Junji Ito/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
/wiki/Junji Itocreator
These women know the drill.

Junji Ito's so very good at this he warrants a page all his own.

Uzumaki

  • Junji Ito's Uzumaki is plenty terrifying on its own, but the chapter featuring the babies who were fed on blood was the worst.
    • These talking babies want nothing more than to be put back into the womb. So a doctor cuts open a mother and crams the kid back in there.
    • That's rather an understatement. More specifically, the mother lives through this treatment and resumes searching out the human blood she needed to sustain the fetus—but while before delivery, she had used a drill to get at those delicious arteries, she's now mutated. The doctor finds himself on the business end of a hairy, hollow, blood-sucking proboscis.
    • The "mushrooms" are the really disturbing part of that arc. The hospital staff has mysteriously started serving mushrooms in all of the food, which everyone but the heroine raves about and becomes addicted to. But in actuality, they're the umbilical cords and placentas of the blood-fed babies. Every time one is cut off, it regrows, and if one's dropped on the floor, it'll take root and grow its own crop. A number of patients die at the hands of the mosquito-mothers while they're busy gorging on the macabre myconids.
  • The creepy jokester kid who stalked the lead character. He gets hit by a car, and because no-one can be cremated anymore (due to the smoke from the cremations spiraling into the lake in a horrific manner) is buried- this alone is horrifying for most Japanese, by the way. The lead character and her boyfriend come to put his soul to rest. They dig him up, open his coffin and his limp, rotting, stitched body beings springing towards them, complete with close ups of his maggot shedding limbs. To make it even worse, his body starts falling apart until he is nothing but a torso with the gigantic metal spring from the moving car he dived into for a bottom half...well, you can also take this as Black Comedy when he starts boinging all over the place.
  • The chapter where people first started turning into snails. Worse yet is when people start eating them.
  • The melted glass lighthouse lens that turns the entire building into an inferno, nightly. The manga shows at least four people burned into a black charred goo.
  • Along with the Golden Triangle and Golden Pentagram, the spiral is one of nature's fondest patterns. Now think about how many spirals there are around you in everyday life.
  • The crowded houses of people eventually fusing into horrifying writhing masses of people twisted and wound around each other, carelessly throwing the mutilated warped twisted bodies of the dead outside?!
  • The greatest unsung scary moment of Uzumaki is the end of Chapter 1, when Shuji's dad dies. We've seen him do all that crazy shit with his eyes and his tongue...but the bathtub...the bathtub...
  • "The Scar"...when she takes off her hat...
  • The peeping tom with the skin-disease that caused spirally spikes. How was he even alive at the end?! How could he even SEE??!!!
  • Shuji's mother cutting off her fingerprints was bad enough... Then it was called to her attention that the cochlea (a piece of the inner ear) is spiral-shaped, so she stabs herself in the ear trying to cut it out! To make matters even worse, the inner ear is largely responsible for keeping a person properly oriented, and so infections or damage can cause someone to become dizzy - the poor woman basically removed her ability to balance, and spent the rest of her short life in a constant state of vertigo, feeling as if she was turning in a never-ending spiral.

The Enigma of Amigara Fault

The Enigma of Amigara Fault, a one-off manga that you should never, ever read unless you really like horrible nightmares. You will never look at the Noodle People trope the same way again.

Gyo

  • The first part of Gyo is actually very funny (you wouldn't expect it from Junji Ito, but there you have it), what with Kaori being chased around by a fish in a floating balloon, not to mention the Crazy Awesome shark tank, but then the infection spreads to humans, and suddenly the manga isn't funny. It's not funny at all. One image stands out: multiple giant Spider Tanks, covered by bloated, infected near-corpses (doomed to serve as power sources for the tanks), advancing slowly but relentlessly through the Fog of Doom, gathering up new "power sources" to replace the ones who have finally rotted away.
  • The very last image of the manga showed the main character sitting down next to the charred skeletal corpse of his girlfriend, and sadly musing that at least she's finally free from the stench of rotting corpses, which she hated in life.

Tomie

  • Obviously, the plentiful Body Horror moments of new Tomies growing from parts of the deceased one. Or, worse, still in her body!
  • In her last appearance, Tsukiko (AKA the Only Sane Man) visits Tomie's house. But it turns out that house is not hers, and her "father" is actually Takagi disguised as the actual owner of the house, who also had a daughter. This daughter, in her turn, was used as subject for Takagi's experiments about Tomie's regeneration capabilities. The ending result is a giant pile of Tomie heads of various sizes fused together and, for some reason, a giant earthworm among them.
  • One comic features a man trying to kill Tomie by slicing her face to shreds. Now, this doesn't kill her, but the cuts get infected, and instead of healing normally, each segment of her destroyed face begins mutating into another Tomie, resulting in a huge mass of eyes, mouths and hands erupting from her face.
  • Tomie herself is enough to induce nightmares. Just a glance at her form is enough to plant the seeds of obsession in somebody's head, which always inevitably ends with murder. And what's scarier than that is the fact that she's constantly multiplying in all sorts of manner.

