Hallowatch 2026 No. 26: Uzumaki (2000)

Lets start with a pair of ideas:

One, This is a fairly cheap (not monetarily, but lazy) adaptation of a Junji Ito comic; it goes out of its way to "make the panel on screen" in a very similar and equally ostentatious way that a couple of the middle-phase marvel movies went out of their way to set up a famous cover, which is to say, with little thought to how it served the story and was more for nerds to point at the screen and hyenate about how they understood that reference.

Two, Frailty aside, this is the best of the past seven movies I've watched for this; that isn't to say this was good, but more that the bar has been drastically lowered. I had a good time watching this. Increasingly, that alone seems novel.

If you're familiar with the manga, this tries to be that; it does not have the budget to do that (and indeed, the movie just ends for its last chapter and pans around a couple paintings like it's got the "enhance" button from CSI). It doesn't bother trying to succeed as a movie at all - it wants to do the comic, just the comic, and if the comic doesn't work as a movie, it's doin' the comic so get ready.

Now, what am I meaning by that? It doesn't go to great lengths to set up characters - it assumes you'll have ideas about who the characters are because there is a wide array of stock character archetypes in manga and it trusts you've read the comic. It (to its credit) doesn't try to explain the spiral; you've read the comic, you know about the spiral. So what's left for the director or cinematographer to do? Lets put in the world's jankiest CGI!

The Shelved By Genre podcast covered this as a bonus for their Junji Ito unit; I think Austin Walker brought up the idea of doing this as three minute sketches to play between movies on Shudder or [adult swim], if they would roll out "channels" that you could put on; I think it could work like that, where you aren't sitting with the movie for a full 90 minutes. That's the dream, right? "Bring back the short". I think that format could be extremely flexible at getting a variety of stories and works made that wouldn't really fit otherwise.

Ultimately, this is more words than this movie deserved, the more I think about it the less I like it in retrospect and the more my brain gets hot like an old laptop.

Rewatch? Pass.

Sequel? Hard pass.

Remake? Go back to the source material and remake that. Maybe that Netflix one is better. ■

Hallowatch 2026 • Blog