So the economy sucks and everyone's losing their jobs, up to their eyeballs in debt and generally feeling nervous and uncertain. This means it's time for Horror stories to thrive once again, and the Japanese have been jumping into the deep end of the pool and pouring out their messy, creepy emissions for our delicious dread. Yes, we're overdue for Junji Ito to put out a new horror manga!
Tadashi and Kaori go on vacation by the sea in Okinawa and encounter fish crawling out of the water on metal legs and attacking people for no good reason. They flee back to Tokyo thinking they'd put the incident behind them, only to find that the aquatic menace has followed them, and soon the city is overrun by a plague of marine life on sharp metal legs. There's a shark that seems intent on hunting them down. And the metal legs turn out to be an infection that can spread to humans.
It's all here: Cronenbergian body horror, fear of disease, an unfathomable apocalypse, a sense of Lovecraftian dread, a horror whose origins are lost in mystery, an inescapable end of the world that seems to come from nowhere except the mind of a panicking dreamer.
Beware the smell of fish.
Adi Tantimedh is a screenwriter and filmmaker who writes comics when he has the time. He has recently completed JLA: The Age of Wonder for DC Comics, and written and directed Open House, a short film for Studio FP in Italy. His current projects include the forthcoming Blackshirt for Moonstone Books, Anna Passenger, a novel being serialised on Opi8.com, and various film and television projects.
