Things Are Going to Get F*cked Up When Junji Ito’s Netflix Anime Maniac Drops January 19

I know the word “anime” may turn off a huge portion of you guys, but hear me out. If you love horror, especially body horror and existential dread, you’re going to absolutely adore Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre when it hits Netflix on January 19.

For those that don’t know about Junji Ito, he’s the top manga artist when it comes to the supremely fucked up. If you’ve ever seen a supremely twisted page of manga art, chances are it’s Ito’s work. That featured image above of a woman’s severed head smiling eerily is just the tip of the iceberg of Ito’s imagery. In fact, it’s heavily cropped because I didn’t feel the even more grotesque being higher up in the image was potentially safe for work.

Typically, his work starts out simple enough, but things quickly go sideways, turning the everyday occurrence into a stage for the absolutely horrific and surreal. The anime will apparently take those grim panels and turn them into moving art, adapting 20 of Ito’s stories, including Tomie, Sōichi, and The Hanging Balloons.

So yeah, check out the anime’s opening sequence below. While it doesn’t lay on the horror elements just yet, it does show some gruesome snippets atop a trippy background. Horror and gore fans won’t be disappointed when this drops on January 19.