10 Horror Movies Nobody Understands
3. Uzumaki (2000)
Adapted from the unnerving Eisner-nominated manga by Junji Ito, Uzumaki (‘Spiral’) begins and ends with imagery. Ito himself extrapolated the story from an image that fascinated him, a long row of traditional Japanese terraced houses coiled into a spiral.
Director Higuchinsky would end up taking a similar approach to his live action feature, digitally twisting the screen into corkscrews and coils to provide the mise en scène for a town cursed by supernatural phenomena characterised by spirals.
Like the manga, the film fixates on the numbers 6 and 9, along with the uncanny idea of physical transformation into snails, but this is really just the spiral fixation at play: there’s no deeper symbolism than that.
A bigger concern was that, backed by foreign money focused on an international market, the adaptation was rushed out: shot in two weeks, from a script written only months before the manga itself came to a conclusion.
However, you can’t really tell from the amazing finished product - except for how it ends. Like a J-horror Final Destination, Uzumaki climaxes in a whirlpool of bizarre, spiral-influenced high-concept deaths. We never see what happens to the film’s protagonist Kirie: we never see a resolution to the curse or to the narrative, and certainly nothing as eerie and terrifying as Ito’s perfectly spiral-shaped denouement.
Instead, Higuchinsky simply left the story unfinished, ending in an ellipsis rather than a full stop, and leaving fans and critics alike speculating as to what it means ever since...