
Unless they try to understand, or even fight back against these forces
they're inexorably drawn deeper and deeper into the horror.
There are also frequent elements of self insertion in his comics
where his protagonists are drawn to resemble the artist himself.
- not unlike Steven King, who likes to make his main characters writers
as it makes it easy for him to make them feel authentic.
Throughout most of Ito's works his art style is clean, simple and expressive.
But every issue or chapter usually has at least one big panel that contains
an intense, almost abnormal amount of detail.
You can tell that these parts are the result of an intense amount of labour,
dozens of hours of careful planning and precise inking.
This beautiful and hyper-detailed style is particularly visible in his many scenes of
gruesome body horror that show a clear influence of film directors like David Cronenberg.
If you want to learn a bit more about body horror and the works of David Cronenberg
I recommend you check out this video.
Most often these horror elements are used to create a distorted reflection of modern Japanese society.
Ito has stated that one of his favourite techniques is to take
a concept or trope that usually has positive connotation in Japanese culture
and then turn it on its head to fundamentally corrupt its meaning.
This use of tropes usually has a dark undercurrent of punishment and humiliation
Where characters are doomed to suffer for their sins, in many cases vastly out of proportion.
One of the most common examples of this in Ito's works is the subversion of the Japanese ideals of female beauty.
like in Tomie, a story about a beautiful young girl who possesses the uncanny ability to make any man fall for her.
- which she acts out in true succubus fashion.
The catch is that every man who does fall for her
develops the strange urge to murder Tomie.
A truly sadistic curse which makes her existence a never ending cycle of torment.
Ito has also used the comic medium to comment on issues like
like widespread social isolation in Japan
like an Army of One, or the government's use of biological warfare in World War Two
as in his famous two-parter "Gyo".
Junji Ito started his working life as a dental technician in the early 1990's
and it's easy to see how his medical background fuelled his hyper-detailed and visceral depictions of human anatomy.
Initially he drew comics freelance, with his works appearing in various
weekly and monthly comic magazines in Japan.
But his popularity skyrocketed throughout the 90's.
until he eventually opted out of his medical career to become a full time manga artist.
Ito has been writing and illustrating comics for close to three decades now
and every time he releases something new his works are renowned to be incredibly prolific
which makes it difficult to pick out his best,
or even most influential work.
But if you ask fans and critics to pick one you will almost unanimously hear one answer -
Uzumaki.
Originally released between 1998 and '99 in the Japanese magazine Big Comic Spirits and spanning over 19 chapters
Uzumaki is nightmare fuel in its purest form that plays out in slow motion
as the reader uncovers, piece by piece, how a strange curse revolving around an obscure spiral pattern
haunts the peaceful Japanese seaside town of Kurôzu-cho.
Step by step, chapter by chapter, increasingly menacing forms of the curse begin to infect and gradually blight the village.
At first nothing seems to connect these horrific incidents
aside from one common factor - the spiral.
But as the story evolves we witness how each chapter is part of a larger chain of events,
a humongous and eldritch yarn about an ancient curse that has haunted the land for hundreds of years.
Throughout its history it always unfolded in the same pattern:
First it manifests itself in the form of unearthly phenomena
like people suddenly losing their minds and becoming, almost systematically, insane.
Followed by natural disasters like violent hurricanes and mysterious vortices in the sea.
and the townspeople themselves becoming perverted half-human abominations.
Until the eventual total collapse of society.
Ito visibly delights in twisting mundane and commonplace elements of society
into increasingly frightening and nightmarish visions
until bit by bit the spiral curse taints everything in this town, corrupting all of its citizens in the process.
High school students get drawn into supernaturally grotesque quarrels
Two star crossed lovers become forever... entwined...
and even childbirth becomes tarnished by the cosmic force of the spiral.
Eventually Kirie and Shuichi, the story's protagonists, come to understand fragments of this terrible scourge.
The spiral has doomed the town, all who live in it to be inevitable consumed by it,
no matter how much they struggle.
Like in a cosmic pit of quicksand, the more the people of Kurôzu-cho resist, the faster they sink,
being drawn deeper and deeper into the spiral.
In an interview with 78 Magazine Ito explained how he developed the fascination for the concept of the spiral
that served as the basis for an entire series.
If you think about it, the spiral is truly one of the most fascinating patterns in nature.
Our modern understanding of it is expressed in a famous mathematical theorum:
The Fibonacci Sequence, which is also known as "nature's numbering system".
You might have heard about it in math class:
In 1202 the Italian theoretican Leonardo Bonacci, commonly known as Fibonacci,
established a theorem about a strange sequential numerical pattern
that appears again and again in mathematics.
The algorithm is simple: every following number in the sequence is the sum of its first two predecessors.
It starts with 1, then another 1 because there is only one predecessor,
then a 2 because 1 and 1 is 2, 2 plus 1 is 3, 3 plus 2 is 5, 8,13, and so on.
But aside from it's regular occurrence in mathematics, it's found everywhere.
For example it builds the theoretical basis of our subjective understanding of aesthetics.
