Junji Ito is considered by many to be the foremost name in Japanese horror manga. He has a particular eye for body horror, and his stories are often short and full of suspense, yet focused carefully on one character or group of characters. This gives them a very specific tone that only Ito has managed to pull off in quite this way, unnervingly, but with an almost funny endearing quality to the characters.
But how does that storytelling hold up in the many live-action adaptations of his stories? Here are our choices for the 10 scariest live-action Junji Ito adaptations, ranked.
10 Kakashi
Kakashi is a story about a young woman, Kaoru, who, seeking out her brother, goes to a small mountain town looking for him. She believes he sought out a girl they once knew who was in love with him. She arrives to find all of the villagers acting cold and distant, already setting the stage for a moody and eerie small-town horror movie. Kaoru soon discovers that the town has a ritual of burning human effigies made of straw in order to bring back their dead loved ones. This ultimately leads to scarecrows terrorizing the town and destroying everyone. It’s a spooky, classic monster story with the added cherry of cultish ritual behavior.
9 Marronnier
The title does a lot to describe this one, and while it’s a story that we’ve seen in western media before, it has special Junji Ito creep factors that take it to a new level.
The story follows a girl and her love for a beloved doll, but instead of the doll itself turning out to be evil, it’s instead the doll-maker, who uses a machine to turn human skin into the wax to make his dolls. This doll-maker, and his apprentice, becomes obsessed with the main character, kidnapping her and her friends to make dolls out of them, making this film something of a cross between The Boy and Saw.
8 Tomie: Re-Birth
Tomie: Re-Birth is one of several films in the Tomie series. Each revolves around a woman named Tomie, who has a mole under her left eye, who is killed by a lover driven to madness. In this iteration of the concept, there’s a slight Dorian Gray idea at play. Tomie is killed by her boyfriend, a painter whose work she’s scoffed at, and when she comes back to life, she appears to possess any woman who is in possession of the painting. She can’t be killed as long as it exists. She uses these possessions to murder all of the men who wrong her.
7 Tomie: Revenge
In this iteration of Tomie, Junji Ito’s hand is heavy in the storytelling, as this is based specifically on a chapter of the manga. In it, we follow a young woman who’s a doctor, who accidentally runs down a naked woman while driving home one night. She follows her to make sure she’s all right and finds herself in an abandoned house full of bodies.
The story takes a different tone from most of the other Tomie films, following a female victim of Tomie’s torture instead of the usual men.
6 Tomie: Another Face
This film is the perfect format for sequels to the original Tomie film. The appeal of Tomie is that it’s the same story that can be told a billion different ways, with different set-ups and consequences for the characters who interact with our unkillable title character. So having an anthology story like this one, where Tomie appears to different people, with an overarching plot involving a man in a trenchcoat and an eye patch stalking her, is a great way to give us a few different looks at the storytelling possibilities here in shorter bursts.
5 Tomie: Replay
This is one of the most bananas versions of the Tomie story, and it feels the most like something that Junji Ito would have come up with. In this one, Tomie is still an unkillable demon woman, but in the last instance of someone killing her, one of her organs was used in a transplant to help save a little girl.
Tomie then ends up growing, head-first, inside the girl’s stomach, like a watermelon might if the myth about eating a watermelon seed was real. The body horror aspects of this version put this one's fright factor over the top for us.
4 Tomie: Forbidden Fruit
There are a lot of Tomie adaptations. This one is the only one in which Tomie has a semi-romantic, semi-sexual relationship with another woman, whose name is also Tomie. This is amusing considering the film stars Aoi Miyazaki, one of the stars of the NANA live-action movies, where two women share the name Nana. Tomie mostly terrorizes her in order to successfully terrorize her father, who murdered her years before. Father and daughter work together to try to get rid of Tomie, leading to psychological intensity as they are both battling their own wits and each other’s latent desires to be with Tomie.
3 Tomie
Of course, the last installation of Tomie is rightfully the original one. As with almost all horror franchises, the original film is the scariest and feels the most original. Tomie is the subject of a murder investigation, as in most of the Tomie films, and comes back to life to terrorize the various people involved in her murder or surrounding her at the time.
Meanwhile, the police begin to find evidence of her existing, and being murdered, over and over again, as far back as the mid-1800s. The movie is a conspiracy mystery as well as a gory horror film, and the juxtaposition of the genres works really well in this case.
2 Uzumaki
Uzumaki is arguably Junji Ito’s best-known manga, aside of course from “The Enigma of Amigara Fault,” the creepy one with the human-shaped holes in the mountain (you know the one). So it makes sense that it’s so high on this list. The story is one of psychological horror, with the citizens of a small town becoming obsessed with and paranoid about things shaped like spirals. The main character's hair even starts to curl in an unnatural spiral shape. There’s complicated lore involved in the storytelling, and the single-minded obsession of the townspeople is off-putting. And of course, there is Junji Ito’s signature body horror to top it all off.
1 Long Dream
Long Dream is likely the most philosophical of all of Junji Ito’s stories, and it works that way as well in the live-action drama version of the story. In the story, a man shows up to a hospital claiming to be having increasingly long dreams. The dreams can last days, months, years, or centuries, even though he appears to be sleeping a normal amount of time in the real world. As his dreams get longer, he becomes more and more unhinged, unable to navigate the real world. As the story continues, the question becomes a matter of whether a person really dies if death is just a long dream in the end.