Netflix's highly anticipated Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre is here. One of Japan's horror masters, Junji Ito is a horror manga author and artist that needs no introduction for most anime and manga fans. That being said, many people that enjoy anime don't delve into manga too often, so animated anthologies like this are ideal bridges into the unique and enchanting world of Junji Ito.
The new show is best viewed as an anthology, rather than a series. With anthologies, some stories will be better than others; some glaringly so. Others ill blend together into dull nothingness. This was the case with Crunchyroll's Junji Ito Collection. Fans will be excited to hear that Netflix’s stab at a Junji Ito anthology is better than its predecessor, only let down by a few odd choices. Here are the top ten episodes, ranked.
10 Mold / Library Vision
Though it is by no means bad, this double bill is a quite underwhelming. 'Mold' tells the tale of a disgusting house overtaken by mold, and the awful circumstances that led it to develop. The visual of a young infant crawling around while bubbling with the fungus is incredibly unsettling, and the mold is well-rendered itself.
'Library Vision' is a creative take on generational trauma. A man is obsessed with his vast collection of books, several of which start disappearing and reappearing as ghastly apparitions. He becomes convinced that he must commit his entire collection to memory, which quickly drives him mad.
9 Alley / Headless Statue
'Alley' is an interesting take on the murder mystery genre with Ito's signature supernatural twist. A young man named Ishida rents a room from a woman and her daughter, Shinobu. Compelled by the sound of children in the alley next to him, he uncovers a murderous secret about Shinobu.
'Headless Statue' is more overt, and still very fun to watch. There's no particular narrative here; rather, it relies more on the creepy visuals of headless statues jerking around. Still, it does the job!
8 The Story of the Mysterious Tunnel / Ice Cream Bus
The first story in the episode follows Goro and his sister Mari, who are drawn to the mysterious tunnel their mother disappeared in. It's revealed that there is a Cosmic Ray Observatory within, which is used to observe the strange phenomena of the tunnel. It unfortunately pales in comparison to the second half, but it's a very interesting bit of sci-fi/horror.
'Ice Cream Bus' is animated far more vividly, which is a nice contrast and a great fit for the story. Tomoki, a young child living with his newly divorced father, is excited to discover an ice cream truck that gives away free ice cream every Saturday. It plays on the innocence of children, as they slowly melt into ice cream, devouring each other without a care.
7 Tomb Town
In a town where gravestones pop up at the exact point of peoples death, it's impossible to get around. There are gravestones everywhere: in houses, in the street, completely obstructing visitors. Tsuyoshi and Kaoru, two siblings visiting a childhood friend in that town, fatally hit a woman with their car and hide the body in their trunk.
This story makes literal the metaphorical idea of not being able to move forward when a death occurs. It’s a story about the manifestation of guilt, wrongdoing and self-serving attempts at covering up a tragedy — and it benefits from having its own episode to breathe.
6 Tomie: Photo
Tomie is one of Junji Ito's most well-known and beloved characters, so it's only right that she get a dedicated episode. This is one of Tomie's most iconic stories, and one of the few with a female lead: Tsukiko, a girl who sells illicit photographs of boys for a high profit.
Tomie, a pretty girl on the student council, traps Tsukiko by luring her to take photographs of her — but in those photos lies the beginning of Tomie's twisted mutation. It gets the full episode, but it still has to sacrifice quite a bit to make the runtime. This is a good introduction for new fans, but a bit of a letdown for those familiar with the original story.
5 Unendurable Labyrinth / The Bully
Two of Ito's most human horror stories are packed into this thrilling double-bill. The first, 'Unedurable Labyrinth,' deals with ascetic monks that starve themselves to prepare for self-mummification — and the unfortunate pair of girls that run into them.
'Bully' is incredibly disturbing _ not because of any monster, but because it's so human. Kuriko reminisces with her boyfriend over her time as a young girl, bullying a boy names Nao. Kuriko meets Nao again as an adult, marries, and has a child with him. Soon, he disappears from her life, revealing that the entire marriage was a plot to get revenge from their childhood bullying. It just gets worse from there.
4 Intruder / The Long Hair in the Attic
Oshikiri is an underrated recurring character of Ito's who is served well by this animated short. It explores the concept of alternate dimensions, and takes a few fascinating turns culminating in Oshikiri and his friends burying their own corpses.
'The Long Hair in the Attic' is one of Ito's high-concept horror shorts that works well here, too. It follows Chiemi, whose hair has a horrifying life of its own. She wakes up to find a dead rat in her long, black hair, with a horrifying cut to her bloody, beheaded corpse. There's a striking visual of her father's corpse, having died of fright from seeing her severed head strung up by her haunted hair.
3 Layers of Fear / The Thing that Drifted Ashore
'Layers of Fear' is a strikingly disturbing body horror tale. When Reimi is injured in a car accident, a layer peels back, revealing part of her face from the year before. She grows like a tree, one year on top of the other. This revelation drives her already high-strung mother mad, and she feverishly peels back her daughters bloody layers to reach the younger version of her daughter she cares for so much more.
'The Thing That Drifted Ashore' is a shorter tale about a giant sea creature washing onto a beach and revealing the fate of many lost at sea. It serves as a nice bookend to the body horror.
2 Hanging Balloons
'Hanging Balloons' is an incredibly unique concept, and a downright terrifying one. It concerns Kazuko, a high school girl whose idol friend is found hanging from a tree in an apparent suicide. The episode cuts back and forth between the immediate aftermath of the suicide to a creepy tapping on Kazuko's window: something is calling her name using her dead family's voices.
It is slowly revealed, through these flashbacks, that giant balloon heads are floating through the sky with nooses intended to kill the person they resemble. It devolves into an outright epidemic of corpses floating in the sky. This is a fantastic adaptation of one of Junji Ito's masterpieces, and benefits from being one of the first episodes in the series.
1 The Room with Four Walls / Where the Sandman Lives
Soichi is back in 'The Room With Four Walls.' The nail-biting menace is plaguing his older brother, forcing the family to hire a creepy carpenter, who turns the room into several rooms within rooms, exacerbating his brother's confusion. It's an interesting premise with a tauntingly comedic score.
'Where the Sandman Lives,' on the other hand, is a haunting, high-concept piece of body horror. When Yuji falls asleep, his dream self physically wrenches himself out of his body, trying to turn him inside out. It's a very well animated piece of horror fiction that can stand alone from the manga adaptation.