In a horror landscape filled with visionary creators, few have had as much of an impact as Junji Ito. The mangaka’s many works have terrified readers for decades with the amount of detail he puts into every page, making the entire reading experience unnerving. It’s a level of depth that dooms almost every attempt at adaptation — and then there’s Uzumaki. The animated version of the author’s magnum opus recently premiered and had the sole intention of changing as little of Ito’s horrific panels as possible; it closely preserved the intricate linework and jaw-dropping details of the source material.
Yet even beyond faithfully adapting these images, the anime excels because it offers the one thing that manga readers didn’t have: sound. As simple as it may be, it emphasizes that hearing is the one sense left out of readers’ terrifying time with Uzumaki and focuses on providing it to them through its sound design, voice acting, and even its strategic use of silence. This allows it to become a truly disturbing, horrifically sensory project, one that protects the original while providing the one aspect that could make it even better.
No Anime Is As Twisted as ‘Uzumaki’
While the anime introduces new audiences to this terrifying story, fans of Ito have known for decades just how petrifying Uzumaki really is. The story focuses on Kirie Goshima (Uki Satake) and her boyfriend, Shuichi Saito (Shin-ichiro Miki), a teenage couple who can only watch as a supernatural fixation on a spiral shape ravages their village. It’s a strange premise, but one that descends — or, some would say, spirals — into horrific depths as Ito discovers new ways for this obsession to completely tear apart the small community; people turn into snails, a couple twists into a terrifying union of flesh and bone, and a man is so fixated on the spiral that he contorts himself into some sick recreation of the shape.
It is a disgusting, endlessly engrossing story that a live-action movie already failed to recreate long before an anime was even considered. As with most Junji Ito adaptations, any attempt to commercialize or simplify his pages stripped away their inherent terror, which is why fans were pleasantly shocked to hear Adult Swim’s version of the story would be directly animating the manga itself. It was the definition of a faithful adaptation, though it made one big change by adding sound which actually improved the story.
Sound design is often underappreciated for the massive role it plays in horror projects. Of course, the sickening sights onscreen are essential, but musical cues and the disgusting noises of people being attacked help create truly resonant, full-body moments of fear. The sound design throughout Uzumaki’s first episode perfectly matches the understated approach of the entire manga. This story isn’t crammed with nonstop horror, and its audio reflects that; there are rarely any huge cues or loud bangs to shock viewers, but instead an ever-present, deeply disconcerting ambient soundtrack, one that’s hard to single out but which subliminally makes watchers as anxious as the people they’re seeing onscreen. It will then crescendo into huge moments of disgusting fear, giving sound to the scenes of bodies twisting in ungodly ways that readers don’t recognize would accompany the scenes they’re watching play out silently in the book.
The way it uses these sounds perfectly captures the kind of unrelenting dread of this story and the manic actions of its characters, but the show’s real talent comes from how it uses silence. While most scenes have some kind of sound, its truly shocking moments — like when Kirie discovers her friend’s forehead has become a whirling abyss — are completely silent. This forces audiences to sit with the horror of what they’re watching and stripping away whatever comfortable distraction these new noises could have offered them. It’s a masterful use of the senses and, when paired with Uzumaki, makes Ito’s work even more terrifying.
Even Silence Can Be Terrifying in Uzumaki
With a work as renowned as Uzumaki, many may consider it blasphemy to say that any adaptation somehow improved on this already exceptional narrative. Even more, to say that sound is the thing that made it better discredits the many creators and readers who understand that fear can be silently read rather than loudly shown onscreen. That is all completely valid, yet it’s undeniable that the reason sound improves upon the Uzumaki anime is that it understands all of that; it understands that the written work never needed noise to be unnerving and is only using sound as a complement while still focusing on Ito’s vital images. It’s an approach that has already proven successful with the anime project, all while creating one of the most unnerving soundtracks of modern horror.
Uzumaki is available to stream on Max in the U.S.
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