Junji Itō Quotes

A lot of modern movies take the approach of shocking the audience with things like jump scares. I grew up with the old-timey Hammer and Universal horror movies which focus more on creating a scary mood, so I prefer movies that gradually scare the audience with eerie atmosphere. Jump scares can certainly make people scared in the moment, but it's sort of a fleeting fear. I suppose it's all a matter of taste.

I think in horror the eyes are really important. How you draw them can totally change how scary a story is. I think the scariest part of the body is probably people’s eyes.

In terms of a short story, I'd like a more horrific/bad ending. In terms of longer stories, fans usually get emotionally attached to characters when reading long form. If I know that's the case, I want to end it on a good note, so people don't end up hating it. For me personally, I prefer short stories and ending it in a horrifying way because I'm also good at it.

Comics utilize images, angles, and feelings that are hard to create in the real world. I think it’s hard to reproduce the overall atmosphere of a comic into a movie, because a film must use real actors and actresses that are not perfectly matched with my original work.

I think pen-drawn art has its own charm. The brightness of the picture produced by the contrast between black lines and the white of the paper, and the atmosphere created from the drawn lines… I think they cannot be expressed by live-action so easily.

I think a lot about why people want to read horror or look at horror and what is the value of seeing something scary, why do we want to write something scary? I do think about that, and my thinking is that life is kind of uncertain. The future is uncertain; we don’t know what is going to happen. Maybe something bad is waiting for us, like, we don’t know, and there’s that uncertainty and that anxiety that comes from that. So if we see something scary, if we look at these scary things, then maybe we can prepare mentally for that. Maybe it’s some kind of readying our minds for possible future terrors.