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Hanging Blim. Balloon idea.

This story is a good example of how Ito uses an ordinary balloon to create a scary story. He took people's heads and enlarged them to very large sizes. Each head tries to hang the person with the same face. But then we are shown that they are made of gas and deflate just like a balloon. I would like to note that the whole environment looks very bright and unremarkable. Even the faces of the characters look simple and without detail. However, when the ball deflates, it turns into a scary mask that has a bunch of wrinkles and shadows. He exaggerates the details here so much that it catches the eye against a calm background.

Junji Ito (2017). Shiver : Junji Ito selected stories. San Francisco, Ca: Viz.

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His greatest work, the three-volume Spiral, tells about the obsession of the inhabitants of the city of Kurozu go with the spiral, which follows them everywhere and captures the mind, and subsequently the entire city, without the ability to get out anywhere.

In the pictures you can see great examples of body transformation to create disgust. In the first picture, Ito lengthens his tongue and wraps it in a spiral just like all the other objects in this manga. In the pictures, the tongue looks like a separate creature that crawls out of a person and drool that hangs from the tongue adds disgust. He also uses a contrasting black background and the figure itself is highlighted, which helps to emphasize it. And of course a lot of shading and details on the person's face and tongue. You can also notice that the man looks very thin and tired, which makes it clear about his painful condition. Another transformation is a man united with a snail. here disgust adds that the eyes will stare out of their sockets and with each frame you can see a detailed process of transformation. I also want to highlight the last two pictures. Picture 3 shows rot and wrapped bodies of people. Everything here looks very gloomy and disgusting. The black background and detailing parts of the bodies help to create this effect. Whereas in the last one, Ito shows a romantic ending and the reunion of the two lovers. Here you can see that he does not use the theme of color, on the contrary, he shows a smooth light process and we do not feel disgust at all. It seems to me that a good comparison of how one situation can be shown from different angles.

Junji Itō and Yuji Oniki (1998). Uzumaki. San Francisco, Ca: Viz Communications.

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Why Is Horror Appealing? 

- The pleasure of the text is, in fact, getting the shit scared out of you – and loving it; an exchange mediated by adrenalin. - For the question should not be ‘why horror?’ at all. It should be, rather, why do these people like this horror in this place at this particular time? And what exactly are the consequences of their construct- ing their everyday sense of fearfulness and anxiety, their ‘landscapes of fear’ (Tuan, 1979), out of such distinctive cultural materials?

It seemed to me that this article is interesting because it tries to answer the question why should we scare people? Do people need to show fear in life? Why should everyday life scare us? And what is the essence of fear or disgust? And as the quotes show, the essence of horror is to scare us and love what scared us. It seems to me that this makes sense. And taking everyday objects that we love and using fear against them can help create a love for fear. In other words, if you correctly show an object or situation, you can make the viewer fall in love with the unusual and new look of the object. Yes, the article says that when we get scared, we get a special form of pleasure. But it seems to me that we can also enjoy the fact that we are shown the world from a different point of view. And the article also asks a good question why right now and here we like this horror movie? After all, the cultural and time context also greatly influences to what things we pay attention and how we show fear or disgust. How does culture influence the perception of disgusting things? Indeed, in China, people calmly fry cockroaches and eat them, while in Russia it seems terrible.

Tudor, A. (1997). WHY HORROR? THE PECULIAR PLEASURES OF A POPULAR GENRE. Cultural Studies, 11(3), pp.443–463. doi:10.1080/095023897335691.

Tuan, Yi-fu (1979) Landscapes of Fear, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Facial expressions and features

Ordinary people, even if they are the main characters, rarely differ from each other. I would even say that the faces of the characters look very stereotyped and empty. However, this is not a minus, but a very big plus if you want to create a horror effect. He highlights an ordinary face with very detailed eyes, which later shows how the character went crazy. Such a contrast helps to focus attention on the eerie state of the character. The people in Ito's stories are not even people, but functions. Their destiny is to guide the reader, page after page, to some particularly vile illustration. 

 In the picture you can see how he uses rough shading to highlight the eyes, he also enlarges the pupils and raises his eyebrows. The source mentions that Ito often makes the characters thin and emaciated.

W, A. (2017). Junji Ito: Things That Make His Horror Tick. [online] Yatta-Tachi. Available at: https://yattatachi.com/tbt-junji-ito [Accessed 4 May 2022].

