How Media Scares Us: The Work of Junji Ito

when I was a lad I can remember being at a friend's sleepover and at some point someone pulls out a videotape of the movie twister we all gather around and start watching and twister is not a scary movie not by any stretch but about 40 minutes in we get this shot of a drive-in theater and playing on the screen of the theater was a different movie there's this unusual shot of a boy riding a tricycle down a long hall before being confronted by two strange-looking little girls and something about the scene just fell off like really really off i sat there transfixed feeling afraid but having no idea why I couldn't get that scene out of my head and I was trying and failing to not get too creeped out until later that night when I had to admit the fees hang my head in shame and call for my parents to pick me up the ultimate social disgrace for a ten-year-old at a birthday party the film was of course Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and has since become one of my favorite films of all time but the question is what was it about that eight seconds of footage scared me so badly and more importantly how did it do it in the scene itself we start off with this really long shot the camera slowly pushing down the hallway behind our character Danny but what immediately resonates here is the sense of motion because of the very particular composition of the shot there's a really strong sense of perspective and this combined with the slow pan on the camera makes it feel like it's not just Danny moving through the hotel but us as well we turn the corner and sound cue hits and we're faced with this scene and I say we because again that's what it feels like rather than watching something happening to someone else the expert staging and shot composition makes it feel like we're the ones being confronted here and not only that but there is a level of uncanny discomfort with what we're being confronted by well we can identify the little girls as humans they're far enough away from the camera that we can't be 100% certain which creates something akin to the discomfort caused by the uncanny valley and adds this weird sense there's something about this scene that's just very very wrong this coupled with some really incredible sound design create scene that even completely out of context and with no dialogue is still frightening on a level that was entirely too much for a younger me to handle and Kubrick constantly does this using bizarre subtleties throughout the movie to unsettle us whether it be consciously breaking continuity making his actors appear as ghoulish as physically possible or making use of ridiculous and unsettling imagery what strikes me about the hallway scene in particular whoever is how it takes advantage of so many aspects that are unique to film such as camera movement sound design and use them all to build a unique sense of horror in other words it leverages the strengths of live action to frighten us and this in turn always made me wonder what advantage can other mediums such as games animation and comics offer in terms of horror that perhaps live-action could not and that is exactly what we're here to discuss draw the curtains dim the lights and get comfortable as we talk about how media scares us before we get into specifics I think at first it might be useful to define what we specifically mean by horror or to put it another way what we don't mean and what we don't mean is jump scares if we pull right back for a second let's talk about the nature of art art as I see it is something created by one person for the express purpose of eliciting emotion in someone else so good horror then creates feelings of fear tension dread etc and there's two reasons I want to leave jumpscares out of this discussion one as I see it jump scares are more a physiological reaction than an emotional one it's your body trying to defend itself against some perceived danger not an emotional response it's not difficult or complicated to create a jump-scare in fact if I wanted to all I'd have to do to jump scare you right now is let the screen fade to black slowly trail off my sentence and like I'm not going to but I could have second I think what a lot of people especially those not familiar with our think of horror is the standard set up misdirection jump-scare and recent cinema has done nothing but reinforced that notion which really sucks because this is only one particular aspect in creating horror and relying solely on this discount so much of what makes the genre worthwhile now that's not to say jump scares can't be a lot of fun or that they're not true horror I actually really enjoyed the clever and even subtle jump scares first insidious movie but again it's not what we're referring to what we are referring to is horrid seeps into your subconscious and stays there for years to come the kind of horror that cannot be achieved through momentary startles that needs to be built up through atmosphere strong imagery and pacing case in points the hallway scene from The Shining we discussed but there's many other examples of great horror movies that rely on fear and dread as opposed to momentary scares and inevitably these seem to be the one that ended up getting discussed years and years after their initial release take for example 1968 s fantastic Rosemary's Baby in which a young Mia Farrow moves into an apartment complex occupied and run by a satanic cult the fear coming not from any direct danger but just through the feeling that something is very very wrong with both the building and its occupants there's no point in the film that's going to make you jump out of your seat but the skill that went into its creation means I've never forgotten that particular feeling of dread created within me it's this kind of situational based horror that I really enjoy and I'd argue nowhere does this better than the medium of video games video games present the horror genre with a lot of unique opportunities the primary one being the players own input so no longer is horror and experience to be observed but something the player must actively participate in we can't watch the victim anymore we are the victim and games like o'clock terror or haunting grow'd play on this beautifully if you want to see a near-perfect marriage between horror and game design though then you should seek out the indie horror game witch's house despite the simple visuals it shows horror gaming at its most precise and clever constantly creating expectations within the player only to subvert those expectations constantly psyching them out until something as simple as moving your character into a new room becomes a daunting and frightening task this isn't the only advantage created by player input however it also serves the distinct function of it keeps players from getting bored this might sound obvious but this really is something that only video games can do take the first Resident Evil for example or better yet it's excellent remake despite how they've changed in recent times early Resident Evil was intensely focused on isolation exploration and dread a solitary 8 hour