Adult Swim’s Uzumaki Adaptation Is Pure Spiraling Dread

When it comes to horror manga, there’s arguably no bigger name than Junji Ito, a comic artist whose long list of nightmarish creations have haunted countless readers’ dreams for decades. But despite Ito’s popularity and ubiquity in the space, there’s never been a particularly good anime adaptation of his work—this certainly hasn’t been for lack of trying, and whether it’s 2018’s anemic Junji Ito Collection or 2023’s equally unimpressive Junji Ito Maniac: Tales of the Macabre, these attempts were unable to capture the specific ambiance that makes his stories simultaneously absurd and unsettling. However, that drought seems to have ended with Adult Swim and Drive studio’s take on Ito’s magnum opus, Uzumaki. At least in the first episode provided for review, its intensely faithful art style, haunting sound design, and excellent translation of the manga’s scares suck us into a whirlpool of slow-burn dread.

This horror tale takes place in Kurouzu-cho, an isolated coastal town in Japan, as Kirie (Uki Satake in the Japanese Dub, Abby Trott in the English Dub) begins to notice something strange—everywhere she looks, there are spirals. Her boyfriend, Shuichi (Shinichiro Miki, Robbie Daymond), takes this observation further, explaining how his dad has been completely obsessed with the pattern, collecting spiral-shaped objects, refusing to eat food that isn’t in this form, and even rolling his eyes independently to create swirling motions with his body. While Kirie initially laughs this story off, she and Shuichi find these circumstances increasingly difficult to ignore as spiral patterns put this town and its people on a circuitous path toward doom.

If it wasn’t clear, this work is very much playing in the realm of weird fiction, a sub-genre focused on the unknown and inexplicable: in this case, these people aren’t being haunted by imposing creatures like vampires, ghosts, or monsters, but a shape. Despite this seemingly innocuous adversary, it doesn’t take long before the spiral becomes a symbol that isn’t just frightening for these townsfolk, but for the audience as well, as it comes to signal that grotesque body horror is just around the corner.

One of the main reasons this first episode of Uzumaki lands compared to previous takes on the author’s work is because it excellently emulates the intricate linework and deeply disturbing sights from Ito’s panels, painstakingly recreating his upsetting images so they lose none of their original impact. Much of the author’s work relies on building up to grisly, ornately drawn punchlines, usually delivered on a full page spread, and the way this adaptation fastidiously recreates these moments separates it from its lesser peers.

In general, Drive went to great lengths to evoke the manga’s aesthetic by using a black-and-white color scheme that matches the original’s ink illustrations and through involved character designs that are virtually identical to the source material. There’s a reason most anime adaptations change how characters look: detailed designs that work fine on the page become a total headache when they need to be recreated several times per second to make things move. But despite this, Uzumaki looks excellent in motion thanks to its uncannily smooth animation, with grounded movement that pulls us in and contrasts nicely against these otherworldly nightmares.

The score and sound design similarly help elevate things, and whether it’s the eerie instrumentation of Colin Stetson’s soundtrack or the disquieting cracks and pops as eyeballs spin and bodies contort into unnatural shapes, the involved work here gets across why it took so long for this four-episode series to come out (it was originally announced over five years ago).

However, these many adaptation details wouldn’t really matter if Uzumaki didn’t hold up as a scary story, and while I’m sure some viewers won’t necessarily jive with how its unsettling sights and characters frequently loop back from frightening to darkly humorous due to over-the-top character reactions, the body horror itself is so detailed and offputtingly specific that you’re likely to flinch. This tale is macabre, strange, and utterly unique, even if some of its characters feel a bit thin at times.

And, of course, one of the most striking elements here is the enigma around its central spiral symbol, which continues to suck unwitting souls into its thrall. Working in the realm of “messed-up little town” fiction, these events inspire a mixture of curiosity and suffocation, not only getting across compulsive phobias and gruesome sights, but also a coiling fear of the unknown. Why does this symbol do this to people, and is any of this happening for a reason? This premiere conveys a sense of slow-build calamity around spirals that seems all but inescapable, and at one point, Shuichi asks Kirie why they don’t just get up and leave this cursed place behind. But for a reason that’s hard to explain, that doesn’t seem like an option (beyond the fact there wouldn’t be much of a story if they did), and it’s as if they’re caught up in an invisible vortex. Like many, it seems they’ll never escape the orbit of this town they were born in, and perhaps that’s the scariest detail of all.

All that said, perhaps my biggest worry at this point is that, while the manga isn’t very long, adapting all of it into four short, 30-minute episodes may be difficult, especially because this premiere only covered three of 19 chapters. Related to this, there was already a touch of awkward pacing with how they spliced together the plotlines from the first two chapters and the third, so that will be something to keep an eye on. Additionally, while the series looks great so far, its detail-intensive approach could be quite difficult to maintain for the full run, something I’m wary of since it’s common for anime premieres to look noticeably better than what follows.

But even with these caveats, this Uzumaki adaptation is basically everything I had hoped for. Its audiovisual touches help elevate these scares, as intricately crafted horrors unnerve just like they did in the source material. Through these sometimes wacky and always unsettling sights, we’re sucked into the swirling, hypnotic pull of what feels like a collective delusion. If the series can maintain its presentation and momentum, it has the makings of an anime horror classic.

Uzumaki premieres Saturday, September 28th on Cartoon Network, streaming next day on Max.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.

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