The Spiral Curse: Junji Ito, Cosmic Horror and Anime

• Author: Caden Rogers

• Editor: Nicole Mejias

Impressing no one and surprising even fewer, allow me to be the latest to say with complete and utter confidence that there’s no harder project to greenlight than a cosmic horror. 

In Hollywood, there’s exactly one reason why this is: money. 

Of the many sub-answers money provides its inquisitors, three in particular account for, when combined, a percentage higher than zero of suit wearing Californians’ reasons for rejecting a project pitch. The first is that cosmic horror is not cheap to produce, and if it is, it is almost never worth watching. This is difficult for most people to understand, because most people don’t spend their days watching the scales visibly tip in response to currency entering and exiting their proverbial wallets. It’s also difficult for prospective pitchers because every pitch operates under the assumption that any and all money going out of an executive’s wallet will inevitably be replaced by money coming back in; that they’re going to be successful, and that their project is the one that will become the next Stranger Things, Star Wars, or Silence of the Lambs, because they made it and they think it’s special. An executive producer doesn’t think your pitch is special. An executive thinks their money is special instead.

The second is that cosmic horror is an oxymoron. Nothing grinds an underpaid marketing project manager’s gears more than an oxymoron. It is globalization of localization. It takes horror—which is “shlock” and “not art” by viewpoint of any producer who’s physically been to the Oscars before—and attempts to remove the genre’s oft hyper specific emphasis on exactly one kind of fear; replacing it with a fear that is universal only if it is properly misunderstood. I say misunderstood because it isn’t possible to ‘understand’ cosmic horror in the first place—that’s the whole point. If improperly misunderstood cosmic horror can be boiled down to silly things happening under silly circumstances. Maybe, at best, these silly things can be vaguely recollected by their viewers as having been “spooky” when they recount the experience over the oppressive atmosphere of a Red Robin table to the others of their group who hadn’t tagged along on release day. The word “spooky” is about as close to the opposite of fear in tone as “silly” is, maybe even more so. In other words, the people that get cosmic horror enough to understand that they never will are few and far between, and these people typically don’t have the kind of money it takes to make up for reason number one, anyway. I should know, because I literally have $103.67 in my checking account right now and a single copy of Color Out Of Space starring Nicolas Cage that I bought on sale one time three years ago. Everyone else, who makes an honest living spraying for bugs or drop selling cactus-themed measuring cups on Amazon, isn’t going to take ‘you probably won’t get it’ as a sign that an upcoming movie, which globally only actually get seen in theaters 2.7 times per household per year anyway¹, is worth spending their money on a ticket for rather than just streaming.

This brings us to the third and final reason: My (at most) four other legal Blu-Ray collecting compatriots could only possibly have given the production of Color Out Of Space starring Nicolas Cage the collective sum of four times the retail price of $23.95 plus state specific taxes in total for their troubles, which is substantially less than the $12 million² the film and its alpaca-milking Cage performance cost its producers to make. Outside of us cosmic horror otaku, the only hope for a project which touts itself as both cosmic and horrifying is to tuck in its tail and pretend it isn’t cosmic at all, presenting itself as elevated art like The Lighthouse or Hereditary did, and hoping that money comes in because A24 is the Apple of cinema (expensive goods which sell because their aesthetic has earned them brand loyalty). In summary, cosmic horror is expensive, hard to market, and caters natively only to a very small niche largely made up of broke college students who haven’t the money to spare, even if they wanted to pay to see the final product. 

