Meanwhile, Shuichi's mother, who has been in hospital since her husband's death, has developed a severe phobia of spirals. Tamura, a reporter, is intrigued by Shuichi's father's suicide and becomes obsessed with the case. It is not long before the entire town is infected by the otherworldly spirals. He then decides to film himself crawling into a washing machine, where he dies.

His unusual obsession causes him to abandon his responsibilities at work he proclaims that a spiral is the highest form of art, and frantically creates whirlpools in his miso soup when he runs out of spiral-patterned kamaboko. High school student Kirie Goshima's first glimpse that something is awry in the small town of Kurouzu-cho comes when her boyfriend Shuichi Saito's father begins to film the corkscrew patterns on a snail he is also in the process of making a video scrap book filled with the images of anything that has a spiral or vortex shape to it. Simultaneously, Uzumaki received a limited release in the American city of San Francisco. The film was backed by the company Omega Micott, who released it in Japan on a double bill with Tomie: Replay, another film based on a manga by Ito. As the film was produced while the manga was still being written and released, it departs from the story of the original work and features a different ending. The film takes place in a town plagued by a mysterious curse involving spirals.

The feature film directorial debut of Higuchinsky, it stars Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Hinako Saeki and Shin Eun-kyung. 'Spiral') is a 2000 Japanese horror film based on the manga of the same name by Junji Ito.

Uzumaki spiral