The 11 Scariest Junji Ito Adaptations, Ranked

There are things that go bump in the night, campfire stories that leave you shivering, and then there's the work of Junji Ito. Not content to simply give you a brief scare or make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, Ito's work crawls under your skin and eats you from the inside out, assaulting the imagination with surreal, warped visuals and maddening cosmic horror that would send H.P. Lovecraft himself crying to his mommy. Even the simplest little detail — a song, a chair, the image of a spiral — is twisted into something deadly and unrecognizable. As fans of Ito's work will tell you: There is just nothing else in the world quite like it.  

Junji Ito is a mild-mannered master of horror with decades of work and dozens of volumes of horror manga under his belt. So it makes sense that, over the years, other creators have attempted to adapt his dark magic to other mediums. There have been animated anthologies, live-action films, and even an upcoming Adult Swim series. However, adapting Ito's work is no easy task; it can be incredibly difficult to lift his stories and visuals off the page and keep their unique horror intact. Still, that doesn't stop directors and writers alike from trying, and some of them have managed to get pretty close. 

So get ready to gaze into the void and have it whisper back its terrible secrets: We're here to rank the scariest adaptations of Junji Ito's work. 

"Kakashi" is a film adaptation of one of Junji Ito's famous short stories. Also referred to as "Scarecrow," it tells the story of a young woman named Kaoru who is searching for her missing brother. Believing he left to look for a girl that was once in love with him, Kaoru makes her way to a mysterious small town in the mountains. There, she finds the town to be less than welcoming, as the villagers prepare for a bizarre yearly ritual called "Kakashi." 

As she learns more about the town and their traditions, Kaoru learns that the villagers burn human-shaped effigies made of straw in an attempt to draw out the spirits of their dead loved ones and reconnect with them. Of course, because this is a Junji Ito story, it isn't that simple — there's far more going on in this town than meets the eye. Though it's not as scary or bizarre as a number of other Ito adaptations, "Kakashi" has an eerie atmosphere mixed with a classic, creepy small-town setting, resulting in a film that blends Ito's influence with films like "The Wicker Man." 

"Tomie: Revenge" is the sixth installment in the film series, and draws its story (and its title) from a specific chapter of the original Junji Ito manga. Ordinarily, "Tomie" stories center around a man who becomes romantically and sexually obsessed with the titular supernatural girl. However, "Revenge" follows a young female doctor named Kazue Kae whose life is thrown into chaos while she is driving down the road alone one night. A strange naked woman unexpectedly darts into the road, and the doctor accidentally hits the said stranger with her car. 

In an attempt to track down the almost certainly wounded girl (who she can identify via a mole under her eye), Kazue follows her unintentional victim to an abandoned house. There, she gets far more than she bargained for: The house is filled with dead bodies and, of course, Tomie herself. From there, things only get worse for Kazue, along with anyone else in Tomie's path.  

Just like in Junji Ito's manga, Tomie shines as a character when she is explored in a short story format. 1999's "Tomie: Another Face" is not one single narrative, but rather a collection of three separate episodes combined into a feature film. Each episode focuses on Tomie's impact on a different character, with the through-line of a mysterious stalker in a trench coat and eyepatch threaded throughout. 

The first episode introduces Tomie as a body found on the street, who comes back from the dead in order to reunite with an old boyfriend. In the second episode, we meet a photographer who has fallen out of love with his craft, only to regain his passion when he meets a beautiful woman at a bar. Considering her his muse, he begins to photograph her without her permission. When he develops the photographs, however, he sees that Tomie has two faces in every single picture: one face is beautiful, and the other is ghoulish and horrible. The third and final episode reveals the identity of the mysterious man with the eyepatch. 

These shorter stories allow the action to get straight to the point, and provide several unique depictions of Tomie's wicked, indestructible nature. 

Long before Adult Swim announced its plan for an animated adaptation, Junji Ito's most famous work was pulled off the page and onto the screen. "Uzumaki" starts with two innocuous elements: A small town, and a spiral. Just a location and a shape. But the spiral begins to take hold of the town in a deeply unnatural way, driving its citizens to obsession and paranoia as the world around them begins to twist into a collection of spirals. 

Spirals appear everywhere as the story of "Uzumaki" unfolds. A girl's hair curls into one, landmarks tighten into spirals, and parts of people's bodies begin to curve and crunch to fit the shape, too. What follows is a story of paranoia, the destructive nature of single-minded obsession, and a surprisingly complex tale of cosmic horror and the influence of that which we can never understand. It is an incredibly difficult story to adapt, and though the film struggled to capture the visuals perfectly, it is still very much worth the watch. Perhaps the upcoming animated series will learn from the film's mistakes and finally give us an "Uzumaki" adaptation as powerful and stomach-churning as the original manga. 

Another one of Junji Ito's most famous stories is "Gyo," a two-volume manga that first appeared as a weekly serial in the magazine Big Comic Spirits. "Gyo" is an apocalyptic horror story that, at times, feels evocative of some of the best zombie films. However, "Gyo" should not be mistaken for a common zombie apocalypse story. No, it is far stranger than that. 

In "Gyo," a young couple named Tadashi and Kaori must fight for their lives as thousands of undead fish come ashore, propelling themselves with spindly metal legs powered by something called the "death stench." The concept sounds like it could be silly, something out of a B-movie like "Sharknado," but "Gyo" threads the fine line between absurdity and terror beautifully. The dread and mystique of the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean come ashore, and humanity is completely unprepared for the threat. Oh, and it also features one of the scariest sharks since "Jaws." 

2012 saw the release of an anime film entitled "Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack" or, simply, "Gyo," which tells the story of the manga in a tight 70 minutes, keeping the fast-paced, frantic nature of the original.