There in the same room as cosmic horror, the metaphysical waiting room of media itself, sits patiently the entire medium of animation, with notable child and adult oriented sitcom shaped holes in it which it tries very hard to cover up with a large coat and an especially rugged-looking scarf. Impressing no one and surprising fewer, there are few projects harder to get greenlit than an animated work which is intended to be taken seriously. This, in contrast to cosmic horror, is largely understood by Western animation fans, especially because, to this vocal minority, there is an audience for it, in contrast to cosmic horror, and that audience is why we now have such acclaimed modern animated projects as Over The Garden Wall, Infinity Train, and Scavengers Reign, each of which ironically enough contain trace elements of the endless intrigue required of a successful cosmic horror without burdening themselves with the genre’s label. It is interesting to note, however, that these are not based exclusively on pre-existing works which have successfully elicited their desired primal screams and recurring nightmares from their audience. 

Anime, on the other hand, has been successfully marrying pre-existing written material with full motion video for many years now, which is why as the medium explodes in popularity with the rise of mega hits like Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Academia, and Demon Slayer. And Crunchyroll becomes more and more of a household name, one of the West’s few outlets for off-kilter animated projects meant to be taken seriously, and, on many occasions, also meant to be feared, saw in Junji Ito’s magnum opus Uzumaki the kind of once in a lifetime opportunity that cosmic horror media rarely provides, once again overlooking the genre’s proverbial identification tags and picking Ito’s work because Ito is the only mangaka most people outside Japan know by name off the top of their head. Because everyone who reads manga thinks of something different when you say ‘manga’ or ‘horror’, but everyone’s mind conjures the exact same image the moment you say ‘Junji Ito’. A girl looks onward, half her face melted into a horrific spiral as her very body is absorbed by the vortex. It’s on shirts, it’s on posters, and it gets audiences asking all the right questions.

Alas, Adult Swim’s Toonami block was not the first place a Junji Ito anime adaptation reared its horrific head. While Ito’s work remains revered and commercially successful in Western book and anime retail locations far and wide, in Japan only Tomie received enough praise among general audiences to be considered a resounding success, enough so that the manga ended up with nine film adaptations, an anime, and lasting pop cultural relevance in the Japanese horror scene. While other works of Ito’s have been modest successes in Japan, the bubbly young artist’s horrific creations have been enjoyed almost universally among Western anime enthusiasts, placing the notion of a Junji Ito anime adaptation into a bit of a strangely shaped orifice in an oddly specific cliffside. Western audiences wanted Junji Ito’s work animated, while Japanese studios found it hard to justify the cost of production. That being said, it’s hard to argue that the significance of anime in the West is negligible to Japanese executives, and as the anime subculture blossomed in the late 2010s, Junji Ito Collection became the first Ito specific anime in recent memory to garner real attention among anime fans in the West. Worth noting is that Ito’s oceanic thriller Gyo had received an anime film adaptation in 2012, though the film departed so incredulously from the visual stylings of its source material that it tends to be forgotten by Junji Ito fans today. Thus, the first anime that a significant portion of the anime fandom widely accepted as part of the Junji Ito mythos was the Collection in 2018. Unfortunately for Junji Ito Collection, however, those three problems and their green, presidentially headed origins loomed precariously over the production like a swirling cloud of smoke above Kurozu Cho.

Animation, like cosmic horror, is expensive. Animation, like cosmic horror, occupies a fine line between silly and scary, and most damning of all, animation is subject to the movement analysis of animation fans and anime otaku; the kinds of people who care enough about framerate to sit happily at the same poorly made table of the gamers who didn’t buy Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door on Nintendo Switch because it didn’t run at 60fps. In the face of these ravenous wolves and their freshly sharpened fangs, Junji Ito Collection laid bare its deepest misdeeds and justly received the kind of critical lashing only an intensely passionate group of people who’ve just been profoundly disappointed can deliver. In the end, Junji Ito Collection made three crucial mistakes. 

The first was its Western release logo using a poorly disguised and slightly italicized version of the Papyrus font. Here’s a free tip to all you graphic designers out there: if you ever feel like your project would look better if you used Papyrus, it won’t. The second mistake was assuming that visceral detail, the backbone of Junji Ito’s illustrations, needed to be removed in order to make the anime feasible. While in general, animation does require sacrifices to be made in order to make it move, Junji Ito Collection’s visuals don’t tend to move much in moments of particular impact anyway, and aren’t presented with the same level of grotesque moodiness and visual emotional power that their manga counterparts were even if they did; a fact that makes the decision to hold on these shots for as long as Collection does especially disappointing, and especially laughable.