adventure - Requip mansion only briefly punctuated by the appearance of other characters now imagine that in any other format it would be near unwatchable keeping the audience's attention would mean that multiple characters must be on screen so that dialogue can occur but because of gameplay video games don't have this restriction we can be by ourselves and it's still engaging and this in turn allows game designers to explore the feeling that comes of being isolated somewhere unfamiliar and dangerous animation in horror is kind of an odd one for me well the potential to create great horror is there after all animation can explain whatever the mind can conceive but works of genuinely great horror and animation are few and far between a certain amount of this comes from how little horror animation there actually is no doubt stemming from the misguided stigma that animation is a children's medium but I think a certain amount of it is also due to the importance placed on aesthetics in animation what I mean by this is that animators are trained to value things on an aesthetically pleasing level ie the idea that 95% of all animation should either look cool pretty or cute and this in itself creates a barrier as true horror needs a very particular kind of aesthetic in order to really get under our skin take for example the anime horror another while it's fun enough in its own right one thing you'll notice about the visuals is that they are extremely extremely pretty all the character designs have a serene beauty to them only offset by the many gruesome death scenes that take place and while it's enjoyable in a final destination kind of way it seems more than anything what the show wanted was to be seen as a beautiful looking show as opposed to a frightening looking one and in doing so trades in the ability to build a scary and tense atmosphere for the sake of appealing character designs now take that character aesthetic and compare it to the stalker character from perfect blue now there is a guy who looks creepy as hell in any setting whether it be standing in a crowded audience or chasing you through an abandoned building I'm sure he's never getting his own figma but his lack of direct aesthetic appeal make him an ideal antagonist for a psychological horror like perfect blue he's creepy on site alone without context or dialogue and this is specifically what makes him so effective and while we're on the subject even though I'd be reluctant to refer to it as a straight-up horror I'd be remiss for not mentioning paranoia agent from the same director it tells the story of a city plagued by mysterious assaults with people saying they've been attacked by a young boy on rollerskates with a bent baseball bat well not particularly frightening it is a master class in unease and tension well I think neither paranoia agent or perfect blue are particularly frightening they are both highly unnerving and excellent in their own right and even more than that they're both works of one of the greatest anime directors of our time Satoshi Kohn and this isn't going to be the last time we talk about either on this channel but that aside I'd really struggle to think of many genuinely frightening animated horrors which again is a shame because in a lot of ways the medium is perfect for it if you do know of any decent horror animation or anime and please let me know is it's something I'd really like to see more of which brings us to comics and not long ago I would have thought much the same about horror comics as I do animation but that's before I discovered the work of one very particular artist at that artist being John J Ito Ito's work can be both eerily beautiful intensely frightening his illustrations don't seem to concern themselves being aesthetically pleasing in a traditional sense and they don't have to nothing about the way ito draws or creates stories is for the sake of making things easy on the reader rather every line every pen stroke is intensely focused on making the reader feel as uneasy as physically possible even his regular illustrations of humans have an eerie quality to them and something as simple as a house cat can become eerie and bizarre when illustrated by ito which if anything shows just how good a grasp he has on how to create eerie visuals after all it's easy to make a demon or monster look scary but a house cat now that's something else entirely it's through this we can also see one of Ito's core philosophies it's rare that any kind of pre-established horror convention appears in his work such as say like vampires or werewolves rather Ito's illustrations are primarily centered around the disorientation of the natural world or as he himself puts it taking something normal and looking at it backwards and this goes a long way into making Ito's creations feel all the more inning and frightening and completely removes us from our horror or comfort zones everyone knows the rules to dealing with zombies or vampires but this [ __ ] thing no thank you eatos lack of reliance on what's come before really makes him reach to find horror in places we might not otherwise have considered Ito finds horror not in dark castles or forbidden woods but in our everyday lives like take the brilliance window next door for example in which at night a young boy is called upon by something that lives a mere 10 feet away from him Eidos first major success was with the series that featured one of his very few recurring characters Tomy a a story about a wicked teenage girl who would repeatedly die only to return to life tormenting and corrupting those around her he later fined international success with miniseries like yo and Uzumaki but it's his dozens of single chapter short stories that make up the main body of his work and arguably where we can see him really push his unique brand of conceptual horror short stories have a lot of advantages in our narrative for one because of their brief length there's never a need to over explain the concept which trust me is for the better I have literally never seen a horror story told that was more effective after the ghost or threat was explained and the reason for that simple explaining why a sinister entity is the way it is lets us understand its logic and in doing so allows us to deal with it and thus destroying the mystique and true fear of dealing with something we don't understand this is never the case with Ito's work we never get to peer under the hood of his creations all we get are brief glimpses and rather than weakening his stories it strengthens them after all what's more frightening a threat that you can understand or one that you can't even comprehend take for example one of my personal favorite veto shorts the hanging balloons a small town slowly becomes infested with these giants grotesque floating heads and if that wasn't bad enough each head has the face of a person living in the town and it will track that person down in order to drop a noose around their neck and hang them all attempts to combat and understand the balloons fail we don't know where they came from and we don't know what their true purpose is but we don't need to finding out that