Junji Ito Would Love To Do More Projects Like Frankenstein

Junji Ito normally creates nightmares all his own, through stories that originated from the deep recesses of his brain. With the likes of Gyo and Uzumaki under his belt, folks may not think that he'd be looking to take his pen in the creation of an adaptation of another's work. However, Ito recently won an Eisner Award for his work on an adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, lending his pen to the classic tale. We had the opportunity to speak with Ito at the recent Crunchyroll Expo, asking him whether he'd like to visit some other horror works that are already established.

Ito makes a note that he'd love to dive into some new stories, breaking down some of the differences to be found between the horror stories of American and Japanese folklore:

""Frankenstein" is a longer novel, but there is a significant amount of classical horror short stories in America, too. Many of those anthologies have been translated into Japanese and released in Japan. (For example, "The Monkey's Paw".) I would love to be able to create manga versions of those."

Ito certainly has played with pre-established monsters in his works before, even if they aren't straight adaptations of the source material. Working with the idea of vampires, Ito created a story that followed the idea of a small village looking to take the blood from unfortunate visitors and taking it in quite a horrific manner. Ghosts, zombies, and several other monsters have shown up with Ito's personal touch in his stories, with even the upcoming Hollywood adaptation of Tomie focusing on the idea of a succubus throughout a series of chilling anthology stories.

Ito's adaptation of Frankenstein does a fantastic job of retelling the story of Victor Frankenstein and his "monster", originally created in 1818, and one of the first movies that were ever created with the adaptation released in 1910. Whether or not we'll see Ito's specific iteration of the story brought to life through anime itself is another story, though with his popularity continuing to sky rocket, never count Ito out!

Ito has had quite the year, as mentioned earlier with his Tomie adaptation being announced, as well as Cartoon Network deciding to dive into the world of Uzumaki with an anime series releasing next year. With this month being tailor made for news about ghosts and goblins, we'll cross our fingers that even more announcements will be coming down the pike from this master of horror.

What horror stories would you like to see Junji Ito tackle in the future? What's your favorite original horror story that Ito has created? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and Junji Ito!