‘Uzumaki’ Review – A Suffocating Spiral of Cosmic Body Horror Perfection

Adult Swim’s highly anticipated Junji Ito adaptation is animated cosmic and body horror of the highest degree that’s guaranteed to disturb seasoned genre fans.

“Become one with me and the spiral.”

Junji Ito has become one of the manga industry’s most prolific body horror storytellers and Uzumaki: Spiral Into Horror is definitely regarded as one of his strongest works. Uzumaki was originally serialized from 1998 to 1999 and its chapters were collected into three volumes than span nearly 650 pages. Ito’s works have been prone to adaptation — in both animation and live-action — but his style is incredibly hard to replicate, which has only reinforced why he’s become such a mainstream name in horror illustration. Junji Ito Collection, Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre, and the 75-minute OVA, GYO: Tokyo Fish Attack, have all done their best, but amounted to flawed experiments.

Accordingly, Adult Swim’s Uzumaki adaptation almost seemed destined to fail. Announced all the way back in 2019, fans were worried that the series would face budgetary issues, production woes, or just be outright cancelled. Now, five years later, Uzumaki has proven to be well worth the wait and an impressive example of what’s possible with the right source material, production team, and passion. Uzumaki is the best Junji Ito adaptation to date, but it’s also a standout horror anime and one of the scariest things to be on Adult Swim in years.

Uzumaki, above and beyond anything else, truly looks and feels like Ito’s manga brought to life. There’s something truly magical about this series even existing in the first place. It casts a cursed energy that’s akin to the videotape from The Ring. Ito’s work is hardly a medium that can’t exist in a full color palette and there are plenty of his stories that take advantage of a rich color spectrum. That being said, Uzumaki’s black-and-white aesthetic works here and makes this project, and Kirie and Shuichi’s story, feel all the more otherworldly. It casts the audience under a spell and it feels like the strange punk rock programming that Adult Swim used to pump out during the week hours of the night during the channel’s infancy. It’s been a long time since Adult Swim has had something that taps into this energy. The closest thing in memory is PFFR’s stop-motion fever dream, The Shivering Truth.

Uzumaki’s first episode eases audiences in with a structure that’s akin to friends telling disturbing ghost stories around the fire. There’s immediately a strong identity to the series and characters where Uzumaki doesn’t feel the need to rush itself, yet it still covers a lot of ground and leaves the viewer reeling. A simple narrative about small town malaise and a powerful supernatural phenomenon acts as Uzumaki’s driving force. The storytelling and characters are sublime, but it’s also easy to just get lost in meticulous, sprawling scenes where spirals dominate and suffocate the frame. It’s so easy to forget that spirals can be found anywhere — clouds, hair, insects, fingerprints — and once you start seeing them it becomes increasingly hard to stop. Uzumaki locks into that tightening experience of obsession and what it’s like to feel like you’re no longer in control of yourself and a puppet to some larger force. They’re glorious splash panels that come alive. The level of detail alone in this art style is genuinely incredible and reinforces how lucky the production team was to finish on their own terms, when it was ready, rather than rushing out a subpar product that’s a disgrace to Ito’s name.

The first episode alone is full of so many disturbing visuals that are deeply horrific and pure nightmare fuel. Uzumaki’s horror is omnipresent from the first frame. However, it’s remarkable how the series’ scares gradually grow more intense until they’re strangling the audience by the episode’s end. Uzumaki is only four episodes, but it feels like this short episode count is for the audience’s own good and that any more would be too intense. The series is a taught tightrope walk of terror that’s a true triumph. The first episode is filled with more harrowing body horror moments than some shows accomplish in their entire run. It’s cosmic horror with a sinister Lovecraftian edge to the finest degree.

Uzumaki is non-stop visceral, visual delight where audiences won’t want to blink so that they don’t miss a single frame of this mayhem. That being said, Uzumaki’s score is so, so perfect and deeply unsettling. It’s hard to imagine what Junji Ito’s soundscape should resemble, but this is exactly it. It’s the type of uncomfortable miasma that deserves to be released on vinyl in all its haunting glory. Colin Stetson (Hereditary, Color Out of Space, and 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre) goes above and beyond with this special, supernatural soundtrack. It genuinely feels like the power of the spiral has consumed Stetson and taken him over.

On a similar note, Uzumaki’s voice acting — in both the original Japanese and English dub — is equally intense. These vocal performances really capture the perfect heightened-yet-restrained energy that’s needed for this surreal universe. Robbie Daymond, Abby Trott, Cristina Vee, and Max Mittelman lead the English cast, all of whom fully understand the assignment here. They make sure that their performances are detached from reality, but that they still start in a familiar place and have room to grow across these four episodes.

Uzumaki also really gets to the core of what spirals are and what they represent, whether it’s a physical creation or a psychological condition where an individual’s mind reels and gets twisted up in itself. This may sound like a silly thing to praise, but it’s such an important tenet of Ito’s story that elevates the subject matter to more than just creepy images that are ultimately hollow (which can hinder some of Ito’s other stories). Uzumaki reminds the audience that spirals may look interesting and haunting, but they’re also a dizzying, enigmatic creation that’s without resolution. A spiral is a cyclical, labyrinthine device that constricts, rather than an allegory for freedom. Uzumaki presents a nihilistic world where everyone is lost in their own separate spirals, even before anything supernatural sets in.

Uzumaki somehow surpasses the unreasonable expectations that have hung over it since its announcement and it’s a triumph in absolutely every regard. It’s a visual masterpiece that’s an intense, terrifying, one of a kind experience. Uzumaki is perfect viewing for the Halloween season and destined to become an animated horror classic. Uzumaki sets a new high standard for Junji Ito adaptations, horror anime, and Adult Swim programming that may be impossible to top. Get lost in the spiral and give into its cyclical secrets.

‘Uzumaki’ premieres September 29th at 12:30 am on Adult Swim.