For years, we here at ComicBook.com have rallied for the anime industry to venture further into the horror world. As Hollywood reaps the benefits of the spooky side of entertainment, with the likes ofObsessionandBackrooms pulling in wild profits at theaters, anime often feels like it isn’t doing the same. While there have been several examples of Junji Ito’s stories being adapted from manga to anime, there is one manga storyline released in the 1970s that has never been brought to the medium of animation. With its timeless story, it’s well past time for The Drifting Classroom to receive an anime.
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For those who have never experienced the story of The Drifting Classroom, the manga first started in 1972 and spent two years weaving a cosmic horror story that stands the test of time. Creator Kazuo Umezu imagines an elementary school that is randomly displaced and flung into a terrifying environment. While the students, teachers, and the structure of the school itself have been teleported to this new location, the characters are now surrounded by nothing but sand, quickly realizing that their new life is bursting with mind-bending threats. While this story does have plenty of surreal monstrosities, Umezu’s story hits at the heart of just how scary humanity can be on its own.
The True Horror of The Drifting Classroom
One story that The Drifting Classroom shares several similarities with is William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which the surviving students deal with what their current situation means in surviving alongside one another. Even in a world where giant centipedes, killer robots, and spider-like creatures inhabit the landscape, factors such as hunger, thirst, disease, mistrust, and power all run rampant in the horror manga. These factors add some serious storytelling to Sho and his classmates’ cursed journey, as they try to both figure out what happened to them and discover a way to return to their world.
The true horror of The Drifting Classroom comes when the protagonists struggle with keeping their sanity, trusting one another, and finding the resources necessary to survive. Once the manga sets the stakes, Umezu immediately begins exploring questions that almost any reader would have while reading the spooky story. The children routinely need to find food and water, struggle with how to address mortality, and otherwise deal with problems that they very much have never encountered before. More often than not, the teachers who were transported alongside the young children were more of a hindrance than a help, as Umezu intriguingly wove together multiple threads throughout.
Like John Carpenter’s The Thing, Drifting Classroom has a sense of isolation and loneliness that helps make the horror of the story hit that much harder. This environment through the eyes of adults is scary enough, but the manga makes the scares hit that much harder when the children need to figure everything out on their own. Without diving into spoiler territory, the more that protagonist Sho and his allies discover, the more mind-bending their predicament becomes. While we would be remiss to venture into how the story ends, it feels wildly appropriate for the chapters that preceded its finale and is well worth your time, even if you’re not a horror enthusiast at heart.
The Live-Action Drifting Classroom
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The Drifting Classroom is one of the rare instances where a manga completely foregoes receiving an anime and instead jumps right into the live-action world. Series like 20th Century Boysand I Am a Hero followed this path, though this horror story ultimately suffered from the two big adaptations. The first was released in 1987, transforming the original school into an international one, gathering together a diverse class. Following this movie, which steered quite far from the horror of the source material, 2002’s The Long Love Letter presented a radically different take on The Drifting Classroom by imagining older students taking part in the terrifying landscape.
On top of the anime world needing more horror in general, The Drifting Classroom has long been thought of as one of the greatest manga of all time, spooky and otherwise. The story, despite releasing in the ’70s, feels timeless, while also managing to create quite a few spine-tingling moments throughout its panels. While a full-blown television series would be amazing on its own, the story could also work as an anime movie if the right production house was given the keys to the kingdom. If you want to read the story for yourself, we have good news for you, as Viz Media has also shared the manga as part of its subscription platform. Should you want to own physical copies, you can pick up the three volumes by clicking here, and prepare yourself for a riveting, heart-pounding story that is dying to receive its own anime.
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