Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre was recently released on Netflix. Despite the word salad of a title and mixed critical reception towards the show’s production values, some would call the series a modest attempt at adapting the ever-popular horror stories from the acclaimed manga artist Junji Ito. Known for his bizarre story concepts, abrupt endings, and haunting artwork, Ito has written and illustrated dozens upon dozens of stories in his prolific career, with some receiving multiple live-action film adaptations since their initial release. While some adaptations prioritize his longer-running stories, Junji Ito Maniac aimed to capture the author’s short stories in an animated format.
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Over the course of its first season, Junji Ito Maniac was able to adapt around 20 individual story segments across 12 episodes, bringing some of the author’s most popular works to life on the small screen. But that’s just scraping the surface of the manga artist’s vast bibliography. If Junji Ito Maniac is renewed for a second season, what are some other stories we’d like to see adapted?

The Enigma of Amigara Fault Is Infamous

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Originally released as an additional story at the end of Ito’s Gyo, it was surprising to see just how popular The Enigma of Amigara Fault became. Following a man named Owaki as he ventures out towards the eponymous formation, a crowd forms around the Amigara Fault due to a strange discovery being made. Along the face of the fault is a series of holes, each one perfectly shaped to fit a human being. As there are thousands of these holes along the fault, some feel strangely compelled to approach “their” hole.

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It’s an interesting deviation from Ito’s previous works in that it focuses almost exclusively on the fear of small spaces. When a hole is “made” for someone, it means that their body fits it perfectly, leaving not even a millimeter of wiggle room between their skin and the surrounding rock formations. As they sink deeper into the fault, their bodies are manipulated by the gaps, twisting and pulling their extremities into noodle-like twigs. What’s exceptionally terrifying is that most don’t enter these holes willingly — they do so out of compulsion, a need to fill the void that is exclusively theirs.

It’s a story that’s light on gross-out moments and more reliant on a premise that’s genuinely skin-crawling. It’d be relatively simple to transition to animation in comparison to some of Ito’s other stories, with an ending that’ll likely linger in the back of your mind every time you see a crack in the ground.

Army of One Has a Horrifying Premise

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In another interesting first for Ito, Army of One doesn’t feature any blatant supernatural force. Instead, what we have is a story that turns mass hysteria and mass murder into something equally artistic and horrifying.

The social shut-in Michio is coaxed from his depression nest to his class reunion, but the event is soured by the news of a couple being found dead with their bodies stitched together. Sometime after, a plane drops a series of mysterious flyers advertising a group called the Army of One, along with a formal request for additional members. Strangely enough, no additional details are provided.

From there, a series of strange killings quickly escalates. Michio is stuck in the middle, having to find a way to handle the growing paranoia surrounding the Army of One as well as investigate their potential ties to the killings. It’s a story more rooted in psychological horror, one that echoes the horrors endured by many during the original onset of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Tomie Needs More Screen Time

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The most prolific and popular character from Junji Ito’s bibliography, Tomie, gets an entire episode devoted to her horrifying adventures. While it was nice to see Tomie terrify us in Photo, there are a handful of other Tomie stories we’d love to see adapted to animation.

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Waterfall Basin, for example, is a fantastic Tomie story that sees the supernatural girl reduced to nothing but a bundle of fleshy seeds. After a mysterious businessman fails to sell them to a remote village, he maliciously dumps them into the town’s water supply, inadvertently allowing them to grow into an army of flesh-eating Tomies.

Boy, on the other hand, sees Tomie’s manipulation at its absolute worst, as she’s discovered in a cave by a child. As the two spend more and more time together, her nefarious influence starts to plague the boy’s mind. His behavior starts to change, quickly escalating from committing petty crimes to committing murder just to have Tomie for himself.

The Human Chair Is Exactly What You Think It Is

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The Human Chair wasn’t actually written by Junji Ito originally, instead being adapted from a work by Edogawa Ranpo. However, Ito puts his own spin on the story. It follows a writer in Tokyo who visits a furniture store, intent on purchasing a new chair. Once inside, she’s told the story of a vintage armchair in the store’s possession.

The chair originally belonged to a woman named Yoshiko, who, after receiving a mysterious manuscript, starts believing something is moving inside of it. The majority of the story closely follows Ranpo’s original writing, but the framing device and new ending turn the story into something absolutely unsettling. Suffice it to say, the next time you kick back in your chair, make sure it hasn’t been hollowed out.