Junji Itou is a Japanese comic artist who has been prolific in the horror genre. He is most well-known for his Short story format that works well for horror (this is also true for literary works). This medium allows the author to concisely present a central big concept that leaves an impact and sticks in the mind without giving the viewer/reader enough time to contemplate what does or doesn’t make logical sense. Horror is visceral, it shouldn’t matter if it makes rational sense, and in fact, is often better if it does not. The key is creating an engaging story so that logic won’t matter.
The short-form narrative also allows for an increased amount of experimentation with story format – many times Itou’s stories will end on the climax with no resolution, making them increasingly disturbing. Characters also often exist more as stand-ins for the audience, their purpose being to discover and react to the horror around them, rather than as fully fleshed-out personalities. The format & the strength of the horror elements allows him to get away with this without impacting the strength of the overall experience. The point is the central horror, and every other element around it is designed to make that more effective, usually with great success.
Itou’s longer comics still frequently take an episodic approach that allows him to make use of his greatest strengths. Uzumaki (subtitled “Spiral Into Horror” in English) for example consists of a series of bizarre events all taking place in the same setting, featuring some of the same characters, around the central conceit of “spirals”. The structure each of these vignettes use is replicated on a macro scale across the whole narrative, each incident usually being more absurd, more consequential than the last – escalating to an apocalyptic point by the end.
Itou makes masterful use of the structural elements of his medium. His usual style of paneling dictates a slow, methodical pace for much of the story – featuring mainly action-to-action transitions across somewhat regular panels. However, whenever something key to the horror is about to happen, he will slow the pace down to a crawl, switching to moment-to-moment transitions, often taking an entire page or two to depict a character noticing something out of the corner of their eye, turning and moving to look at it. He depicts each moment, each minute reaction in excruciating detail, driving tension up until the final panel of that page will be the character’s (usually horrified) reaction to what they are seeing. It is then up to the reader’s curiosity to tempt them into turning the page and be confronted by a full-page spread of the subject of horror, rendered in horrific detail before the action returns to a more regular pace.
This brilliant use of the page turn to deliver scares is a key tactic used in nearly all of Itou’s work, and works extremely well – the degree of control afforded to the reader, having to voluntarily turn the page, really adds to it. Structurally similar to the cinematic trope of the “jump scare”, where a stretch of low action high tension (often also a character exploring an unfamiliar location), enhanced by sound design and music cues, will be followed by a sudden high-intensity scare, taking advantage of the basic human fight or flight reflex.
The above structure has directly influenced how I structured parts of the final story. The obvious approach, to me, would have been to first show the subject the character is reacting to,*then* their horrified reaction – but by examining what makes Itou’s work so good, I realised putting them in the opposite order is much more effective for building anticipation and delivering an effective scare.
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