Hellstar Remina

  • Aside from the horror of all the world's population turning against a teenage girl and her father for the stupidest reason (Okay, yeah, the world will be destroyed, but just because the disaster and the girl share a name is no reason to hunt her down...), there's the sight of planet Remina itself. It...has eyes. And a satellite manages to snap a photo of it destroying Mars...by extending a huge tongue from itself and eating it like a frog does a fly.
    • Especially "lovely" is what the bum who ultimately saves Remina answers when she asks him to just let her go and save himself.

They get you, they don't, don't mean a thing to them. They'd never stop with you now that they got a taste for it.

    • The freaking ending.
      • Not much, since they at least have some hope of survival... well, at least better than who stayed on Earth or, worse, in Remina!

Other

  • The art for 'Mimi's Ghost Stories', especially the faces in the Graveman.
    • "The Woman Next Door". Slashers have nothing on her Offscreen Teleportation. Say, what's that at the window?
    • "The Scarlet Circle" Hmm, a Hell Gate in the form of a little red dot of blood that gets darker with each person it swallows, and grows to engulf the room whenever it takes someone.. Throw in that it's in a tiny little room with no way in or out other than a hole torn in the ceiling. No, not an entrance way in the ceiling. There was no way in or out until the hole was torn open.
  • The ending of "The Bully".
    • The worst part of The Bully is that there's nothing supernatural at all. With things like Uzumaki, you can rest easier in the knowledge that that could never happen in real life. But with The Bully? That actually COULD happen.
  • "Army Of One" is about people that are apparently murdered (without a single evidence of the perpetrator) and then sewed. From only two people being sewed, it went to six, twelve, around fifty, then around one hundred, and then the record was topped gloriously with FIVE FREAKING HUNDRED CORPSES SEWED TOGETHER. And we never get to know who committed everything. That was a scary one-shot, to say the least.
    • Oh but we do get to know who did it in the end. They killed and sewed themselves as a group. After all, "No one wants to be a lonely only..."
    • 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, damnit!
  • Splatter Film: after you eat the honey, it all boils down to either never eat anything again or risk being splattered to death at any arbitrary moment you're eating. You'd think people being splattered flat like a pancake would be funny, but... it's not.
    • The good news is that you won't get splattered solely for eating, but if you're caught eating that special honey...the real horrifying part is how far that one plant must be able to stretch its limbs so it instantly splatters people in other countries, separated from it by oceans!
      • Oh, but we know how! The answer is the plant teleports its limbs away for the split second it takes to splat someone flat! This means, of course, you're safe nowhere. NOWHERE!
      • Oh, and the honey is addictive, so you won't want to eat anything else.
  • From "Voices in the Dark", "The Dark Drinks Blood". A body that is torn to shreds, and the parts scattered all around, should guarantee death, right? Well, not if you have a swarm of bats to act as your circulatory system.
    • Ghosts of Golden Time: they'll kill you... with tickles!
      • If you're very ticklish, this story can indeed be horrifying. Especially since it's actually true that you can die from laughing too hard (basically, if you don't get enough breath between laughs, you suffocate) or too long (you can't rest, eat, or drink properly while laughing. Death by exhaustion is most likely in this case). Being tickled to death might sound like Narm, but it is possible.
  • From "New Voices in the Dark", "Anything But a Ghost". Being possessed by ghosts really can suck...but you start to feel sorry for them when your girlfriend eats them. Worse yet, they bleed. A lot.
    • And she very obviously plans on eating your ghost when you die, and is so eager to eat you that she sits there, watching you with wide eyes, just waiting for you to stop breathing...
  • Hell 'o Dollies. That is all.
  • If you're afraid of the sea or deep-sea creatures, The Thing That Drifted Ashore will surely make you shiver. Now, consider what they found inside the creature. Now,consider that the thing, whatever it was, probably isn't the only one in the ocean...
    • Or the possibility of even creepier creatures, as the chapter aludes to.
    • The zombies/crazy people that spilled out of the thing's guts...
  • Flesh Colored Horror: The story starts off creepily enough by introducing a little kindergartener with a bad skin condition who attacks his school mates out of resentment. But then we get the real reasons behind his skin condition, and it just gets worse from there. Turns out the kid's mama and auntie have been experimenting on themselves and their own skins, and they've reached a point where they could successfully jump in and out of 'em like clothing. And now they've been researching for ways to do the same to junior, explaining his scars. Why? Because the mother believes that the human body, sans skin, is the most beautiful thing in the world, so she wants to spread her twisted sense of beauty to her child. Yeah.
    • One of the more unsettling scenes is after Chikara destroys his mothers skin. Realizing how screwed she is without it, she decides to "Borrow" Maya's. By basically ripping her face off.
  • Den of the Sleep Demon.
    • And guess what? It Gets Worse. Here's a riddle: what's worse than a body turning inside out? The answer: a body turning inside out and swallowing another body in the process.