The final mistake is what I’ve come to understand and personally define as the cardinal sin of any Junji Ito adaptation: Junji Ito Collection has colorized Ito’s work. It’s possible to do cosmic horror in color, though it’s much harder to animate it that way. In color is clarity of intent, something Ito’s most striking works cleverly avoid. What’s missing in the manga’s shadows and gradients is instructions for how it is to be viewed. No markers of what is a growth, what is a hole, what is vibrant red and what is ghostly pale. In this lack of visual direction, the beholder’s mind is forced to fill in the gaps. In a way, the manga of Junji Ito and their ghoulish visuals have managed to bridge the gap between the written word and the visual image; each line, gradient, and dot requires of their audience the same imagination which illustrates for them the words of a horror novel. Like an inkblot test, everyone who looks at an Ito piece sees the details of its immaculate detail quite differently, a phenomenon which is lost completely the moment discernable color is added to the equation. Of course, the production’s low frame count and disappointing lack of atmospheric buildup only serve to exacerbate the issue, something you would think the series itself does not understand if you watched it today. Collection seems to believe it’s done the work a good deed by colorizing and simplifying its most impactful moments, showing them off with the tenacity of an MCU cameo appearance, with, much to the anime’s dismay, all of the fanfare of someone who’s been dragged into the latest Marvel release against their will.

Some years later in 2023, another attempt at animating Ito’s works was made, this time by Netflix and Studio Deen, with results so homogenous to what was seen in Collection five years prior that it may as well be seen as Collection’s second season. Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre does rectify the Papyrus issue, thankfully, in its stead presenting an entirely new issue of having one of the longest and least enticing names of any horror anthology ever made, right up there with Yamishibai’s English localized title. While it’s also true that Maniac is a far better attempt at adapting Ito’s work, the word “better” only applies to a select few of its chosen stories, and the disservice the anime does to Tomie only strengthens the blow. In the end, Maniac is more of the same, and commits almost all of the same cardinal sins, including colorization. Fans of Ito’s work, consequently, lost a great deal of hope with the release of what they saw as the final nail in the Ito anime coffin. 

Sometime between those two profound disappointments, in 2019, and with updates and delays in every subsequent year with the exception of 2021, Adult Swim, Production IG, and Colin Stetson gleefully tormented us all with tantalizing trailers and glorious promises of an upcoming anime adaptation of Uzumaki. Uzumaki, of course, is completely absent from both Collection and its one-fourth-baked cousin, Maniac, because Uzumaki is not just a scary short story with chilling art and even colder implications. Uzumaki is a cosmic horror epic unmatched by anything else Junji Ito has ever produced. A lengthy, spiraling tale about a deep and ancient curse which makes itself known in a phantasmagoria of horrific ways to the poor unsuspecting denizens of the old town of Kurozu Cho.

The downward spiral of all the unfortunate souls who eventually found themselves incapable of escaping something so deep, so dark, and so hungry, as to take upon itself the grandiose effort of transforming the entire town into a gargantuan tribute of its own likeness, is the entire point of the series. Uzumaki is unfathomable, and it requires every panel, every word, and every image that the original manga provides to be as effective as it is. There are parts of Uzumaki that are downright silly. There are parts of Uzumaki that are poorly paced. There are even parts that don’t seem important in the slightest, that anyone else, anyone who isn’t Junji Ito, probably would have cut out of the story altogether. Nonetheless, we all remember Uzumaki as being as close to perfect as a manga can get, and the deep obsessive madness of The Spiral Obsession parts one and two. Remove anything or attempt to touch it up, and you cannot hope to reach the same conclusion. Uzumaki cannot be abridged. It can only be as it is, as it was, forevermore a large book with many haunting pages. For all their faults, at the very least Collection and Maniac understood that they couldn’t possibly include such a large story in such a small anthology. The sins of these two unintentional comedies are many, but they thankfully do not include the irreparable tarnishment of Uzumaki and its ever whirling legacy. Fans of the original manga were, in turn, profoundly grateful. As was proven by the film adaptation in the year 2000, Uzumaki is not easily adapted, and even under circumstances which allow it to be the one and only point of focus for its creative staff, it still cannot be “brought to life” without sacrificing a sizable portion of itself, though in the end the live action Uzumaki film is not, to be clear, without its well earned merits. 

