After years of delays, the horror manga author Junji Ito has confirmed an anime adaptation of his magnum opus, Uzumaki. Drive and Production I.G. will animate the four-episode anime, which will air on Adult Swim later this year.
Fans may be worried about this prospect since, in 2018, the Junji Ito Collection came out with mixed reviews. Many viewers felt the animation was clunky and failed to capture Junji Ito’s style and detail, making the anime more comedic than horrific.
The difference is that the upcoming Adult Swim anime appears to be a one-to-one replica of its source material, even being stylized in black and white. So, can a Junji Ito story be animated while still being scary, or does his horror style only work on paper? The question may leave you spiraling.
Spiral Into Insanity
Discussing any of Ito’s works without detailing how his art style adds to the horror is difficult. The cover pages of the first volume showcase the manga’s excellent art style, which is surprisingly light and almost serene.
The scene introduces the protagonist and narrator, a girl named Kirie Goshima, in a field of grass overlooking the coastal town of Kurôzu-Cho. However, a closer inspection reveals twirling grass, tree bark with whorls, and spinning skies. This visual motif is the titular “Uzumaki,” or the Japanese word for a spiral pattern.
From the beginning, Kurôzu-Cho is an abnormal town, producing spontaneous whirlwinds and whirlpools. These phenomena indicate that this town has been cursed since before the plot began.
The Spiral Obsession
Kirie’s boyfriend, Shuichi Saito, is the deuteragonist of Uzumaki, and the story implies that he has psychic powers to detect the spiral. He warns Kirie of the dangers of staying in Kurôzu-Cho and urges her to skip town with him. He brings up his father’s creepy obsession.
Shuichi’s father quit his job because of his fixation with spiral patterns. He is so devoted that he can independently spin his eyes and curl his tongue inhumanly far to replicate spirals on his body. One night, Shuichi and his mother discover Mr. Saito dead in a small tub, having coiled his entire body like a snake.
Mr. Saito’s cremation causes his ashes to form a “black spiral” in the sky that resembles his horrific face before landing in the “dragonfly pond” in the middle of town. This image scars Mrs. Saito, who develops an extreme spiral phobia, which includes her fingerprints and hair knots. Shuichi tries to prevent his mother from learning about the ear’s cochlea, a spiral necessary to live.
Despite Shuichi’s best efforts, Mr. Shuichi tangibly haunts his wife and tells her anyway, leading to her miserable death. Her ashes also become a black spiral. Whether one reveres or fears it, the spiral’s influence is inescapable.
The Scar
“The Scar” is perhaps Junji Ito’s most iconic work. Azami is a pretty girl from school who believes the crescent-shaped scar on her forehead attracts every boy. However, Shuichi psychically detects that her scar is becoming a spiral and avoids Azami like the plague.
Furious that a boy would reject her advances, Azami becomes obsessed with Shuichi. Her obsession makes her scar become a spiral that bores into her skull like a drill, ultimately sucking in her surroundings like a black hole, including herself.
Misc. Chapters
In “Medusa,” Kirie’s hair grows sentient, mesmerizing curls that drag Kirie around crowded areas to mesmerize onlookers. Her narcissistic friend Sekino decides to copy Kirie’s hairstyle but doesn’t realize that her hair is sapping her vitality, turning her into a withered husk.
In “Jack-in-the-Box,” a boy with a crush on Kirie tries to win Kirie’s affection by jumping in front of a car but gets killed. His corpse is still alive, chasing after Kirie and Shuichi by bouncing on a spring from the car before finally falling apart.
Some chapters exist to introduce concepts, such as slow-moving people turning into “snail people” and lovers intertwining their bodies. The area around the dragonfly pond is dangerous.
In “Black Lighthouse,” an abandoned lighthouse emits extreme light every night, causing vertigo for anybody who sees it. At the top is a melted lamp emitting dangerously hot light. Kirie narrowly saves herself and her little brother Mitsuo, but one of his friends gets caught in the light and burnt to a crisp.
Mosquitoes (TW: pregnancy/surgery horror)
Swarms of mosquitoes attack pregnant women, laying their eggs inside of their wombs. The mosquitoes also cause the women to drink the blood of patients to feed their babies.
