24/03/2020 Lesser-known short horror manga to give you the chills during the hot weather

Lesser-known short horror manga to give you the chills during the hot weather 22

1) Kuro Ihon; Aka Ihon; Shiro Ihon (gore and disturbing imagery, but nothing sexually explicit) (Hokazono Masaya)

Collection of short horror stories. Each series has 6-7 stories told in 7 issues (each series usually has one 2-parter). It’s super scary! I can’t be sure which stories come from which series, but I recall three especially scary stories: a movie fanatic who goes crazy after watching a snuff film (I think this is from Aka Ihon); a policeman investigates a spooky apartment when doing a neighborhood survey (I suspect Shiro Ihon); and a builder meets a ghost while working on a construction site (maybe Kuro Ihon). The humanoid characters are drawn a little manga-ish, but everything else is drawn very realistically and detailed, which I thought was quite interesting. I particularly liked the framing mechanism in Aka Ihon, which is like those campfire games where you tell story-after-story with candles and stuff.

The author, Hokazono Masaya, is quite a prolific horror mangaka. He has a lot more series, most of which are quite mainstream and accessible.

2) Zashiki Onna (scary story, but nothing too unbearable) (Minetaro Mochizuki)

A fairly short series about one haunting incident. A guy moves into an apartment and has a really creepy neighbor, but he later realizes that she’s not just a creepy woman, but possibly something worse. The bulk of the story is pretty scary and suspenseful because they never reveal more of the neighbor, but they slowly ramp up the intensity of her actions until you’re just as scared of her as the main character is. They do a few interesting things in the manga that you don’t often see in horror stories, like having the main character actually be kept in a safe place, or having a strong character physically fight the “ghost”. It’s a chilling urban legend that will stay with you for a while.

3) Sayuri (scary story, but nothing too unbearable) (Rennsuke Oshikiri)

Another short story about a haunting, this time a family haunting like Annabelle (but not a doll-ghost). A middle-aged man finally makes enough money to move his family into a luxurious new bungalow but things start to go wrong immediately and you’ll never know who will come out alive at the end of it. I won’t give away the ending, but I will slightly spoil you by revealing that I found it incredibly depressing, but I really liked how the main character(s) saved himself/herself/themselves from the haunting. Personally, I’m a little superstitious and I sometimes get scared to go to the toilet at night, so this kind of thing helped me be a little braver!

4) Jisatsu Circle (disturbing imagery and subject matter) (Usamaru Furuya)

You might have seen the movie from which this manga was adapted. It was a pretty big deal at the time, if I’m not wrong. A whole bunch of high school girls kill themselves and one is left alive. Policemen investigate the tragedy and don’t know what to make of it. I can’t spoil it, but I will warn you that this is one of those kinds of stories where the journey is better than the ending, as is usually the case with horror stories revolving around large-scale phenomenon.

5) Fraction (extremely explicit nudity and gore) (Kago Shintaro)

This series is about a serial killer. It’s quite scary, not because the killings are gruesome (although they are), but because the scenes and the nature of it is so incredibly unnerving. The entire time reading this felt like an hour-long audio track of someone running their fingers across a blackboard! However, you’ll put up with it because it’s also super engrossing – you’ll want to uncover the mystery behind the killings. There’s a lot of nudity and I won’t pretend that it’s tasteful, but it’s definitely not sexual – in that it’s meant to highlight and emphasize how morbid and disturbing the situation is.

The author, Kago Shintaro, is pretty well-known in the horror manga world, and he’s got lots of other scary stories too. I consider him the Japanese HP Lovecraft. Personally, I like his work more than Junji Ito (who wrote Uzumaki). One such story is Anamorphosis no Meijuu – a group of people staying in an old film studio for 48 hours for a sum of money, but it quickly devolves into a reality-bending mind-f***.

- Shiota Nagisa 😉