Then for what one commenter on the teaser trailer for Adult Swim and Production IG’s animated take on Uzumaki once articulately described as “one-thousand years”, nothing happened. There were sparse updates, all of which only ever seemed to serve as hails for continued delay. One in 2020, and another in 2023. The clips Adult Swim had no doubt forcefully pried from Hiroshi Nagahama’s cold dead fingertips painted the series as beautiful beyond compare, a visual delight which somehow, despite all odds, managed to perfectly convert Ito’s work into remarkable fluidity. In reality, though, this gold with which eager fans and wolves in Uzumaki printed hoodies were presented was that which can only be found at the end of a rainbow—and Uzumaki’s anime is colored only in shades of gray. Each new look at the show stoked the flames even further, while each passing day without an update allowed for naught but more coal added to the locomotive all productions fearfully whisper may one day head their way behind closed doors.

The hype train and its billowing smoke stacks roared forth, undeterred by logic, reason, or any of the show’s many unfortunate delays. Uzumaki had Colin Stetson. Uzumaki had Production IG. Uzumaki had Adult Swim. Uzumaki had Hiroshi Nagahama. Uzumaki had everything it possibly could have had in its favor. Yet, for all its years in development, Uzumaki had also attained something else. The spiral curse, as it would seem, did not stop at the binding of the manga’s pages, but had additionally taken root in the production itself. As a cosmic horror, as an animated television series aimed at mature adults, and as a Junji Ito work, the Uzumaki anime held the mark of the beast from the moment of its inception. Adult Swim and Production IG just couldn’t see it yet. 

The first sign came with deep subtlety, in the winter of 2019. Adult Swim and overall Uzumaki production staff released a video of themselves visiting the Hanazono Shinto shrine, in Shinjuku, Japan, for a ceremony which was meant to bless the production with success. Given the dark and violent content of Uzumaki, this was viewed by the more superstitious among the staff as a necessary countermeasure to the curse of the spiral. All seemed to go according to plan by all accounts except one—Maki Terashima-Furuta, president of Production IG, USA. (The fact that her name is Maki, the Japanese word for ‘rolled’ or ‘winding’, and she happens to be involved with Uzumaki, is an unrelated but mildly amusing coincidence.) Terashima-Furuta smiles nervously toward the end of the video presentation, and says the following: 

“It went really well. I think Jason messed up a little bit but, other than that…”

Whether or not you find this oddly specific statement indicative that something deeper was troubling the production, that the ceremony might have been unsuccessful, and that the production did end up cursed in the end is a matter of personal superstitious belief, but I mention it here, of all places, because it is odd that what happened immediately following this video’s release was a series of lengthy, multi-year delays, and that the series’ final release ultimately received a mixed reception from fans. Outsourcing of episodes to unrelated studios, cryptic statements about requiring double the typical staff, and all of this for only four roughly twenty minute episodes which were meant to adapt the entirety of Junji Ito’s manga epic, all of these things strike me as hauntingly strange now, and only now, when I look back on this moment five years ago and realize that Uzumaki’s blessing may have had a few slight cracks in its proverbial armor. That’s not to blame Jason DeMarco, SVP creative director at Adult Swim, for any personal gripes I may have with the end result, of course. DeMarco is, by all accounts, a hard worker, and seems to care very deeply for the series and its source material. To say a non-Japanese individual not performing with absolute perfection a Japanese-specific ceremony exactly one time in 2019 is the reason Uzumaki was so plagued by delays is mindless fantasy with no basis in scientific fact of any kind. It does, however, result in the kind of words that slowly etch into the mind when years later one contemplates what exactly happened that led to Uzumaki episode one looking like Uzumaki episode one, and why episode two ended up with comments like: “Welcome back, Junji Ito Collection.”

