It’s easy sometimes, watching horror films, to forget how important filmmaking technique can be, and I think part of that is because anytime you’re dealing with genre film, there’s a tendency to lean into familiar cliches, into obvious settings and a style of filmmaking that is purely functional. Give the audience what they want as efficiently as you can. And I guess maybe that’s a style of its own, but to me it’s not an especially interesting one. I think sometimes people forget that how you tell a story is as important as anything else, and when you aren’t thinking about the potential of a visual medium for evoking all of the things the story usually does, you’re missing out.
This all occurred to me watching Uzumaki (Spiral), a film that isn’t the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen, but works as something really creepy in its relentless cinematic strangeness. It has less in common with other Japanese horror films than it does the work of H.P. Lovecraft and David Lynch, and that’s very much to its credit.
Kirie Goshima is a young woman who lives in the small village of Kurozo-cho, and she has the kinds of worries and cares that come with being a teenager in a small town. She’s worried about school, looks after her widower father, has a kind-of, sort-of boyfriend in Shuichi Saito, and an annoying boy constantly following her around, desperate to win her favor. But it’s just another day, another walk home from school, when she notices a man staring intently at something on a fence. It’s a small snail, its shell a pronounced spiral pattern.
He can’t stop staring at it.
The result is something pervasively unsettling and creepy, and there’s a number of different things feeding into it. Part of it is that it really starts off more like a comedy or melodrama than anything else. A lot of this is down to the acting, which is exaggerated and stylized, and the characters are very much types, rather than fully fleshed-out people. So it begins feeling very much like a whimsical look at a small town, albeit one introduced by a fairly gruesome image in the opening credits, so the tone is pulling you in a couple of different directions from the start. As the film goes on, the weirdness starts moving in from the edges, and the performances never really get any less melodramatic, so the end result feels like the heightened emotions you experience in a dream, and so there’s an uncertainty, a sense that the usual rules for storytelling are getting tossed out the window. A lot of the strangeness is even peripheral to the story - students walking through the hallway of their school framed by other students, silent and heads bowed as if in mourning, a nurse standing in an elevator with the protagonists, staring fixedly up into space for no apparent reason, Greek choruses of gossips, the whole point of the film is that there’s something very wrong with this town, and these little fillips contribute to an already uneasy atmosphere. The story at least begins as a very oh-golly look at a small town with hints of the grotesque, and the heightened emotions and incidental oddness feel very much like something David Lynch would produce. I know it’s easy to describe anything strange in film as “Lynchian” (probably the filmic equivalent of describing something in literature as “Kafkaesque”) but I really do see that same sense of the uncanny at work here.
This is very much reinforced by the visuals - the look of the film is desaturated, with Kurozu-cho being largely gray and muddy to start with, and much of it is shot with a pronounced reddish-blue cast (extended into almost a spot-color effect for emphasis at points) that makes it look like it’s a much older film than the setting would suggest. This might have been as much a limitation of budget and technology as anything else, but combined with the performances, it also reminded me of some of Guy Maddin’s work at times, which is not a comparison I’m usually drawing on for the films I write about here. It doesn’t even look like other Japanese horror films made around the same time - Ju-on and Ringu were made a year or two on either side of it, and they’re much slicker productions. This oddness extends to camerawork that isn’t afraid to be highly artificial. There’s extensive use of wipes, dissolves, double-exposures, even one inventive sequence that turns looking at a photo album into a reverie of stop-motion. The overall effect, then, between the acting and the visuals, is one of a dream that is curdling into a nightmare.
The whole thing is highly impressionistic, and I think a big part of why is that the film is based on a (very good) manga by the horror author Junji Ito, and in some ways the editing and cinematography feel heavily influenced by the visual logic of manga, both in exaggeration of expression, and in the number of sudden, abrupt cuts and vignette-like structuring of the story. Things aren’t literally broken up into panels, but the editing sort of serves them up that way at times, so it’s as much an array of discrete images as anything else. It all serves to keep you slightly wrong-footed even at the best of times, and as things get stranger and stranger, moving into surrealism and body horror as this small town is twisted tighter and tighter on itself, bringing even the skies above into its pull, the result isn’t necessarily frightening, per se - a lot of things that make it really strange also cut into narrative momentum and dispel any tension that might build - but it’s hauntingly strange, stem to stern, and it doesn’t look like anything else I’ve ever seen writing this thing, and those are both really valuable, I think.
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