Fridge / Junji Ito

Fridge Horror

• Invoked in "The Licking Woman". The protagonist meets someone who provides a chemical that should prove fatal. When the plan is carried out, the protagonist notices that the licking woman's spectacles are the same as the stranger's, and wonders if it was a suicidal cure.
  • It's later shown that the woman's "tongue" wasn't really a tongue at all, but a parasitic monster that inhabits people's mouths. Read between the lines, and it's implied that the woman was attempting to kill herself to prevent the monster from committing any more murders. Unfortunately, all this results in is the monster making the protagonist its new host.
• At the end of "Layers of Fear", Reimi is still mentally a child, or alternatively her mind is a irreparably warped amalgamation of what's left of each layer that had been torn off beforehand. This implies that she cannot progress forward, and her future has quite literally been ripped away from her.
  • While the entirety of the curse is unsettling enough, the way how the mother treats and manipulates her daughters is disturbingly reminiscent of real world abuse. Her older daughter was neglected and ignored because her mom didn't find her pretty enough (which she says to her face). The mother constantly babies her younger daughter, but it comes with the implication that she wasn't able to have a normal childhood due to both the spotlight and her mom's pushiness. Not to mention that the mother gets downright creepy and obsessive with the idea of aging her child down and redoing everything. The mother's behavior never truly feels to be in either of her daughters' best interests and are entirely self serving, with both of her daughters seemingly acting only as extensions for her ego and happiness, given that when one displeases her she immediately turns on her children. Even without the curse, this family was screwed up from the start.
    • If you were to theoretically replace the curse with something more mundane that allowed the mother to get some influence over her daughter (like drugs), you'd have a story of a controlling mother favoring the youngest child while neglecting and stringing along the other, pushing the younger one into the spotlight, and, eventually, when the younger one has had enough of the smothering, the mom decides to do something to her child that'll make her dependent on her care, with the older sibling's reluctant assistance; only, the results end up backfiring on the mother, who not only ends up injured, but the child she wanted to control has been disfigured beyond recognition. The story isn't just body horror, but a tale of abuse.
• The curse in "Layers of Fear" originated from an ancient burial site, where a child's skull lies underneath many layers of rock and clay. One of the archaeologists that discovers this speculates that the layers are simply part of an ornately-constructed sarcophagus, but once we see what Nanami's mother does to her after she discovers the nesting curse, one has to wonder... are all those layers the result of someone close to the "child" doing the same thing to them?

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