Line #73 Manga/Uzumaki


1	[[quoteright:339:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/51q3mshowxl_ac_sy780.jpg]]
2	[[caption-width-right:339:''[[{{Tagline}} Spiral into the dark.]]'']]
3
4	-> ''"This is Kurôzu-cho, where I grew up. I would like to share with you... the strange events that took place here."''
5
6	Kurôzu-cho, a small Japanese seaside town, is plagued by mysterious happenings. A man commits suicide in his own bathtub. A student's scar becomes a black hole. People start transforming into giant snails.
7
8	What do all these events have in common? [[GothSpirals The spiral]]. A suicidal man's body is contorted into a spiral. The student's scar becomes a spiral in its transformation into a black hole. The "snail people" are marked by their spiral-shaped birthmarks, which slowly transform into shells. To make matters worse, the small island town is completely cut off from the rest of the world. All ships coming and going are sunk by whirlpools, all air travel is disrupted by violent tornadoes, and the tunnel that leads to the outside world becomes an endless trip.
9
10	So begins the terrifying three-volume manga by Creator/JunjiIto (creator of ''Manga/TheEnigmaOfAmigaraFault''), centering upon a supposed curse placed upon the town.
11
12	Not to be confused, in any way, with the main character of ''Manga/{{Naruto}}''. Or [[Anime/TengenToppaGurrenLagann Spiral Energy]]. Or ''Manga/{{Spiral}}: Suiri no Kizuna'', even though "Uzumaki" means spiral.
13
14	A [[TheMovie live-action film adaptation]] exists that [[CompressedAdaptation has a large portion of the story left out]], although this is partly due to [[GeckoEnding the manga still being incomplete when the movie was made.]] There are also two {{Licensed Game}}s for the Platform/WonderSwan.
15
16	On August 30, 2019, Creator/AdultSwim announced a four-episode anime mini-series adaptation animated by Studio Drive and co-produced by the network and Creator/ProductionIG USA; it was set to premiere on Creator/{{Toonami}} in 2022, but has been delayed several times. The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDEQyK5ZH-E teaser]] can be seen on their channel.
17
18	----
19	!!Provides examples of:
20
21	* ActionSurvivor: Shuichi and Kirie directly confront and fight off several of the spiral's manifestations, despite being average human beings with nothing that really makes them distinctive.
22	* AdaptationalAttractiveness: Shuichi. In the manga, he's scrawny and sickly pale to the point of some of his panels bordering on disturbing to look at, his clothes practically dangle off his body, the circles under his eyes are dark enough to almost look like bruises, his hair is shaggy and messy, and he's always got this bleak expression of pure hopelessness and exhaustion like he can barely keep his eyes open--but in the movie, he's tanned and athletic-looking and has well-groomed hair, his eyes have no dark circles, his cheekbones look perfectly normal, and his expression is more often than not a neutral one. This said, Shuichi wasn't exactly ''ugly'' per se in the manga, just astonishingly disheveled-looking.
23	* AdaptationDyeJob: In the movie, Kirie's hair (which was ginger in the manga) is black.
24	* AdaptationPersonalityChange: In the film, Kirie, who was serious and often irritable in the manga, is made far more fearful and less independent. Shuichi, who was severely mentally ill and fearful in the manga, is made perpetually emotionless and abusive.
25	* AdaptationalAngstUpgrade: In the manga, Kirie was a fairly average young woman with an average social life and an upper middle class family. In the movie, she was extremely poor, bullied at school, and lived with her drunkard father, as her mother had died when she was young. To make matters worse she was also the constant victim of [[spoiler: Shuichi]]'s manipulative and abusive tendencies since she was a child.
26	* AdaptationalIntelligence: There's no proof that Shuichi is any smarter than many of the other manga characters; he's just psychic. However, in the movie, his psychic powers are nowhere to be seen, but he's a genius. Also completely inverted with Kirie, who was seemingly of average intelligence in the manga, but is shown as TheDitz in the movie.
27	* AdaptationalVillainy: [[spoiler: Shuichi]] is a recurring antagonist of the movie, as Kirie's psychological/emotional abuser since childhood. [[spoiler: He also succumbs to the Spiral in the end and attempts to kill her.]]
28	* AdaptedOut: Chie, Azami, Kazunori, Yoriko, Wakabayashi, Tanizaki, Okamoto, and Mitsuo do not appear in the movie at all.
29	* AgeLift: Shuichi and Kirie, who were both eighteen in the manga, were made respectively twenty-something and fifteen in the movie.
30	* AlienGeometries: Of a decidedly spirally sort.
31	* AlphaBitch: Azami, though she treats Kirie as a SecretKeeper.
32	* AndIMustScream: Practically the entire series, but special mentions go to...
