Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are returning to the ill-fortuned terrors of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, as we sift through the wreckage of this once-promising adaptation. After a first episode that saw Hiroshi Nagahama wielding his singular yet undeniably laborious Aku no Hana-adjacent aesthetic to marvelous dramatic effect, producer meddling and presumed merger-prompted impatience on the American side has left the production floundering, wielding every cost-saving measure in the book to ensure its profoundly limited animation crosses the finish line. We’ve seen single-frame imitations of movements, cutaways to avoid animating faces, and walk cycles with perhaps two frames to their name, a grim parody of the meticulous animation style employed in this production’s first episode.
And yet, the inherently compelling nature of the material remains, alongside the production’s excellent background art, soundtrack, and foley work. The thing about Junji Ito’s stories is that they straddle the thin line separating horror from farce even in their original form; hell, stories like Kirie’s brief hostile hair fiasco don’t really have any interpretation other than comedy, so divorced are they from anything approaching a relatable human anxiety. An aesthetically compromised adaptation makes for an oddly compelling rendition of Ito’s tonally discordant vignettes, and Uzumaki’s tales are certainly never boring. With expectations appropriately tempered, let us return to the spiral!
Episode 3
We begin at Kurouzu Hospital, where Kirie is recovering in the wake of the lighthouse trial
“The cochlea,” says Shuichi, drawing Kirie’s attention to the spiral of the inner ear. Much of Uzumaki’s most effective material centers on finding horror in the mundane spirals of our bodies – there’s plenty of overt body horror, but also sequences like this or the fingertips obsession, which more specifically see the body’s own natural processes as inherently horrifying
I feel this is of a piece with Ito’s approach to horror more generally, in that it reflects a mind focusing on the mundane for so long that you start to question its mundanity. Similarly to how a word repeated ad nauseum stops to sound like a word at all, a body part or simple facet of reality observed for too long can start to seem inherently strange, no longer privilege to the assumption of normalcy we take for granted. The road from this estrangement to outright horror is a short one
Shuichi fears for his mother, and what she might do were she to learn her ears contain hidden spirals
Outside the window, swarms of mosquitoes form their own spirals. I feel both one of the reasons for Ito’s success, and also the reason so many people don’t enjoy his work, is that he simply doesn’t self-edit. If an idea is compelling to him he runs with it, paying no heed to what specific emotional effect it provokes. This means he can find horror where others would not, but also that many of his stories fall flat, or require a leap of faith many readers aren’t willing to provide
Kirie’s cousin Keiko is admitted to the hospital with blotchy mosquito bites all over her face
Oof, some truly egregious character animation as Kirie’s father rises from the river in town, full bucket in hand
Adult Swim was a key gateway to anime for many fans, but as show producers, they seem like mostly a nostalgia trap. Their collective interests haven’t evolved beyond “wasn’t FLCL great” – they’re not investing in new talents or promoting original work, they’re just applying shock pads to dead horses
In the morning, several of the mosquito victims are dead. Charmingly hokey composition here, as a flat, still image of a mosquito is moved around before the dead bodies
Keiko says the baby has started to move. No surprise that even within the general body horror umbrella, anxieties regarding pregnancy have inspired some of the most terrifying stories in history. Whether you’re frightened for the baby or yourself, the idea of an unknown creature gestating inside you is about as horrifying as it gets, inspiring stories ranging from Rosemary’s Baby to Alien
“Only female mosquitoes that are carrying eggs suck blood.” These words combine with Keiko’s negative reaction to the bug spray to offer a horrifying implication regarding Keiko’s child
Keiko’s eyes go full white as she states that she actually likes the mosquitoes. Probably nothing to worry about
This sequence definitely benefits from the adaptation’s addition of sound design – that whining mosquito noise is a terrific compliment to the overall feeling of entrapment within the hospital
Deep in the night, the pregnant patients march like ghouls down the hospital halls, many of them bearing drills limply in their hands
As expected, the women have become mosquitoes themselves, drilling into the necks of other patients and draining their blood. Some genuinely excellent, uncomfortably decaying faces as one woman pursues Kirie
And gruesome body horror as first another patient and then a nurse fall under the drills. The jerkiness of the animation does little to undercut the pure visual grotesquery of this sequence. Good stuff!
