Well, after a week or so of stewing over the events of our last video, we've decided that
it's not quite enough simply to discuss how Junji Ito uses characters.
If you've read any of his work, you're already familiar with the wildly disturbing, yet...
strangely ineffable effect of his horror.
It's unique and compelling, and at time's just... really hard to understand.
So for this month's list, we're going to take a shot at articulating what it is about Ito's
work that leaves us shuddering.
Keep in mind that this is subjective.
There are many reasons for these stories to turn your stomach, but we feel these are the
three most important:
Humans often speak of the "self" as comprised of three aspects: mind, body, and soul.
These are the pillars of human identity—the most familiar things in the world—and only
one of them is actually tangible.
Body Horror is the art of destabilizing that pillar.
It derives its effect from damaging the human body, thereby instilling in the audience a
profound sense of fragility; the feeling that what makes you you could be taken away.
This is rampant throughout Ito's work, manifesting as bodily harm and deformations that are not
only gruesome, but in many cases entirely impossible.
One of our favorite examples of this comes from his story "The Enigma of Amigara Fault".
It begins with an earthquake, which unearths a buried section of the Amigara mountain range.
The newly-revealed cliff faces are riddled with strange holes in the shape of human silhouettes.
Even strangers, for each hole there is a human counterpart somewhere in the world who fits
perfectly inside.
As word of this phenomenon spreads, people begin to show up in search of their holes.
Finding ones hole means succumbing to the urge to enter it.
Until this point, it's all psychological horror, playing with self-control and determinism.
The real shocker doesn't come until the story's end, when we discover the fate of those who
enter their holes.
Inch-by-inch, as they travel through the darkness, the hole makes subtle deviations around them.
When they finally arrive at the other end, we find the journey has... changed them.
It may not be as visceral as other examples of body horror, but it doesn't need to be.
With his work, Ito often goes a step beyond damaging or deforming the human frame; he
perverts it entirely, undermining what it means to be "human".
While a great deal of his work uses body horror to disturb the reader's sense of self, almost
all of his stories attack and even closer pillar of human identity: the mind.
Similar to his use of body horror, Ito seems to enjoy putting his characters through intense
mental damage and degeneration, troubling the audience with the fear that their minds—the
thing they expect to have the most control over—could be harmed in a similar fashion.
He employs Psychological Horror with a refreshingly heavy hand, throwing his characters into all-consuming
obsession and irrational mania as a go-to catalyst for his conflicts.
And it... works surprisingly well.
You can see it very clearly in his story "Library of Illusion", which is about a man who inherits
an extensive book collection from his mother and father and spends a decidedly unhealthy
amount of time maintaining it.
But the real story only starts when two books go missing.
Suddenly convinced that the only way to truly protect the library is memorize the contents
of every book word-for-word, his obsession spirals into insanity.
By the time he's transcribed all 150,000 of them to memory, his mind is so overcrowded
that he can no longer recall who or what he is.
He becomes his obsession.
Many of Ito's characters undergo this kind of mental transformation, leading them down
terrible paths no rational person would ever think to tread.
So far we've looked at how Ito's work disturbs the human concept of "self" by attacking the
body and mind, but what about the soul?
Well, more than the actual soul, his work effects the self-concept.
The horror he creates is about conceptual shifts: a move from human to inhuman, sane
to morbidly obsessed, "self" to "other".
As we read his stories, we slide backward into something called "The Uncanny Valley".
This is usually expressed as a graph with a single slope.
The more similarities something shares with its audience, the more comfortable they tend
to be with it.
But there comes a point in this climbing "likeness" where the thing in question enters a sort
of aesthetic limbo, no longer different enough to be "other", but still not quite close enough
to be "self".
This is The Uncanny Valley: a place where one has no choice but to doubt the nature
of their identity.
The brilliance of Ito's horror is that he begins at the opposite end of the slope, and
through his singularly disturbing employment of both psychological and body horror, draws
us from a place of familiarity into the valley.
We really felt this while reading "Hellstar Remina" in particular.
It's about a newly-discovered planet in a distant galaxy.
At first the only strange thing about this planet seems to be its strange path through
space.
But the astronomers watching it soon make a troubling discovery: other celestial bodies
around it are disappearing.
This new planet is eating them, and it's coming for Earth next.
The story is about the ensuing chaos as our world is steadily devoured by another.
This is clearly an example of Lovecraftian "Cosmological Horror", but it's also a terrifying
representation of how Ito approaches the uncanny.
He begins with something as familiar as the basic human understanding of the cosmos, and
the pushes it into a place of relative unfamiliarity, where the very planets have eyes, and tongues,
and appetites.
He plays with the metrics humans use to evaluate themselves, forcing them to reconsider their
purpose, their significance; ultimately, who they are.
It's not always scary per se, but you rarely come away from his work without an overwhelming
sense of disquiet; wrongness.
This may well be due to the fact that Ito is admittedly operating on a very intrinsic
level.
In an interview with Akiko Iwane, he said that he "doesn't really know what's considered
'scary'", and that he prefers simply to "look at things from daily life with a backward
perspective".
Incidentally, turning the familiar into something... else.
Speaking of which!
Aside from some... quiet... skittering noises just outside the Foundry, everything around
here seems to have calmed down since our last video.
Don't worry—Clive is doing just fine now.
The other Taleoids have really helped him to re-acclimate.
For now, we're just glad that... thing is gone.
It's a shame we can't take a closer look at this right now, but don't quite have the means
to get deeper into the facility.
If you'd like to help with that, come support us on Patreon!
The closer we get to our goals, the more we'll be able to uncover.
In the meantime, we do have a short story to write.
Thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!
We'll see you... next week.
Bye!