Hallowatch 2026 No. 28: Tomie (1998)
This was a weird one. Here's the wikipedia synopsis.
Or, This was another Junji Ito adaptation, this time of Tomie; you can watch it via the internet archive if you don't have a copy. I'm trying to decide how much of my feelings on this were colored by thinking about how different its modality was from the book.
The book has unreplicated aspects not present in the movie:
- Tomie's ... longevity, shall we say, isn't front and center in those first couple issues. It was retconned in later.
- The book is brutal; it's like, setup, payoff, over and over. Occasionally there'll be more setup but it's usually around setting, not character. It is not usually cartoon violence — there is gore, viscera, and it is loadbearing plotwise.
- The characters are all fairly flat, since Tomie's effect turns them even flatter in their desire for or against her.
In the movie, it's.... Slasher Degrassi? Like its characters get developed, at least a little. The male gaze aspect of Tomie, how she drove men insane with lust and/or resentment, is somewhat subdued in its portrayal. It seems like she can drive them insane, but it's not an all-consuming lust - the landlord is more like a renfield type situation. And due to how it needs to keep non-Tomie characters foregrounded, it can't really switch to her POV every time. By not having the "there's been a lot of Tomies" foregrounded, you loose a critical unexplained aspect, that forces an audience to ask how this happened (and "it's been happening forever", while it squares with the metaphor in the manga, that's much more muddied in the movie).
So instead you get toxic yuri Tomie, being handed a stick of dynamite before she explodes, like she is Yosemite Sam. It's a really strange tonal mismatch. I think it still works for the movie, weirdly?
I'm not trying to advocate for the "entirely direct" adaptation, but I do think the setup of that first issue is critical to understanding what follows, and I'm not sure this movie gets you there. I think maybe a remake that does it as a Horror Movie About type deal may be a more useful adaptational move here.
