People widen their eyes when they’re scared, and we tend to start feeling scared ourselves when we see someone else’s frightened face.
In some cases, like the last image above, the effect might be biologically determined. I want to talk about how Junji Ito draws eyes. When is it going to get crazy? When is it going to get gross? And I’m sure that Ito owes his fame and success to his ability to come up with (and execute), these nightmare visions.īut this post is about a quieter aspect of his technique, and one which - unlike the horror-images linked above - appears not just in one of his comics, but pretty much systematically throughout his work. The revelation of the horror-image, in fact, becomes a meta-narrative tension that runs throughout the story. When you open up a Junji Ito book, you do so knowing that you’re going to be confronted with an image like this eventually. Jesus, there’s just no warning some people.) Even though this post is about horror, everything else on this page is pretty PG - but if you want an unfiltered taste of Junji Ito’s horrific imagination, click here. Just coming up with this many appalling ideas, and then finding novel and visually arresting ways for each of them to look horrific, is an astonishing achievement (and/or a sign that Ito needs to go have a glass of warm milk and a lie-down). Spiral in particular is usually seen as his masterwork, but to my mind his vast output of short stories is even more remarkable. Junji Ito is a Japanese comics artist who specializes in horror, most famous for his large-scale works, Spiral, Gyo, and Tomie.