I know everyone is a fan of Junji Ito, horror mangaka par excellence whose unmistakable, hyper-detailed style is recognizable the world over. Everyone except for me, who is a big wuss and can’t even look at his incredible work without my gorge rising. I’ve never read anything by Junji Ito, so I went into Junji Ito Collection totally blind and, let’s face it, more than a little nervous.
It turns out I was nervous for nothing. Episode 1 of Junji Ito Collection is shockingly bland for something with the name of a world-famous horror mangaka attached. It’s the story of an unlikeable, arrogant boy named Souichi who uses his middling gift for the occult to curse his classmates.
But it’s not scary, not even to me.
Souichi’s whining, oblivious, immature personality is usually the butt of the joke, as when his big brother takes the spider Souichi was using to torment his sister and uses it to torment Souichi instead, or when Souichi chases a curse victim while on stilts only to get caught in a trap and tumble upside down, breaking the curse and exposing himself for a fool.
The episode is hard to watch because Souichi is so unlikeable and there’s neither tension nor visual spectacle. The setup of “moron child thinks he is superior because he can do a handful of curses” is tedious. The voodoo-esque dolls Souichi uses for his curses have creepy promise, but even that tension is ruined when the angry old landowner comes by and yanks all the dolls down off his precious cedar trees.
The curses themselves aren’t visually impressive: a kid thinks he sees a spider and is trapped in its web but is instead found wrapped in toilet paper, a kid falls asleep buried up to his head in the forest, someone has a tummyache on the sidewalk. The last curse, where Souichi turns into a sort of Slenderman-esque clomping figure, is kind of neat, but only kind of.
In fact, the little three-minute vignette that airs at the end of the episode is far superior to the bland story, animation and design of the content before it. Titled “Hellish Doll Funeral,” it plunges us without explanation into the horrifying world of two parents whose beloved daughter has transformed into a doll who can no longer move or smile. Tempted to destroy her, they don’t, only for the changes to continue until she is a monstrous, blue-eyed mass of a thing. The vignette leaves us on an image of her repulsive final form. It’s evocative, it’s grotesque, it’s a horrific scenario and it’s the only glimmer of hope in this boring first episode.
Junji Ito Collection airs Fridays on Crunchyroll at 10:30 a.m. EST here. What did you think? Feel free to let us know in the comments section below.
