Unsettling reflections

When most people think of Junji Ito, they think of grotesque faces, body horror, and nightmarish images that stick in your mind long after the page is closed. But for me, Ito isn’t just about shock or scares. He’s holding up a mirror — not to monsters outside of us, but to dysfunctions within society and within ourselves.

In his stories, the real terror isn’t just the supernatural. It’s the loss of control. The way we get swallowed by collective hysteria (The Enigma of Amigara Fault). The way obsession destroys us (The Hanging Balloons). The way beauty turns predatory (Fashion Model).

Ito dramatizes the things we’d rather not face: our dependence on social validation, our fear of being forgotten, our willingness to lose ourselves in conformity. His horror shows us that sometimes, the scariest thing is not the monster chasing us — but the way we willingly hand over our agency to something bigger than ourselves.

In this blog, I want to explore Ito’s works not as “scare stories,” but as meditations on human weakness, social dysfunction, and the terrors of being alive. Horror, in his hands, isn’t just entertainment — it’s reflection.