From episode 1 of Uzumaki. 

From episode 1 of Uzumaki. 

From episode 2 of Uzumaki. 

From episode 2 of Uzumaki.

If you’re looking for a scathing review of the series, some rousing hit piece which laments that supernatural forces contorted the promised masterpiece into a muddied pot half submerged in a ditch of mediocrity as whirlpools raged in the waters of the stream above, or even an analysis of the anime on its own merits; what it does well and what it does not so well, you won’t find it here. No supernatural curse affected the series, as a matter of fact Jason DeMarco himself has said as much on BlueSky, lamenting that “someone is definitely at fault here” and that when presented with three losing options, he chose the one that would at least see Uzumaki’s story through to completion, “warts and all.” When faced with an ultimatum by the kind of person who likely spends their days watching the scales visibly tip as money enters and exits their proverbial wallets, DeMarco made the only decision he felt he could.

Uzumaki was an ambitious endeavor, a profound effort, and a difficult task which pushed the anime industry in Japan beyond its capabilities; which bent it until it broke. As a result, Uzumaki and its lightning fast pacing leave the whole affair feeling remarkably unremarkable in some ways, and visually and auditorily triumphant in others.

In the end, the real curse of Uzumaki is much older than production delays and world altering pandemics happening in the center of production—the Dragonfly Pond of Uzumaki itself. It is ancient, and has tormented deeply the artistic endeavors of creatives the world over since the days of H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, and whoever really wrote The King in Yellow. It is simply that cosmic horror is by nature unseeable, unadaptable, and unknowable. It has been since its inception, since Richard Stanley, director of my current favorite cinematic adaptation of Lovecraft’s iconic short story, The Color out of Space, which sits proudly atop a white shelf in my broke college student living space, tried and failed to adapt H.G. Wells’ The Island Of Doctor Moreau. It has been there since we began trying to tell each other about things so deep and haunting that eventually we coined terms like ‘cosmic horror’ to fill in the gaps our poor, human brains inevitably have. Cartoon Network simply didn’t have the time to unpack what people like Junji Ito spend their whole lives working on for a four episode anime series on Adult Swim, and I for one, am not going to be the person who blames them for that. I can simply say that in the end, what resulted from their ill-fated efforts to adapt the unadaptable can be described like this:

Uzumaki’s anime adaptation is the kind of washing machine with a transparent top, where you watch from above as the high speed cosmic spin cycle lays bare your favorite selections from your wardrobe at such dizzying speeds that though you can technically ascertain which is which, you can’t do it without getting dizzy, and even then, you can’t see any of the specific attributes which made each piece of clothing so special to you in the first place. In the end, you can’t experience either activity without feeling dizzy, exhausted, and sick. Whether or not that’s what you want out of a story about a rapidly spiraling curse, is, of course, a matter of personal taste.

Sources (listed using superscript within the text) :

1. Dixon, Colin. “2023 Movie Theater Attendance Improves; May Never Reach Pre-COVID Levels.” nScreenMedia, 19 Mar. 2024, 
nscreenmedia.com/2023-movie-theater-attendance-improves/

2. Lange, Jeva. “Color out of Space Has No Interest in the Highbrow Horror Trend.” Theweek, The Week, 24 Jan. 2020, 
theweek.com/articles/891167/color-space-no-interest-highbrow-horror-trend.

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK5MzW9BwQQ