the balloons were from another planet or some ancient evil wouldn't make them any more frightening there's no possible explanation that could match the murmurings of our subconscious here and Ito's aware of that he's a master at giving us just enough information to be frightened and then leaving us to speculate what it was or where it came from in a regular narrative this could be frustrating but what Ito's going for here isn't a regular narrative and though it might sound odd these are not character or plot driven stories but it's in discarding these elements that allow him to so thoroughly focus on horror and to do this he's developed his own unique narrative structure a regular narrative arc looks like this this is essentially the emotional flow to a basic story but with ito his stories look more like this and what he really nails what makes him better than 99% of other Horror Writers is his command of this spike right here this sudden jolt of fear at the end of every story and what he uses to communicate it is a technique nearly entirely unique to comics that of the page turn when we turn the page of a comic new information is instantly communicated to us and a good comic artist will use this to his advantage either meeting our expectations or subverting them this works entirely differently from the page turn of a written novel which is without visuals or the quote of a movie because it's the reader who controls when it happens and into that space created by control a good horror writer can inject fear and unease which of course Ito does masterfully right when something really bad is about to happen he always gives us this little panel right at the bottom of the page of our character reacting to something unseen and then it's up to us to turn the page and oh Christ what the [ __ ] is that the best example of this I can think of is one of Eros most famous stories the Enigma of a Megara faults in which an earthquake reveals a group of bizarre human shaped holes in the side of a mountain at first no one can figure out what these holes are or why they're there but slowly people begin to realize that each hole is perfectly suited to each individual person and upon this realization people start to feel compelled to climb to the holes when they do get slowly sucked in no explanation of where they're going nor what lies beyond I'm gonna leave the story there as I really think you need to just experience it for yourself but trust me when you turn that final page it's going to stay with you for a long long time and incidentally if that sounds familiar at all it's because it was referenced in season 1 of Steven universe in the kindergarten episode Steven universe being once again on point with its references we cannot discuss however the work of Ito without bringing up his magnum opus the three-volume horror masterpiece was Maggie in it a small town becomes haunted not by ghosts werewolves or zombies but by the concept of a spiral and no not the put kind of spiral seriously that's the threat here an abstract idea of a geometric shape and it's horrifying much in the same way I think it's impressive that he can make everyday objects unsettling I think the same is true with a premise there's nothing frightening about a spiral in the same way there is a ghost or serial killer and yet still ego manages to weave a tale of unbridled corruption and horror this becomes apparent as soon as chapter 1 in which one of the protagonist fathers becomes obsessed with the idea of a spiral at first in a relatively unobtrusive way he begins collecting things with spiral patterns on the meth spends a lot of time examining them but before long he begins to exhibit behavior that's entirely unhinged contorting his body and even life into a spiral shape and it ends with one of the best page turns it was ever done this is just chapter 1 however and what's fascinating about this story is how it escalates at first in very small ways whereas the father becomes obsessed with spirals the mother develops a violent phobia of them which becomes a problem when you remember that spirals are part of our physical makeup not gonna say any more on that but yeah it's it's bad as things continue to advance though one of Eros biggest influences becomes parents and that is the work of 19th century horror author HP Lovecraft Lovecraft is the proprietor of what is generally known as cosmic horror tales of ancient extraterrestrial beings so massive and advanced that to even behold them is to accept how truly insignificant man is and suffer madness because of it Lovecraft always plays on this idea of horror through perception that there's truth out there mere concepts that are so overwhelming and dangerous to our human psyche that the mayor discovery of them would destroy how we view reality and thus us ourselves which is exactly the threat presented in Uzumaki eventually the entire town begins to twist and distort under the influence of the spiral and what starts as a man way too into spirals grows into a story of cosmic horror and raises the frightening idea of what is it that lies just beyond our perception one aspect that I think's especially noteworthy about Uzumaki is that it's an idea that could only really have become realized through comics well whose amake has been adapted into film its initial conception couldn't really have happened through any media other than comics you couldn't pitch with a Maki to a film or animation studio without the mangas prior success it's just to add there a premise and this is the final advantages that comics hold over other horror mediums that they're relatively inexpensive to make and can potentially be done by a single person this not only allows comics to be highly authorial in nature but allows strange and bizarre ideas to breed and take hold and these the ideas that are at the heart of Ito strongest work these brilliantly unique and horrifying these strange concepts and despite the fact they're created with the express purpose of scaring us the imagination and creativity that goes into them cannot be denied which incidentally is exactly what I think is missing from a lot of modern horror cinema and it's through authors like Ito that we begin to see what the horror genre is really capable of after all horror at the end of the day is about eliciting emotion not jump scares not voyeurism but emotion and just like good art good horror reaches deep down into us and makes us feel things we didn't know were there [Music] friends that's gonna do it for this video thanks for joining me today a huge shout out to my buddy Rebecca who did the opening artwork for this episode whose tumblr is great and you should totally check out especially if you're into JoJo's and tumblr user what would the community think for letting me use their amazing Jun Geto glitcher I'll be back soon with another video but in the meantime why not come hang out with me on Twitter eyepatch wolf or come listen to me in the past cast talk about crippling destiny addictions the Dead Rising re release or love sunshine friends take care of yourselves and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 3,572,185

