In my house, when you went down into the tunnel, we had a storage shed there with an earthen floor. But that bathroom was scary.īen K: And if you had to go underground, there must have been insects, like centipedes and the like? They fascinated me, so I enjoyed reading his manga. As for manga, of course, some of it was scary but for the most part, I found it interesting and intriguing. I was scared by things that seemed real to me.

When they showed photos with ghostly apparitions on those shows, that was scary. Especially since the bathroom in my house was at the end of an underground tunnel. On the other hand, TV shows where they went into haunted houses or had a medium who could summon spirits, I thought those were scary. The manga I was reading wasn't that scary. You say you began reading horror manga at 4 or 5. Nobushi: I was wondering about something. So, I started before I even entered elementary school. I took a pencil and paper, or sometimes the back of advertisements, and would draw frames, imitating the manga I had read. Ito: I was about 4 or 5 when I began reading, and very soon afterwards, I wanted to try it for myself. So, I watched many occult films, like Dario Argento's Suspiria, for example.īen K: So, when did you begin drawing manga? In the 70s, when the occult boom began, I saw The Exorcist on TV as well.

I lived in the countryside where there were no movie theaters nearby, so I could only see movies on TV.

Ito: Yes, when I was very young, I watched Dracula or Frankenstein when they showed it on TV. Junji Ito ( Ito): When I was very small, maybe 4 or 5 years old, my two older sisters would read Kazuo Umezu and Shinichi Koga in magazines and I read them too. The roots of horror: childhood experiencesīen K: Since when have you been interested in horror as a genre? Interviewers: Ben K (grape Japan), Nobushi (Japanese-language media Grape).

Manga gyo junji ito