An immortal girl survives every form of dismemberment and destruction. A town loses its mind obsessing over spirals. A fish with mechanical legs marches out of the sea. Junji Ito’s horror stories stand apart for their bleak, surrealist plots as much as their hyper-detailed art. No other body horror tale feels quite like Junji Ito’s stories. The Uzumaki author’s collaboration with Dead by Daylight brought a variety of eerie cosmetics to the Fog. They’re some of the coolest skins the game has seen, hammering home an already obvious truth. Junji Ito deserves more collabs and a bigger spotlight on the gaming stage.
Junji Ito, DbD, and the Triumph of Body Horror
There are already video games based on Ito’s manga, just not ones you’ve probably heard of. Uzumaki: Noroi Simulation and Uzumaki: Denshi Kaikihen were both released on Bandai’s ill-fated WonderSwan handheld. Launching on a struggling platform when public attention was already shifting toward the Game Boy Advance? It’d be hard to set a game up for failure more dramatically, but of course, that’s the privilege of hindsight. In the years since those early ’00 flops, the gaming scene hasn’t seen much of Ito at all.
One reason is simple competition. Hellraiser, The Fly, The Thing, and Alien set the stage for body horror in the West. Games looking to collaborate with other IPs had their pick of franchises, and Ito’s relative obscurity didn’t help. That’s despite the author’s critical and commercial acclaim. The struggles faced by Adult Swim’s Uzumaki adaptation reveal another problem. One thing that makes Ito’s stories so incredible is the detail of their art. The sheer amount of line work alone makes them difficult and expensive to reproduce. Compare Tomie to the art of Jujutsu Kaisen or One Piece, and it’s easy to imagine devs and studios just shaking their heads no.
I Want More of This Gross, Weird Fish
Though some indie horror games have paid homage to Uzumaki and the like, we need more. Specifically, we need bigger games with bigger budgets to give Junji Ito’s art the attention it deserves. If Cronenberg’s Fly has one perfect parallel, it might be those awful walking fish from Gyo. It’s a tragedy that Western gamers haven’t gotten more exposure to Ito and the legion of writers and illustrators he inspired. Dead by Daylight‘s Junji Ito collaboration and cosmetic collection are promising signs that the tide might be turning. That’s good news, even if that tide carries Gyo‘s death stench.
