A scorned woman coming back to avenge the hurt in gruesome ways is another of the tropes Ito uses in his horror manga. In Episode 5 of the Netflix adaptation of the horror that Junji Ito draws, one of the stories focuses on a woman whose boyfriend breaks up with her, so she avenges the hurt—in a unique manner. With each episode bringing an animated version of the horror manga that J-horror fans have loved, here’s a recap of the fifth episode.
Spoilers Ahead
What Happens In ‘Intruder’?
A boy is digging the courtyard ground with a shovel inside a walled house when he unearths a body with his own face. The boy apologizes for hurting the body when it opens its eyes as the title card rolls. Inside a library, the same boy named Oshikiri is reading a book when a few others talk about his quiet demeanor. While reading the book, he overhears three students at the next table discussing the existence of entities from alternate dimensions. While searching for the book that details it, he finds that Oshikiri is reading it. The students introduce themselves as Kamiyama, Watanabe, and Koizumi and invite him to visit the town with them. At an eatery, Oshikiri shares that he hears phantom footsteps that echo throughout the house, and the others are immediately interested. They request to come over to his place and hear the footsteps for themselves, and Oshikiri agrees. The four students arrive at Oshikiri’s European castle-like house, where the boy lives alone. Kamiyama announces that he’s feeling the presence of an entity inside the house, and Koizumi agrees. Oshikiri says that the footsteps are usually heard at midnight, but they can also be heard during the day at times. Obsessed with alternate dimensions, Kamiyama finds its presence inside Oshikiri’s house and theorizes that the footsteps belong to an intruder from a different dimension. The clock strikes 4’o clock, and footsteps begin. The four students chase after the sound and are about to head outside, following it, when Watanabe spots something in the courtyard. Out in the courtyard, an exact copy of Oshikiri is seen digging the earth to bury a body that lies beside him. As Kamiyama explains that the person below is the mirror image of Oshikiri from the alternate dimension, who has killed someone and is burying their body in this world to avoid getting caught, Oshikiri shouts at his doppelganger. The second Oshikiri laughs at them and disappears; the classmates find that the body being buried is Kamiyama’s, probably from another dimension. They proceed to find the buried bodies of Watanabe and Koizumi, which are in various stages of decay and disintegration. As it turns out, Oshiriki’s alternate self has totally devolved into a serial killer. The students cover up the scene of the crime to prevent anyone from spotting the bodies. Left alone at his home, Oshikiri sits in a room as the footsteps echo louder and louder.
What Happens In ‘Long Hair In The Attic’?
In a dark alley, two people are sitting inside a car—a sharply dressed man and a woman with immensely long hair. The man notes how much of a people-pleaser the girl Chiemi is and that she does whatever she thinks he’ll like. Chiemi notes that the man was the first person to take her to the beach since she hadn’t been there before that. Clearly trying to break off their relationship, the man changes the topic and leans in to open the car door and tell her that she’s better off with someone who’d want a serious relationship. While driving away, he tells her not to call him again. As she’s climbing up the stairs in her home, her sister Eri explains the relationship the man just broke off through exposition. Chiemi had been dating Hiratsuka for almost nine years. Eri also said that a rat had been scampering around in the attic, and with cat-like speed, Chiemi was able to kill the rodent by hitting the roof. Thinking about the day, Chiemi spaces out and bids her sister good night. She lights a cigarette while looking at the photographs with Hiratsuka, especially the one where she had very short hair and was visibly cheerful. A flashback shows the two standing in front of the sea when Hiratsuka asks her to grow her hair out and then pulls her close. Back to the present, Chiemi cries herself to sleep over the breakup, having burnt off Hiratsuka’s face from the photo. She wakes up in the morning to find a dead rat strangled in her hair, and while washing her hair, she makes up her mind to cut the abnormally long hair off. She asks Eri to give her a haircut, and while the younger sister is looking for scissors downstairs, a scream from Chiemi makes Eri sprint to the room to find something grotesque. Chiemi’s body lies covered in blood, but she has been beheaded. A while later, Hiratsuka is in bed with another woman when an unknown call comes, and on picking it up, Hiratsuka hears scraping noises and a squeak in the end that he pieces together to be the teeth grinding that Chiemi used to do.
Meanwhile, Eri asks for the flashlight from her father because a rat might have fallen into a trap, and she wants to put it out of its misery. Her father insists on going instead of her, but he’s been gone for a while, so Eri follows him up there. She finds him sitting with a terrified expression, and upon closer inspection, she realizes that the man had died from a heart attack after seeing something horrific. Eri notices that her father saw the head of Chiemi stuck in the attic with her creepy hair wrapped around the beams. She tries tearing the hair, but her hands get scraped, so she starts rushing to get the scissors when the hair pulls Chiemi’s eyebrows wide and grazes her teeth together, making it sound like the noise Hiratsuka heard. The hair, now with a mind of its own, climbs down from the attic and escapes, the head lolloping behind. Hiratsuka is seen suspended in mid-air with hair protruding from each of his orifices as the grinding sound continues. The hair rips Hiratsuka’s body apart to shower the room with hair as the screen cuts to black.
‘Junji Ito Maniac’ Episode 5: Ending Explained
Of the two stories, the second is obviously a lot creepier and scarier because of the context. While the first one deals with alternate realities and a murderer at loose, it fails to create an atmosphere of horror. In all probability, the body that Oshikiri digs at the start of the episode is one of this dimension, and he, too, has been killed by the murderer from the other dimension. Thus, the beginning of the episode happens after the first story is over. The Oshikiri, the people will know from now, is an imposter and truly an intruder who’ll take up the identity of the doppelganger he just murdered.
The second story is a lot more interesting because it deals with the themes of jealousy-driven revenge and assigning life to lifeless objects- the anthropomorphisation trope that Ito frequently uses. In this story, the nonchalant Chiemi had grown her hair out during her relationship with Hiratsuka because he liked it. After Hiratsuka breaks up with her, all the rage, anger, and sadness that Chiemi felt but was too polite to express get transferred into her hair, which comes alive. When she wants to cut it off, the hair, now a sentient being, defends itself by cutting Chiemi’s head off and escaping to the attic. It stayed there until the girls’ father climbed upstairs to reset the mouse traps and became the unwary victim of the bone-chilling sight of Chiemi and the hair. The moment Eri mentioned getting scissors, it untied itself, slipped out, and headed to Hiratsuka’s residence. The hair growth began with Hiratsuka’s desire to see Chiemi with long hair, so the hair avenged his breaking up with her by wrapping his body in hair and then tearing it to pieces.
