Famous Japanese Horror Master was Also Working on Silent Hills

I hate to do this to you, but I’m going to do it anyway: there was a third person working on Silent Hills beyond Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro. And if you ever needed more evidence this was going to to be an amazing game we’re never going to play, this would be it: apparently horror legend and psychologist’s nightmare Junji Ito was also working on the game.

Holy crap.

So, for those of you who aren’t big into horror or Japanese manga, you might not know Junji Ito. But he’s easily one of the creepiest, deranged, creatively horrible horror masters in our generation. He was the mind behind the twisted series Uzumaki (which was about a small Japanese Town getting haunted by spirals--literally, spirals) Gyo (apocalypse via Gas-Bloated Walking Fish--seriously) and Tomie (Lust Demon who makes people do horrible things out of love--surprisingly normal synopsys until you actually read it). The man is a genius at his craft and even if you don’t find his gross-out style horrifying, you have to admit he has a knack for thinking of some messed-up stuff.

The revealer of this information, del Toro himself, said this over Twitter:
 

"He was very, very shy, and I kept slapping him on the back, which was not very Japanese. Junji Ito is the only author of comics that has scared the crap out of me. When the shark takes the stairs in Gyo, grows the mechanical crab legs chasing them up the stairs, I literally threw away the comic and yelled, 'NO!' I was so absolutely scared."

So, yeah. Silent Hills, being worked on by three creative geniuses, posed to make more money than God, shut down. By Konami. I think Jim Sterling has it right.