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Junji Ito On His New Book Sensor

- '' I read a lot of nonfiction and I also like film, so I watch films and get inspiration from that. Outside of that, it's just paying attention to my surroundings. So if I take a walk and I see a tree that's like a weird shape, that'll end up triggering an idea '' - '' I discussed it with my editor and we started going in the direction of being more character focused, which is usually not my forte. I usually have an idea and then I create the story based on that idea.''

In this interview, Ito indicates that despite the fact that he usually made the characters as a secondary element, now they are in the lead. I think it's interesting to see how the narrative changes and how it affects the visual part? How does this help create disgust? And does that make the story scarier? If before the story seemed vile compared to the characters, then how successful will it be here? Also in an interview, he mentions that the main inspiration for him is what surrounds him. On the streets, he looks at unusual tree shapes and uses them in his manga. This once again confirms that we need to more carefully examine what is around us and do not need to have super imagination to create unusual creatures.

Dean, T. (2021). Horror Manga Legend Junji Ito On His New Book ‘Sensor,’ Getting Older and Cockroaches. [online] GQ. Available at: https://www.gq.com/story/junji-ito-sensor-interview [Accessed 4 May 2022].

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In his interview, I realized that in order to find inspiration, he uses the main concept - this is the combination of the human body with a foreign element. He talks about how he uses a slug instead of a tongue because when he looked at himself in the mirror, he was reminded of this. It seems to me that this is a good point - we need to study ourselves and what surrounds us, compare and select elements that do not fit together in order to create disgust. He also says that he likes to use beautiful girls to highlight scary moments. However, even their beauty looks awesome and mystical. He uses the golden ratio. This is when all the proportions of the face create perfect symmetry, however, these proportions are so unrealistic that they can be frightening, since an ordinary human face is asymmetrical. Thus, it creates visual discomfort. On the example of a girl, you can see that her beauty is not natural and has a mystery.

Vizmedia (2020). A Talk with Junji Ito | Creator Interview | VIZ - YouTube. [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7qCN8qN31A.

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Junji Ito - Bio House

Junji Ito has a great example of how disgust can be found. His story shows an ordinary girl who came to her director. But they have an unusual fetish - they love to eat insects. If you look at the beginning of the story, the table looks so nice, but if you look closely, you can see that these are insects and the thought that they will eat it now is a little scary. Ito shows in great detail all the small insects, which makes them look quite realistic and more disgusting than usual. In the second picture, we see the bad ending where the insects are already eating the one who ate them. Ito in this case creates disgust using disgust for food and human blood. He uses the insane attraction to the unpleasant and turns it inside out. And the most important thing is that nothing here looks unnatural and these scenes can be easily imagined in real live.

Junji Itō, Allen, J., Erbes, E. and Grano, A. (2021). Deserter. San Francisco, Ca: Viz Media, Llc.

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Disgusting Food Museum  

-  The term “disgust” entered the English language more than four hundred years ago, from the Old French word desgouster, meaning “to put off one’s appetite.” But disgust wasn’t considered worthy of scientific examination until 1872, when Charles Darwin defined it as a reaction to “something revolting, primarily in relation to the sense of taste . . . and secondarily to anything which causes a similar feeling, through the sense of smell, touch and even of eyesight.” Darwin theorized that disgust is a basic human emotion—like anger, fear, or sadness—and that it is expressed with a universal “disgust face.”

- Evolutionary psychologists often cite the Swiss Army knife as an analogy for the mind, because both have all-purpose tools designed to cope with an unpredictable world. Disgust is simply one blade of many. If the blade is kept sharp, it helps you avoid disease, but if it becomes too sharp you might not ingest enough calories. “Evolution has optimized this trade-off so that priority is placed on the more urgent goal,” Fessler said.

- Rozin is the pioneer of a subfield called disgust studies. His favorite experiment involves dropping a cockroach into a glass of juice. Most people, of course, refuse to drink the juice, citing the dirtiness of cockroaches. “What’s amazing is that even if you disinfect the cockroach and convincingly demonstrate that the juice is harmless, people still won’t want to drink it,” Rozin said. The juice has been irrevocably contaminated.

