While there are plenty of fighting and romance anime, one of the genres that doesn’t get nearly enough play is that of horror and with Halloween right around the corner, what better time than now to dive into this genre of manga and list some spooky stories that are dying to be made into anime series of their own! With Junji Ito being the premier horror mangaka in the world today, Uzumaki is set to be made into an animated series on Cartoon Network’s Toonami and there are plenty of other stories made by both him and others that need the anime treatment!
Videos by ComicBook.com
What horror manga deserves its own anime series? Which Junji Ito property are you most looking forward to seeing adapted? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and the world of horror!
I Am Hero
There are plenty of zombie stories in Western and Eastern media but I Am Hero manages to inject some new life into the medium with an utterly unique protagonist and zombies that are uniquely terrifying in their own right. The manga series began in 2009, releasing twenty two volumes of a terrifying manga that followed a young manga artist attempting to navigate his way through a zombie apocalypse. What makes I Am Hero scary isn’t just that the zombies are wholly unique, in that they contort in ways that would make a gymnast jealous, but the hero of the tale is insanely relatable. Of the stories we have mentioned, this is definitely at the top of our life for a series begging for an anime.
The Enigma At Amigara Fault
A candidate for a return of The Junji Ito Collection, The Enigma At Amigara Fault is one of the Ito’s most popular stories, following a society that is beguiled by human sized holes in the side of mountains that bids people to enter. Once the person enters them, they move further into the hole, unable to escape and moving toward a fate that is far more terrifying than anything we could conceive. While making a series of this would be insanely difficult, a brief OVA or animated segment would work well.
The Hanging Balloons
Now this is another of Ito’s stories that we believe would actually work as its own anime series, even though the manga was a short story itself. The Hanging Balloons are almost like zombies in that they are looking to kill humanity, but instead of eating them, they simply hover horrifically over the landscape below, looking for the people whose faces they share.
Seeds Of Anxiety
Seeds of Anxiety is a manga series that focuses on ghost stories and the ghosts themselves are what is the real pull for this potential adaptation. With the ghosts often portrayed as disturbing giants and bizarre contortions, mangaka Masaaki Nakayama released this series in 2004 and told some truly spooky stories that would be dying for an anime adaptation!
Anamorphosis No Meijuu
Created by Shintaro Kago, Dark Beast Metamorphosis has images so disturbing that it’s hard to find any that we’d be able to post but we would have to imagine that they would look absolutely insane in an anime adaptation. This story incorporates spirits into some of the most twisted body horror that we’ve ever seen and rest assured, it would terrifying audiences who witnessed it as an anime.
