Uzumaki is a 2000 Japanese horror film based on the manga of the same name by Junji Ito. It premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival in 2000. Even during the height of J-horror, when tropes and formulae were becoming predictable, there were unusual entrants like Akihiro Higuchi’s “Uzumaki,” directed by Higuchinsky. The story takes place in the small town of Kurouzu-Cho, which is beset by a mysterious spiral curse. Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Hinako Saeki, and Shin Eun-Kyung star in Higuchinsky’s feature film directorial debut.
The filmmaker commented that he was more interested in the changes the Uzumaki (“spiral”) generated in individuals and places in Junji Ito’s original manga, which is exactly the vibe we wanted to portray in his version. Uzumaki was part of the Japanese horror wave that began with the success and popularity of Ring (1998). The new Japanese horror renaissance aggressively grabbed imagery from manga, hentai, and traditional Japanese Kaidan for an inventive new synthesis. As a result, “Uzumaki” stands alone in the world of J-horror, emphasizing mood rather than horrors, a feature that many fans of the genre have yet to discover.
Uzumaki (2000)
Uzumaki has a Lovecraftian effect as it indulges in the madness of the simple and unavoidable things in life. It is a tale about an all-consuming madness over one of the most commonly occurring natural phenomena – the Spiral. Higuchinsky starts the film slowly like the outer portions of a spiral and quickly tornadoes one deep into the madness. The story of the film begins slowly, with an adolescent schoolgirl heroine, Kirie Goshima, facing weird events. It’s a film in which the plot (split into four parts) is more of a line that moves through an environment of constantly increasing strangeness, from the mundane to the weirdly apocalyptic.
The spiral obsession starts with the father of our heroine’s boyfriend, Shuichi Saito. Kirie finds him in an alleyway filming the corkscrew patterns on a snail’s shell so obsessively that he fails to even realize her presence.
She finds out through her boyfriend that he’s also working on a video scrapbook loaded with photographs of anything with a spiral or vortex shape. His strange fascination causes him to neglect his obligations at work and life as a normal human being. He declares that a spiral is the highest form of art and tries to pursue it in everything, he can find. When he runs out of spiral-patterned kamaboko, he furiously makes whirlpools in his miso soup. His wife and son are increasingly concerned about his obsessive behavior.
The first shot of the film is the dead body of a schoolboy whose brains are splattered all over the floor. While it may seem unrelated at the first glance, the story unfolds when Shuichi tell Kirie about the boy being drawn into the spiral resulting in his death.
During this time, strange things keep happening at Kirie’s school as well. A student named Katayama starts walking very slowly, dripping with a slimy material, and only goes to school on rainy days. He seems to be growing a shell, on his back as well.
Shuichi throws away his father’s spiral collection which causes his father to find anything and everything that could form a spiral. There is a rather terrifying shot where Saito’s face becomes oblong, and his eyes start turning into spirals. His obsession with finding the spiral pattern results in him spinning in a spiral to his death, in a washing machine while filming himself.
Soon, the rest of the student population also starts sprouting shells, drinking huge amounts of water, and crawling on the school’s walls. It is later covered in the news when they fully turn into human-sized snails. Sekino, Kirie’s classmate, begins to grow her hair in exaggerated curls, gaining control of her and other female classmates’ minds. Whirl-like clouds rise in the sky, and smoky, ghost-like faces of victims who died in spiral-related ways accompany them during funerals.
Shuichi’s father’s suicide intrigues Tamura, a reporter, and he gets obsessed with the story. Shuichi’s mother, who has been in the hospital since her husband died, has developed a great fear of spirals. She shaves her hair and fingertips because of their spiral-like shapes, and Shuichi instructs the medical personnel to remove anything spiral-shaped so that his mother does not encounter them.
After a millipede tries to creep into her ear while she is sleeping, she hallucinates her husband telling her that “there’s another vortex in the deepest portion of your ear” tipping her over the edge and resulting in her suicide. Interestingly, 6 and 9, which are virtually spiral numbers, can be found on the reporter’s license plate, as a room number in the hospital, as a date in a video clip at the end of the movie, and so on. This goes on to show the attention to detail given by Higuchinsky.
With this, the Spiral tornadoes find their way into the town! This obsession quickly spreads throughout the village like a virus, causing residents’ bodies to twist and reshape in all kinds of bizarre, horrible, and inhuman ways. The spiral’s passion grows stronger as it engulfs them psychologically and physically, pushing them to the brink of insanity and eventually killing them.
After obsessively creating spiral-shaped ceramics, Kirie’s father takes a drill to his eye; a news crew reporting on the phenomenon becomes trapped in a tunnel and is later discovered as humanoid yet snail-like corpses; and Sekino’s snake-like curls grow to an abnormal height, wrapping around a telephone pole and cables and electrocuting herself.
