Week 11: Horror

For this week I read quite a bit of Tomie by Junji Ito. I am familiar with Junju Ito just because I am a horror fan and so are my friends so I see posts about his work every now and then but haven't actually read any of it myself. In general, I'm a fan of j-horror and have seen a handful of movies so I was excited to finally experience reading j-horror.



I didn't realize this before I started reading that it kinda switches through timelines and different Tomies which did make it a bit hard to read at first. But, I think this confusion only adds to the creepiness of the story. We see her repeating a gruesome cycle so many different ways. It made me think about the saying "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Part of the thrill of this manga is getting to experience the cycle as a viewer and not be able to do anything about it.



I also wanted to talk about one of my favorite J-horror franchises, Battle Royale. It stems from the 1999 novel and has a manga plus a live action movie. The premise is that a bunch of highschoolers are sent to an island and they have to kill each other until there is only one of them left. It's not the most unique premise but the way the characters and handled and how the gruesome deaths are showed really makes it an amazing franchise. I highly recommend watching the movie first and then branching out to the other forms of the story if you enjoyed it.