Flip-of-the-millennium Japanese horror cinema (referred to stateside as J-Horror, and led by Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge) reveled within the irrational, deriving scares from eventualities and ghouls whose existence and function weren’t understandable in easy phrases. They have been nightmares rooted within the unreal, and it’s there that Junji Ito additionally operates.

A celebrated manga artist whose sinister work typically treads into the surreal, Ito has original a profession out of crafting macabre tales the place logic and lucidity play second fiddle to the unfathomable and the psychotic, and the place hope is as fleeting as specters and insanity are omnipresent.

Although revered in his native Japan, the place a lot of his hits have been tailored for the display, Ito stays a lesser-known amount in America—a state of affairs that Netflix now rectifies with Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre, a 12-episode collection of animated shorts that carry basic and new Ito narratives to mind-bending life.

Premiering on Jan. 19, it’s horror in bite-size kind. The collection is trustworthy to the spirit of the writer’s best, stuffed with sagas wherein the supernatural emerges out of the blue, innocents are plagued and persecuted for no purpose, and salvation is a commodity that’s rarer than grim abuse and fateful tragedy.

Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre’s installments all boast a basic anime model that’s in tune with their Ito supply materials, and so they all run beneath a half-hour. Furthermore, many characteristic two separate vignettes, bringing the present’s complete variety of tales to a formidable twenty. Of these, essentially the most acquainted to Ito followers might be “Tomie’s Images,” because it concentrates on Ito’s well-known villain, a teenage lady named Tomie who casts an irregular (which is to say, predatory) spell over any man she needs.

Tomie is an icon who’s already acquired her personal movie franchise and TV collection, and in her Netflix premiere, she does what she does greatest—particularly, torment her female and male classmates. On this occasion, her goal is a fellow scholar who’s snapping pictures of boys after which promoting them to admirers, and whose footage of Tomie reveal that she’s distinctive…ly monstrous.

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Tomie is arguably essentially the most recognizable face in Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre, however the creepiest visages are present in its third episode, “Hanging Balloon.” Based mostly on a 1998 Ito quick, it considerations Kazuko, a high-school lady who’s launched cowering in her bed room as a close-by voice cajoles her to return exterior and eat earlier than she perishes from hunger.

As flashbacks display, Kazuko is hiding from a phenomenon of unthinkable proportions: within the wake of the hanging suicide of Kazuko’s teen-idol greatest pal exterior her bed room window, the nation’s skies have turn into infested with large balloons that resemble the heads of residents. Worse, these floating noggins boast nooses that wish to wrap themselves round their real-world counterparts’ necks. There’s no escape from these entities, nor any recourse to be taken, since puncturing the balloons spells immediate loss of life for the folks they resemble.

How can this be? What does it imply? How can it’s stopped? “Hanging Balloon” doesn’t trouble with such questions, as an alternative following its baffling premise by means of to its forlorn conclusion. Trying to find solutions to the unholy occasions depicted in Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre is the incorrect option to benefit from the anthology; solely by giving oneself over to the insane can its memorably morbid wonders be correctly appreciated.

That is lunacy on a primal, head-spinning stage, which is partly why, following every episode’s finish credit, there’s a short sequence of scary static sights and a voice (maybe meant to be Ito’s?) rambling incoherently about writing in blood, letters that seem like bugs, and utilizing bones to punch by means of partitions in an effort to attain adjoining rooms.

Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre opens with an overtly comedic effort—“The Unusual Hikizui Siblings,” which is akin to a weird riff on The Addams Household—earlier than traversing extra historically bonkers Ito terrain. A boy grapples with the invention of an alternate-dimension doppelganger (who simply so occurs to be a serial killer) in “Intruder.”

A brother and sister attempt to cowl up the unintentional homicide of a pal’s sibling in a village the place corpses are buried within the actual location that they perished in “Tomb City.” A weird sea creature washes up on a seashore, its intestines full of people that went lacking years earlier, in “The Factor that Drifted Ashore.” And in a narrative that typifies the gathering’s hallucinatory nature, a person asks a lady to maintain him awake in order that his slumbering self gained’t change him—resulting in a finale wherein our bodies, and actuality, flip inside out—in “The Sandman’s Lair.”

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One in every of Ito’s recurring characters, Soichi—a gaunt adolescent troublemaker who’s perpetually chewing on nails, giving him a mouthful of spiky pseudo-teeth—exhibits up in two tales, pestering his older brother in “4 x 4 Partitions” and hanging up an unhealthy relationship with a cute cat in “Soichi’s Beloved Pet.”

All through, Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre portrays the cosmos as being ruled by no discernible guidelines and thus cruelly detached to mortals. As in Soichi’s outings, which means the collection’ protagonists typically meet bleak, out-of-the-blue fates which can be alternately (or concurrently) amusing, unnerving and stunning.

Whereas cruelty is typically punished, and vengeance is often served, Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre thrives when it units apart notions of morality and justice in favor of merely expressing Ito’s deepest, darkest, unconscious hang-ups involving moldy infestation and an infection, lengthy, stringy hair, darkish subterranean passageways and tunnels, and corporeal dissection and desiccation.

Be it “Layers of Terror” imagining that people comprise their prior selves inside (like rings of a tree), or “Ice Cream Bus” portray youngsters’ urge for food for chilly treats in essentially the most deranged mild doable, the anthology is overflowing with concepts and pictures that stick exactly as a result of they arrive with out one-to-one explanations. They’re visions of non-public and common fears, filtered by means of Ito’s distinctively demented artistry.

The post Netflix’s New Anime Horror Anthology Might Be Its Most Twisted first appeared on Raw News.