Seventeen years ago, I went a 24 hour theatrical horror marathon where one of the movies in the line-up was director Higuchinsky's adaptation of Junji Ito's horror manga UZUMAKI. I can't say I enjoyed the movie very much, but its story of a town cursed by malevolent spirals was so weird and it contained such crazy imagery that elements of it have stuck with me.
I have never read Ito's manga, but it's now set to get another adaptation. Adult Swim's Toonami have teamed with Production I.G. for a four part animated mini-series version of UZUMAKI, which will be in black and white like the original manga.
The mini-series is being directed by Hiroshi Nagahama. This is the story it will be bringing to life:
Kurozu-cho, a small fog-bound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but by a pattern: uzumaki, the spiral, the hypnotic secret shape of the world. It manifests itself in everything from seashells and whirlpools in water to the spiral marks on people’s bodies, the insane obsessions of Shuichi’s father and the voice from the cochlea in our inner ear. As the madness spreads, the inhabitants of Kurozu-cho are pulled ever deeper into a whirlpool from which there is no return!
The UZUMAKI mini-series will be premiering on Toonami sometime in 2020. Ito, Nagahama, anime writer Aki Itami, and Sayuri Kinjo, editor at the Shogakukan publishing company, can be seen discussing the project in the promo video below.
Ito also created the Tomie manga, which has spawned a nine film franchise. CRAWL director Alexandre Aja is currently working on a series adaptation of Tomie for the upcoming streaming service Quibi.