Their babies want to return to their mother’s wombs, continuously producing an umbilical cord that brainwashes the hospital staff. The doctors then perform, er, “reverse deliveries” by putting the baby back in the womb.
The Storm
Several hurricanes become localized in the cursed Kurôzu-Cho, and even the eye of the storm is sentient. Kirie’s home is destroyed, and her new row house is cursed with giving its tenants spiky warts. Six hurricanes consecutively travel to Kurôzu-Cho, all directly heading to the dragonfly pond, obliterating the town.
The spiral now affects everything in the town, including the oxygen, allowing anyone to generate whirlwinds by moving quickly or making loud noises. The spiral will kill or trap anybody who tries to enter, even if they’re trying to help.
Only the abandoned old wooden rowhouses are perfectly intact and impenetrable. While externally safe from the spiral, the people inside become an entangled mass of flesh if the rowhouses get too cramped. But on the outside, survivors have spiraled into insanity, learning how to ride the whirlwinds and eating the snail people.
Our heroes are forced to cannibalize snail people to survive without a single food source. The heroes venture to the outskirts of town, trying to find an escape route, but the spiral has affected space and will always force them to return to the town. Time has also been distorted, so their short venture caused several decades to pass within the town.
Morton’s Fork
Now, we reach an extreme case of “Morton’s fork,” a dilemma where opposite options lead to the same result.
To recap, if you move too fast, you cause whirlwinds; if you move too slowly, you turn into a snail. Outside of a rowhouse, the spiral affects you; inside of a rowhouse, the spiral absorbs you. Entering the town from the outside traps you inside, but leaving is impossible.
It’s not looking so hot for Kurôzu-Cho.
Completion
Shuichi believes the spiral haunts the town every few centuries, forcing its citizens to return the rowhouses to their original formation, a massive spiral.
Kirie and Shuichi discover that the dragonfly pond has become a chasm with a spiraling staircase leading deep underground. At the bottom is an ancient city of sentient spirals, its floor composed of the petrified victims of the spiral, including Kirie’s parents.
Kirie and Shuichi, having nothing to live for, decide to spite the attention-seeking spiral by intertwining their bodies for eternity while facing away from it. Kirie has been recounting this story while frozen in time at the center of the spiral.
Junji Ito
Junji Ito wrote himself in as a character at the end of Uzumaki, candidly explaining his fascination with spirals. Initially, the story wasn’t about spirals but about people living in traditional Japanese rowhouses, the type of house Ito lived in as a child.
Ito was inspired by the shape of a mosquito coil and decided to create elongated spiral-pattern buildings in the creative process. Through his creative research, he legitimately became obsessed with spirals in real life. He mimicked the actions of Uzumaki‘s characters by raising snails, spinning the water in his bathtub, and eating foods with spiral patterns.
H.P. Lovecraft, the father of cosmic horror, was a major inspiration for Uzumaki — particularly Lovecraft’s story structure, expressionism, and atmosphere.
Junji Ito wrote the story to understand the spiral’s nature, so he has no idea what it represents. However, many of the spiral’s victims are destructively obsessive.
Shuichi’s parents have an obsession with the spiral, and after passing, they become one with the spiral. Azami has an obsession with male attention to the point that she sucks men in like a black hole. Two males have crushes on Kirie and become monsters who chase Kirie down. Devoted couples bond their bodies together.
Our world naturally produces many spirals, so the horror comes from the many ways this eldritch being can be at the root of virtually every facet of life. A few of the manga’s connections are weaker than others, such as mosquitoes flying in spiral formations or a lighthouse’s lights spinning around.
Conclusion
The manga rigidly splits its structure between normalcy and the supernatural. The first half of the chapter establishes an ominous, disturbing scenario. Around the halfway mark is when characters react to something they have seen, followed by the next page’s “jump scare,” displaying the horrific way the spiral killed someone.
That scare makes the chapter tonally darker while the protagonists investigate the latest form of the spiral. Instead of resolving the situation, chapters always end with the spiral still at large.
Although an anime cannot perfectly capture Uzumaki’s page-turning horror, animating these horrific images can produce unique scares.
