I have recently been reading some of the work of horror manga artist, Junji Ito. What I really love about his work, and what draws myself and many others to it, is his ability to make things that are mundane and everyday terrifying.
Take his 3-volume manga series Uzumaki. The series is focused on the fictional town of Kurôzu-cho, and the strange events that take place there. It also loosely follows a high school teen girl called Kirie, and her experiences in the town.
The town is "cursed", and over the three volumes, the curses begin to send the town into disarray, and eventually, destruction. However, the curse does not manifest in the form of ghosts, or demons, or things that go bump in the night. Instead, the physical representation of the curse is a simple geometric spiral.
There is nothing inherently scary about spirals at all. Yet Ito constructs a really solid narrative whereby slowly, both the characters and the reader begin to feel a sense of dread every time one appears on a page.
Ito also uses very graphic imagery in his work, not shying away from gore or body horror. This is also another aspect of his work that has gained him a cult following, that he doesn't have any reservations about drawing a man's body that has been warped into a spiral, or a girl with a spiral going into her head.
i dont think they cover that on the nhs
His work uses the book equivalent of a jumpscare. Usually, his most shocking and graphic illustrations are whole page spreads, or take up a large amount of the page, and it is up to the reader to decide when to turn the page and reveal whatever it is the character is looking at. The character who sees the horror form almost always sees it before we do - we see their reaction, then the thing that has caused this reaction, which allows the reader to build up a sense of expectation and curiosity about what is about to be revealed to them.
I really love Ito's work. I think he constructs a narrative really well, establishing the world and then bringing the mundane into the dark, twisting it. The characters are usually the least interesting part of his stories, but I think they act as narrators to lead us through the story, rather than existing to be pivotal to the plot.
One of Ito's most famous stories is The Enigma of Amigara Fault. I first read this a few years ago, and it has stuck with me since. The plot is devilishly simple, with the basic premise being that an earthquake has broken apart a cliff face, to reveal a whole array of human-shaped holes that seem to go on forever. Without spoiling the ending, the manga manages to introduce an idea, flip the readers' expectations, and then flip them again for the shock cliffhanger (literally...) ending. I would recommend reading it if you have twenty minutes to spare. It's short, sweet, and will stay with you for a long time after seeing the last page.
Finally, the last thing I'd like to talk about is how in Ito's work, there is almost always no threat in the form of a "big bad". Many horrors have a main demon, or witch, or spirit, who must be overcome or reasoned with. But what makes Ito's work truly terrifying is that since there is no sentient force or being, there is nothing to ration with. There is no humanity to reason with and negotiate. Instead, there is only the omnious forces at work, which makes the characters seem so very helpless. And makes us, the readers, feel truly terrified and creeped out.
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