Uzumaki (うずまき?, "Spiral") is a Japanese horror film directed by Higuchinsky. Uzumaki, released in 2000, is based on Junji Ito's episodic manga of the same name. The movie covers some of the notable stories from the manga, with varying degrees of faithfulness. The movie and the manga have different endings, as the movie was filmed before the manga had finished.
Plot[]
Premonition[]
High school student Kirie first suspects that something is awry in the small town of Kurouzu when the father of her boyfriend, Shuichi begins to film the corkscrew pattern on a snail's shell. He is also in the process of making a video scrapbook filled with images of anything that has a spiral or vortex shape to it. His weird obsession threatens to go out of control and take over his life. He proclaims that a spiral is the highest form of art and frantically creates whirlpools in his miso soup when he runs out of spiral patterned Kamaboko. He then becomes one with Uzumaki when he decides to crawl into a washing machine to get a 'point-of-view' shot for his film. Soon after, the entire town is infected by the otherworldly whirls. Tamura, a reporter, is intrigued by Shuichi's dad's suicide and becomes obsessed with the case.
Erosion[]
Meanwhile, Kirie's high school is populated by a host of twitching teachers, preening pretty girls, and the slimy Katayama, who begins to walk at a snail's pace and only comes to school when it rains. Making matters worse, the student body is starting to sprout shells, drink an excessive amount of water, and crawl on the walls of the school. Sekino, Kirie's classmate, begins to grow her hair into massive curls that take over the minds of all of Kirie's classmates. Meanwhile, in the hospital, Shuichi's mother, who was hospitalized after her husband's death, cuts off her hair and fingertips in order to get rid of anything spiral-shaped on her body, and grows so afraid of spirals that Shuichi is forced to tell the hospital to eliminate anything spiral-shaped so his mother may not encounter them. He even throws away the cakes he brought her, as they have spiral-shaped frosting.
Visitation[]
Eventually, Shuichi's mother succumbs to her phobia and kills herself when a millipede tries to crawl into her ear to inhabit her cochlea and causes her to hallucinate about her husband, who tells her that "there's a spiral vortex in the deepest part of your ear". It is not long before even the sky itself is cursed, with whirl-like clouds and the eerily smoky, ghost-like faces of the victims who perished in the grip of Uzumaki appearing during funerals. Soon everyone in Kurouzu has been caught in the curse of the vortex—Kirie's dad, who takes a drill to his eye after obsessively creating spiral-shaped ceramics; the reporter who gives a special report on the horrors of the town and her crew, all of whom lose themselves in a tunnel only for their corpses to be found as snail-people; Sekino, whose body has been devoured by the snake-like curls; Kirie's stalker, who throws himself in front of Inspector Tamura's car and is twisted around the axle, the impact by Tamura's head leaving a spiral crack in the windshield; a police officer, who while he was admiring the spiral rifling in the barrel of his gun, shot himself in the eye, leaving a spiral hole in his head; and even Shuichi himself, whose body twists into a spiral and becomes possessed by it. Only Kirie is left in the cursed town of Kurouzu, and maybe dies in the transformed community.
Transmigration[]
In this part, everyone in the town is now contaminated with Spirals.
Promotion and release[]
Uzumaki was released in Japan in February 11, 2000. For the US release, the film premiered on April 2000 in San Francisco at the Four Star theater. In Singapore, the film was released in the Cathay Cineleisure Orchard and Causeway Point theater from January 2, 2003 to January 30, 2003.
Reception[]
The film received a 54 percent approval rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, with the general consensus that "Uzumaki uses its creepy, David Lynch-inspired atmospherics to effectively build a sense of dread, but ultimately fails to do anything with it."
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- The film is shot in green tinted.
- A ghostly imprint of Kirie's face appears in the middle of the screen when she walks into Shuichi's house looking for his father, and is the same face as when she's watching his father's grisly video recording.
- There are some scenes in the film digitally twisted.
- During the scene where an angry cop sees Kirie and Shuichi riding a bike, he looks at a wanted poster. This is an image of Junji Ito, the creator of the manga Uzumaki. It can be asusmed that he's one of the residents in Kurôzu-Cho.
- Some areas of the screen are digitally twisted into a spiral pattern at least five times in the movie (not necessarily in this order).
- 6 and 9, being nearly spiral numbers, can be seen on several occasions
- The movie was filmed before the manga had completed its run, and reveals a different ending and origins storyline than that featured in the manga.
- Many characters from the manga wasn't featured in this film.