Junji Ito Collection

伊藤潤二「コレクション」 (Itou Junji: Collection)

8.8(1)

OtakuDen

6.6(93,161)

MAL Score

Ranked #7346

Popularity #1381

Drama
Horror
Mystery
Supernatural
Suspense
Psychological

Episodes: 12
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Jan 5, 2018 to Mar 23, 2018
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

From bright daylight to the stillness of midnight, dread gathers in the quietest corners, where the unexplainable slips into view. The horrors that surface are relentless—impossible to reason with, difficult to escape, and all too ready to claim the unwary.

Junji Ito Collection strings together unsettling supernatural mysteries: a cursed jade carving linked to holes that appear across its victims’ bodies; nightmares that linger for decades; a striking spirit waiting at a foggy crossroads, offering advice that carries a price; and a grotesque slug taking root inside a girl’s mouth. Each tale leans into psychological unease and creeping suspense, inviting viewers to step carefully into Junji Ito’s world of terror.

Otaku Consensus

The critical line on Junji Ito Collection is that Shinobu Tagashira and Studio Deen understand the value of an episodic horror grab bag: the pacing lets the strongest Ito concepts strike quickly, and entries like the privacy-focused story and the grotesque model/circus material preserve some of the manga’s macabre charge. The verdict is held back by the same complaint across fan reviews: stiff, sometimes janky animation and uneven sound design flatten Ito’s hyper-detailed page horror, making the series feel more like a gateway back to the manga than a definitive adaptation.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Junji Ito Collection if you want horror as a sampler plate: no training-arc buildup, no mystery-box lore, just brief confrontations with curses, bodily violation, urban paranoia, and cosmic wrongness. It scratches the same itch as Yamishibai’s campfire-anthology format, but with Ito’s more clinical fixation on bodies, social shame, and impossible rules; compared with Hell Girl, it is less moral fable and more nightmare specimen jar. The best use case is not prestige animation showcase but late-night viewing for viewers who like seeing how many shapes dread can take in a single cour. If you have read Ito, it becomes a curiosity about adaptation choices; if you have not, it functions as a fast index of which manga stories you may want to chase afterward.

Key Characters

S
Souichi Tsujii
Souichi is one of Ito’s most recognizable recurring mischief-makers, and his appearances give the anthology a nastier, more prankish flavor than the purely tragic segments.
F
Fuchi
Fuchi is a fan-noted grotesque icon whose scenes test whether the adaptation can translate Ito’s famous page-turn shock into motion.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Studio Deen produced the series as a 12-episode Winter 2018 TV anthology rather than building one serialized horror plot, matching the source material’s one-shot reputation more closely than a conventional seasonal narrative would.
2
Shinobu Tagashira served as both director and character designer, making the adaptation’s visual identity unusually centralized at the top of the production hierarchy.
3
The AniList tag spread is unusually dense for a single-cour horror title: Anthology at 100%, Episodic at 88%, Gore at 80%, Body Horror at 79%, and Cosmic Horror at 76%, signaling a format built around rotating horror mechanisms rather than one monster or one case.
4
The show’s reception profile is notably split but consistent across databases: MAL lists it at 6.59 from more than 93,000 votes, while AniList sits at 62/100 with over 1,000 favorites, reflecting a title many horror fans sampled even when they disputed the adaptation quality.
5
Its horror palette moves beyond haunted-house scares into school settings, urban legends, tragedy, crime, curses, demons, and circus imagery, which is why the series often feels like a catalog of Ito obsessions rather than a single tonal lane.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: Junji Ito is credited as the original creator, while the anime’s series composition was handled by Kaoru Sawada, separating the manga’s authorial source from the TV structure that selected and arranged the stories.
Fun fact 2: The production credits include Kazuhiro Fukaumi specifically for title logo design, a small but telling detail for a series whose brand identity depends heavily on the Junji Ito name.
Fun fact 3: Hiromasa Ogura served as art director, with Wakaba Nagashima and Akiyasu Okamoto credited for art design and Yukiko Ario for color design, showing that the series had separate staff lanes for backgrounds, setting texture, and palette control.
Fun fact 4: The show aired from January 5 to March 23, 2018, completing its 12-episode run within a standard winter cour rather than stretching into a split-cour or long-form horror project.
Fun fact 5: Several viewer writeups describe the anime as more effective as an introduction to Ito’s story concepts than as a replacement for the manga, with one review noting that the strongest episodes may push viewers back toward the printed originals.