  • The City Without Streets works in several levels. In one hand, there's the absurd escalation of the main character's fear of losing her privacy. On the other hand, there's the strage ones,[1] who are, of course, depicted in good ol' Junji Ito levels of detail.
  • My Dear Ancestors seems to imply that Shuichi plans on raping Risa while she's mentally collapsed to the point of jibbering with a blank look on her face. Or at the very least, he plans on having her in a constant cycle of mental breakdowns and amnesia to facilitate their marriage.
  • The Long Dream. In Mukoda's mind, he's lived for thousands- no, MILLIONS- of years, every night lasting exponentially longer than the last. After several days, one night of sleep is enough to wipe all his memories of the waking world. And then he ages into something resembling a gray mixed with a harlequin fetus, which crumbles into dust soon after.
  • Hanging Balloons is the surreal story in which giant floating heads of people start hanging them by nooses under the necks. One shocktastic scene is when Kazuko and her friend Chiharu escape being hung by ducking into an alley. A man who lives in the house next to it sees the giant faces floating and shoots Chiharu's balloon head with a crossbow. The giant face deflates... and so does Chiharu's face, in a gruesome display. And no, that's not the end of the story yet.
  • Black Paradox: That guy...vomiting up those glowing spheres for no clear reason, and then finally exploding because his body can't regurgitate them all at the same rate he's producing them. And we never even know WHY this is happening!
    • Nope, we do. Well, sort of... but it's explained to some extent (it has to do with the way "pilorum" is written in Japanese). It doesn't make it any less terrifying... nor it explains why the other woman's face starts doing... that.
  • The Window Next Door loses no time by already featuring a creepy opening illustration. Then it gets worse. Wait until the old lady next door actually appears...
  • The Seashore gives us a slowly rising terror, culminating in the epilogue when the photographs of from our heroes' adventure on the beach are developed. There's the pictures of their friend who died, which show very clearly a host of drowning children's ghosts clinging to him with their faces twisted in utter agony. (Dear God.) Then there's the pictures we don't get to see, because the owner threw them out, destroyed the negatives and violently refused to talk about it. Long suffering fans slowly lets it sink in that whatever was in those pictures was too awful for Junji Ito to draw.
  • "The Ice Cream Bus" A father and his son just moved to a new apartment complex that is visited by an Ice Cream Truck every Saturday night. The driver of the truck gives the children free ice cream and takes them on a drive around the neighborhood before bringing them back. Sounds charming right? That is until the father lets his son go on the truck as well. One time he even catches a glimpse of what is going on in the truck and sees the kids licking huge mounds of ice cream. The scary part? The ice cream mounds are really the MELTED BODIES of the kids. Turns out the more ice cream the kids eat, the more their body becomes ice cream. It gets worse! Near the end, the father catches his son licking piles of ice cream-that used to his friends mind you- and is naturally horrified. He tries to stop his son, but ends up knocking off his head in the process!
  • Clyceride could be his most repulsive story, and that says a lot. It's full of downright sickening moments, but one scene - that involves horrible acne - takes the cake.
  • The concept of "Binzo Tsujii." It all started with our nail-biting antagonist Souichi. What happens to him when he finds his future "wife" (read into it a man-eating nightmare of a woman.) The result is a monstrous child that removes all comedic sympathy for childish Souichi. The fact that he fed his parents to his own son out of neglect and has no remorse whatsoever for the deaths of so many others by he monster child further justifies his demise by his wife's hunger as a statement of poetic justice.
  • The short story, "Slug Girl", is about a high school girl's third person narration of her close friend, Yuuko, who one day develops a Speech Impediment but refuses to explain why. When she visits her home the second time after Yuuko stops coming to school, she finds out why. her tongue transformed into a huge crawling slug. When she desperately tries to cut off the slimy new appendage with scissors, the offending mollusc grows back and continues to return no matter how hard she tries. When her parents try to put salt in her mouth, she spits it out as if she can't stand it. Eventually Yuuko's body slowly begins to wither away, and as a last resort, her parents submerge her in a bathtub of salt hoping it would cure her condition. Instead, the rest of her body breaks down, leaving only her head which the parents wash down with water hoping it will grow back. However, the slug STILL DOESN'T DIE and just like a snail, the slug carries her head on its back like a snail and continues to slither around in the backyard while its "shell" will stare at anyone nearby with the saddest gaze. And, what's more, there is absolutely nothing the girl does that would make her deserve such an awful fate. It truly shows how much of a Crapsack World Junji Ito's human characters live in.
  • 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 Black Paradox, 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 pelican in the future.
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  1. ↑ who are people with deformed oblong heads with lots of eyes. Too many of them.
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