Kirie eventually repels them with the mosquito spray. In another room, Shuichi’s mother tragically learns of the spirals inside her ear, courtesy of a centipede with her husband’s face. Another perennially effective variation on intrusive and body horror – the idea of insects sneaking inside your body while you sleep, nesting and perhaps even laying eggs inside you. The story of the girl who had a spider lay eggs in her cheek has many variations, all of them playing on this fundamental fear of physical intrusion, and our assumption of the body as something close to a sacred, inviolable space
The doctors collaborate with Shuichi to avoid telling his mother the truth about her inner ear
Yet another interpretation of bodily invasion, as Shuichi’s father seeks to enter his mother’s bloodstream through her IV. This hospital is proving the perfect venue for any number of riffs on that base fear
And at last she does it, taking matters into her own hands and dying soon after
From there, we jump to a very different source of ostensible horror: weird-tasting mushrooms. As I said, Ito will embrace a far wider range of concepts than most of his peers, which informs both his dramatic reach and his audience limitations
Dear lord! The babies in the infant nursery are actually talking to each other, reflecting on how they want to go back to the “warm place” of their mothers’ bellies. Then one actually splits open, revealing itself to be more like a mushroom-style spore than a human child. This episode is going to some delightfully dark places
Keiko’s room is covered in similar spores
The doctor says “a baby’s cuteness is a weapon meant to allow it to mature into independence.” Alongside the general themes of bodily invasion and hostile gestation, this arc is also embracing the inherent real-world horror of the cuckoo, a bird that lays its eggs in the nest of other, smaller birds. When the cuckoo hatches, its natural instinct is to stretch itself out and shove the other babies from the nest, killing them so its adopted “mother” will feed only it instead. I actually recently watched an effective film-length meditation on this horrible process called Vivarium
Cuckoo birds, zombified ants, movement-controlling parasites – the world is actually full of natural horrors that seem as cruel and unthinkable as anything our imaginations can construct. If you want to infuse your horror story with unthinkable cruelty, look to nature
The “mushrooms” are actually their regenerating placentas
Keiko has actually had her baby “returned” to her belly, and now demands more blood for her parasite. The doctor ends up serving as sacrifice
Thus Kirie returns home from her invigorating stay at the hospital
Kirie’s father demonstrates he too is obsessed with the spirals, while the news announces that a typhoon is approaching Japan, the grandest spiral of all
The smoke from Shuichi’s parents fell upon the lake, and from there was drawn into the water and clay used by Kirie’s father. There is no escaping the spiral – it only bends and circles backward, inflicting fresh agonies upon its entrapped souls with every new twist and transformation. They now rest baked into clay, wailing without voices at the pain of being burned and reconstructed. Evocative stuff!
Shuichi can hear his parents still calling from within the kiln. Breaking it open, countless souls emerge, coiling into horrible fragments of demented pottery. Another sequence that loses little of its power even in this adaptation, and actually benefits greatly from the addition of sound design
The typhoon at last reaches Kurouzu, where it mysteriously hangs overhead
The eye of the storm seems to be actively calling for Kirie. A flourish that calls back to various strains of folk horror, assigning a malicious alien intelligence to the natural forces of the world. The natural world has gotten smaller and more constrained as humanity has continued to spread out and develop new technologies, but the fear of unknown forces clawing their way up from the dark corners of the earth remains
The animation regains some fluidity as we check in with the family after the storm, reflecting on its strange course and the sounds still haunting their dilapidated home
Their talk of monsters is interrupted by their neighbor Wakabayashi at the door
Dear lord, the animation of his face moving is demented. I highly doubt these “their faces are melting as they speak” effects are intentional, but they’re certainly distinctive
In the night, Kirie and Shuichi go to check on the wailing of her neighbor, who claims her son is dead
The son is soon followed by Wakabayashi himself, his flesh bursting with horns that seem to emerge from every free inch. Rather than invasion, now a corruption of the flesh that seeks to extend outwards, like a cancer perverting you into a new form. And behind the effect itself, a question of cause or intent – was it Wakabayashi’s snooping that prompted this infliction, or was he doomed from the start? Cultivating that ambiguity is extremely effective, as it prompts the audience to question their own relative safety
And Done
Whoof, what a carnival of horrors that episode provided! Well, the production’s obviously not returning to the standard set by Nagashima’s first episode, but this was certainly a better-looking episode than its predecessor, largely avoiding the comically still character “movements” and unconvincing CG models of its predecessor. Alongside that, this episode also had the benefit of adapting far more genuinely effective horror sequences – in fact, that whole segment in the hospital was just excellent work, a series of deeply distressing vignettes told with reasonable aesthetic grace. Ito works always feel on the brink of tonally collapsing on themselves, and marrying that ambiguity to an equally tenuous production is actually resulting in an oddly compelling and undeniably singular effect. What an intriguing mess this is turning out to be!
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