Round like a circle in a spiral
April 28th, 2010
I have always found horror fiction interesting although I prefer psychological horror over the visceral variety (gore and violence). While the splatter genre of horror presents the frailties of the human body, psychological horror, on the other hand, plays upon the frailties of the human psyche.
I have learned recently of yet another subgenre of horror, Lovecraftian horror, which emphasizes the fear of the unknown (or the unknowable). I was reading about this at Wikipedia when I came across the article for mangaka Junji Ito, whose works are said to have Lovecraftian influences. One of his works intrigued me: a story of a town haunted by a pattern, the spiral. I looked it up and slowly I was drawn into the vortex that is Uzumaki.
In Uzumaki, we follow high school student Kirie Goshima as she witnesses the strange occurrences that befell upon the small town of Kurôzu-cho. First, her boyfriend’s dad develops a morbid fascination towards spirals, to the point of contorting his own body into that shape. Things soon become more and more bizarre: his wife mutilates her own cochlea, people turn into snails, and a typhoon falls in love with the protagonist. It’s as if life’s banality is slowly being stripped away, revealing a reality so sinister it defies all logic.
Uzumaki does not rely on traditional horror elements (demons, monsters, aliens and what-have-you’s) and although there are some body horror, the manga evokes fear through the unknown and the unexpected. After all, who would’ve thought that the simple spiral could bear a curse?
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