Rating: 4.9610076 out of 5

Keywords: How Media Scares Us, The Work of, Junji Ito, Horror, Manga, The Shining, Scary, creepy, Pasta, Spooky, Halloween

Id: lIIA6QDgl2M

Length: 22min 53sec (1373 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 01 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/SidewalkSavant]

He just put out a new video today on a manga called 'Trail of Blood' by Shuzo Ohshimi which I'm absolutely going to check out now. He has a way of talking naturally about things he likes and just puts this halo around them. He's definitely one of the YouTube greats imo.

[u/DitDots]

He also talks about perfect blue which is a masterpiece.

[u/Jantte]

Is this the same artist that made the spiral themed horror manga?

[u/undeadManoto17]

On a different note, you gotta watch his Video on “The Undertaker”. It made me love Wrestling again.

[u/[deleted]]

Supereyepatch is my favorite YouTuber I appreciate the promotion for him!

[u/paranoidkid91]

Ive seen this video too many times, amazing work, started reading junji ito after this

[u/fynouch]

He introduced me to junji ito so I love the guy

[u/NahmenJayden]

Super EyePatch Wolf is a beautiful treasure. I'm so glad his youtube channel is blowing up. Crazy to think the catalyst for making the channel was Woolie trashing HunterxHunter.

[u/Fancypan7z0]

Yes but will he be able to convince Woolie to watch more HunterxHunter?