I like the museum's approach to developing the idea of ​​disgusting food. They did not take things familiar to us, but rather investigated what causes us discomfort. I think it's very important to understand how to make boring things more noticeable. So they eliminated all food that could be attractive and only then began to study what could most create disgust. It is also interesting to understand why we feel disgust and it is important to realize that this is one of the main functions of survival. It can also help in understanding what visual technique to use to evoke that feeling. An experiment with a cockroach shows that no matter how hard we try to make this creature less disgusting, it will still cause us concern - because it is laid down in our subconscious. It is also possible because we have a fear of non-indigenous organism.

Fan, J. (2021). The Gatekeepers Who Get to Decide What Food Is ‘Disgusting’. [online] The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/17/the-gatekeepers-who-get-to-decide-what-food-is-disgusting [Accessed 3 May 2022].

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Aversion to beetles

I became curious about how beetles are used and featured in stories. The second story from the movie The House perfectly shows how you can create disgust visually with the beetles. Despite the fact that the bugs are not real, they cause the same discomfort as living ones. I'm interested in the visual part of the beetles. Although the cartoon uses also sounds. The first picture seems harmless, but you can see that there are a small number of bugs in the house and this is already starting to bother the viewers. I think everyone has faced the problem of unwanted guests in the house and therefore this may not cause the most pleasant memories for people.

The second picture shows finding more beetles. A huge number of unpleasant creatures in the closet of the house - a nightmare. At this stage, the number of beetles causes panic and disgust. The third picture shows the final episode - an incredibly huge number of bugs are dancing in the walls of the house. This is a catastrophe. On the one hand, it looks funny and even beautiful. But on the other hand, visually it causes even more disgust. I like how here visually adding more and more bugs we feel more and more hostility and again it has the context of an ordinary house. Everyone can compare this with their own experience and feel the pain of the owner of this house. Discomfort. The pictures show that it is possible to create disgust by using a large number of small utility critters. It helps to look at things from a different perspective.

The House. (2022). [Film] United Kingdom: Netflix.

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Coraline. An eerie perspective on a beautiful world.

In the first picture you can see two scenes from the cartoon. The first shows disgusting food which also describes the girl's mood. On the second one, you can see how food changes for the better along with the new world. It's interesting how food can show the situation in people's lives. In the first, disgusting vegetables are shown to us in boring gray tones. On the second we see a festive table with a huge amount of food and everything looks very bright. In both cases, we can imagine how the girl feels. Another thing that caught my attention in this film is how the furniture changed into bugs. Beetles are generally not the most pleasant and, as a rule, they change our attitude towards objects for the worse. Perhaps because they are usually associated with something rotten and dirty. So, in the cartoon, the creepy atmosphere is shown in a very interesting way - visually all the objects were shown as bugs, which helped to turn the perspective of the perception of objects that are common to us. Now the legs of the chairs are the legs of the bugs and the drawers of the cabinet are part of the shell. But at the same time, bright colours are used, I would even say that it reminds me a jazz club. The third point is chocolate candies in the form of beetles. It seems that these are sweets that should be tasty, but due to the fact that the bugs move their paws and The Second Mother eats them when they are alive, it makes us completely disgusted. Despite the fact that the candies are shown to us differently from the very first gray picture, this does not prevent us from feeling dislike for the object.

Coraline. (2009). [Film] United States: Focus Features.

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Interview with Svetlana Mamontova

In this interview, Sveta talks about why we do not pay attention to ordinary objects. We see them every day and forget about their meaning, but if we look at these same objects from a different angle - as if these objects are not what they should be, then this gives us a fresh look. It's also an interesting idea that an object needs to be taken out of its usual context - it's interesting if something ordinary is placed in an unusual environment for this object, then this will also give us a new perspective. I think that the principle of Sveta's work is to forget the very essence of the object and its meaning and look at it as a form or as an object that we see for the first time. It reminded me of the patterns on the carpet, which look like ordinary spirals, but sometimes you can see the silhouettes of people or animals there.

For example, in an interview, I used a picture of a loaf with a face. Looking at the shape, we understand that this is a loaf, but then she painted it completely white (although the loaf is made of white), it looks funny. Plus, she added a face, and now this object reminds me of a caterpillar. She used the main features of the object and exaggerated them (white color). Also, the fact that she makes these objects out of clay also gives a new perspective on a well-known thing. I want to note that these works are becoming interesting to us precisely because we already have some kind of personal experience with them. We have certain feelings and memories. Nostalgia helps a lot in this regard.

Mamontova, S. (2022). О повседневности и ностальгии. [online] Choo Choo. 13 Mar. Available at: https://t.me/elessnotes/160 [Accessed 3 May 2022].