The distribution of lines and shapes and forms according to this formula is called the "Golden Ratio"
and it's proven to subconsciously feel pleasant to a human observer.
But even more peculiarly, the Fibonacci sequence can also be observed everywhere in nature.
See, the ratio between numbers in the Fibonacci sequence is also found
in the spaces between the spiral arrangement of the branches on a plant stem, or the branching structure of a tree.
Or in the shape, size and distribution of honeycombs in a beehive.
Or on the shell of a mollusc.
The distributions of scales on a pinecone - or a pineapple!
The relative length of each individual bone in or fingers and thumbs.
The arrangements of seeds in a sunflower, the spiral shaped cochlear of our inner ear -
Fibonacci is found in the smallest cell all the way to entire galaxies.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a four arm spiral galaxy, and the geometric patter of its spirals is -
You guessed it - the Fibonacci sequence!
A secluded coastal town, whose inhabitants are inflicted with the curse of madness.
A godlike force that slumbers beneath, too grand for humans to fathom.
And those who even get the tiniest glimpse of its truths are all irreversibly struck by insanity.
Doesn't that sound familiar?
Yes, it also perfectly mirrors the plot of one of H.P. Lovecraft's most famous stories
and the origin of the Cthulhu mythology: The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
Many elements of Lovecraft's work deeply influenced Uzumaki.
In the aforementioned interview Ito did in fact state that H.P. Lovecraft was his main inspiration for Uzumaki's story.
The concept of protagonists struggling against a great primordial force
underlined by a slowly unfolding atmosphere of dread and paranoia
were both key eldritch elements that Ito wanted to translate into his work.
Having this in mind, it's kind of fascinating to read Uzumaki as a Japanese reinterpretation of Lovecraft.
especially since its conclusion can easily be considered an homage to the Call of Cthulhu mythos.
Junji Ito frequently hints at these concepts and tropes in other comics too
but nowhere as overtly and directly as in Uzumaki.
And when we consider its enormous success and acclaim, and its role in introducing Lovecraft
to mainstream Japanese pop culture we quickly begin to find it echoing throughout many facets of modern Japanese horror.
About strange haunted places by ancient gods and ordinary people falling victim to mysterious curses
Uzumaki was so popular and influential that a movie adaptation began filming
even before the original manga series was completed.
It was released in early 2000, and like many live action adaptations of anime and manga...
let's just leave it at it wasn't very good.
With Silent Hills' strikingly Lovecraftian undertones it's only appropriate
that Junji Ito would have been brought on to contribute to its latest installment.
But Ito's work was also greatly influential to another highly acclaimed video game series with strong horror elements:
Hidetaka Miyazaki's Souls series, including Demon's Souls and especially Bloodborne.
References to Junji Ito can be found everywhere throughout Miyazaki's games,
sometimes almost blatantly obvious.
Think of the bottomless tower to the Four Kings, the mass-of-souls corpse pile enemy,
The snail ladies in Bloodborne, and even the plot of Bloodborne itself,
just like Uzumaki, is a direct reinterpretation of Lovecraft's novels.
And the plot of the Souls games focuses on a mysterious curse,
represented by a circle, in which the cursed are doomed to die and be reborn over and over again.
Each time losing a piece of their humanity, inexorably doomed to spiral into insanity.
This curse of the undead is represented by the Dark Sign, a mark on the flesh of the Hollowed.
And what does this mark look like in the game?
The ultimate symbol of someone or something doomed to repetition -
circling over and over again until they collapse in on themselves.
The spiral of entropy is the fate of all living things
Just as it can symbolise growth outward from a point
it can equally represent a gradual, relentless decline into decay and death.
In life, we enjoy a time where we burst out into the world and flourish.
We grow, thrive, push out into the world in pursuit of a place where we belong.
But as we age, we're doomed to slowly shrink and fade and turn back in on ourselves until we... die.
Junji Ito understands something essential about horror:
What truly frightens us is not the things that go bump in the night.
It is what lurks in the everyday world all around us.
Our darkest fears and nightmares that lie dormant in the deepest pits of our subconscious sea.
It's the knowledge that just beneath the surface of day to day life,
hidden behind the politely smiling facade of society,
madness, despair and death are always patiently waiting to pull us into the downward spiral of existence.
The spiral curse, it's a fate that all of us share.
Thank you so much for watching, as always I hope you enjoyed this video.
If you did I highly encourage you to check out this video by my friend Michael Saba
who had a huge part in writing and researching for this episode
in which he very plausibly demonstrates how an involvement of Junji Ito in Death Stranding is everything but unlikely.
If you want to see more influences on H.P. Lovecraft on Bloodborne I can highly recommend watching this
video by Fungo which draws the connection between the game's Fishing Hamlet location
and a direct influence by The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
Also, I'm bringing back the good old voting.
It won't be the direct next video, but your voice counts!
And lastly, a thank you to all the people who support me on Patreon.
Your support made a lot of what you saw in this video possible in the first place, and that deserves my deepest gratitude.
So, until next time remember:
The Truth is Out There!