Page 167 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

154 Nightmare Japan

An admittedly ‘strange story’ set almost exclusively within the
labyrinthine streets of Kurouzu Town – a modest village separated from
the rest of the Japanese mainland by large hills, a dark tunnel evoking
dizziness and dread in all those that pass through it, and a forbidding
expanse of ocean – Uzumaki is a counter-cinematic treat for the eyes. At
the town’s epicentre, as well as the narrative’s core, is Dragonfly Pond, a
circular pool of water linked with an ancient and obscure mythology that,
to echo Patrick Macias’s astute observation, is highly reminiscent of the
works of H.P. Lovecraft, especially those tales featuring his Cthulhu
Mythos, a pantheon of extra-dimensional monstrosities whose alternative
logics confound human understanding to the point of driving insane those
unlucky enough to cross their paths (Macias 2001: 82). Into this
supernatural scenario Huguchinsky introduces the film’s two teenage
leads: Kirie, whose voice-over narration functions as the story’s frame,
and Saitou Shiuchi, Kirie’s childhood friend/‘guardian angel’ and an
extremely bright student whose daily commute to a school in a
neighbouring village initially allows him initially to avoid the destructive
impact of the mysterious vortexes possessing his town. It is Shuichi who
repeatedly implores Kirie to run away with him and leave their doomed
and haunted town behind, even before Shuichi’s father becomes one of
the vortex’s first victims through a grotesque suicide via washing
machine. This death is one to which the narrative returns again and again,
albeit in ways that provide the film’s viewers with subtly alternative
perspectives on the gruesome death. Even Shuichi’s mother falls victim to
the vortexes’ seductive, if ultimately nightmarish, allure. Disturbed by her
husband’s death and the colossal spiral of smoke that fills the sky above
the town’s crematorium, she soon becomes hospitalised and, in some of
the film’s most grotesque moments, not only removes her fingerprints and
hair, but ends her life by plunging a knife-like shard of broken vase into
her ear to remove the vortex she believes resides somewhere beyond her
tympanic membrane.
Adding to the film’s inventory of surreal, nightmarish events,
Kurouzu Town’s high school becomes a locus of terror and focus of
national media attention as several students slowly transform into large
human-snail hybrids called ‘Hitomaimai’. Similarly, Sekino, the requisite