Junji Ito Is Bringing His Terrifying Brand Of Horror Back To TV

When modern audiences think of masters of horror, there are a few names that assuredly come to mind. People like Stephen King, John Carpenter, and Wes Craven have all made massive contributions to the genre at large and solidified their names as being synonymous with the idea of terror; even those who haven’t seen all of their work can usually name The Shining, or Halloween, or A Nightmare on Elm Street. But once you widen that scope outside of the Americas, quite a few more people join the list, including one of the most (morbidly) beloved manga artists of all-time.

Junji Ito published his first piece, Tomie, in the pages of Monthly Halloween back in 1987 and never looked back. He’s written and illustrated countless tales of the macabre and the truly unsettling, from lesser-known short stories like The Hanging Balloons and The Enigma of Amigara Fault to longer, more iconic works such as Uzumaki and the ongoing Tomie series. Calling him a legendary figure in the genre would be an understatement, reinforced by the sheer number of times his art has been adapted to the screen: 10 movies based on the Tomie series, a few animated TV shows, and an adaptation of Tomio directed by Ito himself. Nowm there’s a new one on the way, a TV series guaranteed to bring nightmares to a whole new audience.

Strange: Junji Ito’s Tales for Sleepless Nights is an upcoming anthology television series based on Ito’s long, grotesque library of stories. The first two episodes debuted during his panel at Anime Expo 2026 over the weekend, also premiering on TV Tokyo at the same time — international fans will unfortunately have to wait until this fall when the show arrives on HBO Max. Unlike the Adult Swim adaptation of Uzumaki or Netflix’s Japanese Tales of the Macabre, Strange will be entirely live-action, placing it in the lineage of anthology horror works like The Twilight Zone or Masters of Horror.

Unfortunately, the last two television incarnations of Ito’s work have been far from perfect. Adult Swim’s adaptation of Uzumaki had a phenomenal debut episode but the remaining four suffered from a sharp decline in the quality of the animation; Japanese Tales of the Macabre didn’t receive the same criticisms but the style of animation never quite felt as stark and harrowing as an anime based on his illustrations should.

For an author as accomplished as Ito, it’s undoubtedly hard to narrow down which of his stories to translate to the screen, but the show has already picked out a phenomenal starting class. Most of them have been pulled from his Masterpiece Collection, a 12-volume assortment which includes The Mansion of Phantom Pain, Face Thief, A Father’s Love, and several others that have been given the live-action treatment. Junji Ito might not be someone who has enjoyed the sheer number of adaptations that authors like H.P Lovecraft or Stephen King has, but hopefully Strange: Junji Ito’s Tales for Sleepless Nights goes on to push him even further into mainstream pop culture, imprinting his horrific and evocative nightmares on legions of viewers who haven’t had the chance to be exposed to his work before.