Prolific horror mangaka Junji Ito has confirmed that Hideo Kojima has reached out to him about working on a horror game together.
He revealed this at the “VIZ: A Haunting Conversation with Junji Ito” panel at the Comic-Con@Home digital event on July 24. In response to a question about whether he is currently involved in game development, Ito spoke through a translator and said, “I do know director Kojima, and we have been in conversation that he may have a horror-based game that he may be doing, and so he has invited me to work on that, but there are no details on it yet.”
It’s important to note that this doesn’t confirm that Kojima Productions’ next game after last year’s Death Stranding is a horror game. Additionally, this does not confirm much more than Kojima wanting to work on a horror game, which he has expressed in the past.
In an April 2020 interview with BAFTA, Kojima stated, “I’m easily frightened myself, so I have confidence that I could create something more terrifying than perhaps others could. I get frightened of things like darkness and imagine shadows of ghosts in the dark … P.T. ended as just an experiment, but I would like to make another horror game someday. Something that uses a revolutionary method to create terror, that doesn’t just make you pee your pants, but crap them. I already have ideas in mind.”
On ideas for a horror game, he said in an Oct. 2019 interview: “Yes, I want to do a horror game one day. Yes, of course, because I have some new ideas that I did kind of get out there. But I don’t know when… I have to think about when I bring this out. Horror is like, for instance, in a movie, you could kind of close your eyes watching the really, really fearful things. In games, it’s different from movies because in movies you could just close your eyes, but that scene will just go away. But in games, it’s interactive; therefore, if you are so scared that you stop playing, you will not proceed in a game … I want to challenge this … I want to challenge the horror genre one day.”
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It’s also not the first time Ito has spoken about being involved with one of Kojima’s projects. At the Toronto Comics Art Festival in May of last year, he said that Kojima and Guillermo del Toro had once approached him about becoming involved with Silent Hills. They all had a meeting, but nothing came out of it in the end. The project was scrapped before Ito could produce a sketch.
“Once the Silent Hills meeting was over, we went to karaoke. I didn’t hear anything after that. I heard that the plan got scrapped through outside sources. I have seen Kojima and Del Toro since. I never started designing monsters. Nothing exists. There are no roughs or sketches.”
— Minovsky (@MinovskyArticle) May 10, 2019
Perhaps future meetings will turn out much more positively for fans of P.T., the Silent Hill franchise, and horror games in general.
In March, Konami’s US public relations responded to a Rely on Horror report about the return of Silent Hills.
“We’re aware of all the rumors and reports but can confirm that they are not true,” said a representative. “I know it’s not the answer your fans may want to hear. It’s not to say we are completely closing the door on the franchise, just not in the way it is being reported.”
You can watch the entire panel below. Thanks to ComicBook for the translation.