Inspector Tamura’s car collides with a pole, causing Tamura’s head to hit the windshield, leaving a spiral-shaped crack. A boy who wants Kirie to be his girlfriend throws himself in front of the car and is twisted around the axle; the car collides with a pole, causing Tamura’s head to hit the windshield, leaving a spiral-shaped crack. Shuichi’s body bends into a spiral-like contortion as Kirie and Shuichi resolve to look for Kirie’s father. He crawls up to Kirie and asks her to “become a spiral as well.”
Since the movie was filmed before the mange finished (in 2004), the ending and origin of the movie are different from that of the manga. However, that hasn’t stopped Higuchinsky from not only crediting the manga writer Junji Ito by glimpsing at it in the film but creating a unique and maddening masterpiece.
While the film does not have the high-quality visuals as seen in the more modern horror films, it provides the same amount of, if not more, chills and creeps while watching. Higuchinsky uses a lot of weird angles and creepy visuals in the entire film.
He slowly turns the camera around like a spiral, as well to create an unsettling effect -resulting in a feeling of dread and anticipation. Overall, this combination of great acting, extremely frightening set dressing, and scenic aspects creates a nightmare atmosphere for people in the cursed remote village of Kurouzu, well exceeding the movie’s objective and idea.
Mysterious Curse Involving The Otherworldly Spirals
Part of the film’s strangeness comes from the fact that it never explains why spiral patterns are causing such bizarrely compulsive behavior and mutations. Throughout the movie, one keeps guessing how and why this obsession started and how does it end. What also intrigued me was the fact that we never got to know what happened to Kirie. It seems that she is the one narrating the story in the beginning, however, one can’t tell where she goes after the boyfriend turns into a spiral and asks her to join him in it.
Since the movie doesn’t address these concerns as such, we will be trying to dive into the world of the manga to figure out how the curse of the spiral works. According to the manga, The Spiral is a mysterious and malevolent thing or force that wipes off the whole population of Kurouzu-Cho at irregular periods every few centuries or millennia.
Its identity and nature are unknown, however, it appears to be sentient to some level, as evidenced by its recurring interest in Kirie (and to a lesser extent, Shuichi). It could have come from the City of Spirals beneath Kurouzu-Cho or not. It’s impossible to say if the Spiral is a curse, an infection, a being, or a force. It is said that it can infect and control the minds and bodies of humans.
Apparently, it only affects the town of Kurouzu-Cho and follows a pattern of killing. It starts with “random” deaths and disappearances, as well as “abnormal” cases of fixation with the pattern, are followed by more severe consequences such as numerous hurricanes and tornadoes, until Kurouzu-Cho is rebuilt as a massive spiral row-house and everyone within is pulled into the City of Spirals.
The Spiral is significantly less powerful in the film; it appears to be less adept at infecting people’s minds than their bodies, is not sapient in any way and thus cannot communicate, cannot affect human abilities, and is confined solely to Kurouzu-Cho, with no implication of controlling other galaxies.
In the manga, it is shown as an omnipotent force that controls the minds and bodies of living beings including animals. It can also control the atmosphere, air pressure, and weather of the town. However, in the movie, it can only control the water in Dragonfly Pond rather than the ocean, and it can’t influence the rest of the weather or air pressure. The Spiral also appears to be incapable of controlling animals or plants, just people.
In the manga, Shuichi does not die. In fact, he has full immunity against the spiral it seems. He could see and interact with the spiral without once becoming contaminated by it. Mrs Goshima, who is shown to be deceased in the movie but not in the manga, was contaminated by the spiral once and recovered. Kirie and Yasuo Goshima were also contaminated many times but they recovered as well.
Why should you watch Uzumaki?
Any Lovecraftian lover, anime fan, and in general maddening horror enthusiasts would love this film. Uzumaki is like a slow burn spiraling madness (pun intended). The 90-minute-long film leaves you with a creepy there is something under my skin kind of feeling. It intrigues one into the vast valley of horror. It shows us that horrifying, maddening, and terrifying things are not only the supernatural that we cook up in our brains, but it is very much widely abundant in nature as well.
Uzumaki shows us that anything can drive us to an obsessive madness if we let it. It has a stimulating plot and cinematography. The visuals and camera angles enhance the creepiness of the plot brilliantly and keep you wanting more. The film suddenly starts increasing in momentum in the middle like a spiral moving inward. The spiral metaphors are not only hidden in the scenes, Higuchinsky has managed to incorporate them brilliantly in his cinematography as well.
The film is sure to entice and enrapture for the entire duration. The abrupt and unexplained ending leaves you breathless and wanting for more. It was a unique film that has me obsessively reading its manga now just to figure out how far the mystery of this spiral goes.