33	** [[spoiler: Kirie is telling the story as a memory, which implies she (and possibly Shuichi) is still conscious... Even though they were frozen in time.]]
34	** The people in the row houses [[spoiler: who become so cramped that they become tied together like knots]]
35	** A relatively mild example, but the people affected by the Lighthouse [[spoiler: who are unable to walk in straight lines, experience constant vertigo, and end up walking around in a circle until they die]].
36	* ApocalypticLog: [[spoiler: Kirie keeps narrating even after she's frozen in time. The scroll found hidden in the wall of the row house may also have been one of these.]]
37	* ArbitrarySkepticism: Given what some people witness directly, their refusal to accept the possibility of later events is stupidity. Lampshaded in chapter 7 when Kirie's jack in the box tells her that the jack in the box kid is going to come back to life and kill her, so Shuichi decides to go to the graveyard and stake the corpse before it can.
38	-->'''Kirie:''' So you believe what that clown said?\
39	'''Shuichi:''' Kirie, we're here because we believe a toy clown spoke to you at all.
40	* ArcSymbol: Spirals.
41	* ArcWords: "It just pierces through my ears!"
42	* AscendedExtra: Shiho, who only appeared for short bits of three chapters in the manga, had more screentime than Shuichi in the movie.
43	* AttemptedRape: Azami to Shuichi in chapter 3.
44	* AttentionWhore: Sekino from the "Medusa" chapter.
45	** On a larger scale, the Spiral itself seems to be one too. The fact that spirals draw a person's eye into their center seems to be a major part of the story's underlying philosophy, and [[spoiler:Shuichi suspects that the UndergroundCity beneath Kurozu-cho is angry at humanity for ignoring it]].
46	* BeautyEqualsGoodness: The main antagonists of Chapter 5, "Twisted Souls", are the families of the StarCrossedLovers Yoriko and Kazunori, who do not want them to be together. The family members appear haggard, prematurely aged and worn-out from living in the poverty-stricken row house, while Yoriko and Kazunori themselves are fresh-faced, young and healthy, despite living in the same conditions. Although it is implied directly by Shuichi and unintentionally by Kazunori that the spiral is manipulating the family members who are fighting and making them more haggard, aged, and worn-out than they would normally be.
47	** Averted with the snail people. They're scary to look at, and it's implied the transformation is uncomfortable, however they don't hurt humans the way humans start hurting each other at the end.
48	* BeautyIsNeverTarnished:
49	** Kirie is also infected with the godawful, demonic spiral warts later in the story. They're on her feet, but are very small, and cause no problems, and then disappear completely.
50	** Also played straight with Kirie's burns, which are severe enough to have her hospitalized, yet mostly miss her face and heal without leaving scars.
51	** Likewise, we only hear about her [[spoiler:eating the flesh of the snail-people]] in vague narration, while everyone else is depicted in full, disgusting detail.
52	** Averted, however, with female characters other than Kirie (particularly, and brutally, with Azami). It's more that nothing permanently disfiguring happens to the protagonist, [[spoiler:at least until she finally gives in to the Spiral]].
53	* BeneathTheEarth: The final chapter.
54	* BigBad: [[spoiler:The [[GeniusLoci City of Spirals]]]] is the [[EldritchAbomination entity]] creating the nightmarish spirals that are causing mass death and destruction.
55	* {{Bizarrchitecture}}: In the later chapters of the book, [[spoiler:Kurozu-cho becomes a single long rowhouse]]. Beneath it, the protagonists find [[spoiler:an enormous, abandoned UndergroundCity made entirely from spirals]]. In the latter case, there is significant overlap with GeniusLoci.
56	* BlessedWithSuck: Kirie's and Sekino's spiral hair has a mind of its own and very much wants to live. Also, it [[spoiler: drains the life of the user.]] Shuichi's psychic abilities also warrant a mention, as while they save his life (and often others' lives), they're shown taking a massive toll on him, emotionally and mentally.
57	* BloodierAndGorier: The movie--while the manga is hardly easygoing as far as Gorn goes, the movie contains gallons more actual blood.
58	* BodyHorror: A huge part of the story. Particularly freaky are the [[spoiler:human hedgerows]] inside the houses after the town succumbs to the curse.
59	* TheCassandra:
60	** Shuichi. The problem is that he mostly only talks to Kirie.
61	** Kirie, who frequently dismisses Shuichi's predictions and snaps at him for making them, eventually suffers the same fate when she tries to warn the people at the hospital about the [[spoiler:blood-sucking pregnant women.]]
62	* CanonForeigner: Reporter Ichiro Tamura, Shuichi's colleague and rival in the movie.
63	* CatchPhrase: Pretty much every character will at some point utter the words "That sound! It just pierces through my ears!"
64	** Also Shuichi saying "X is contaminated by the Spiral" (or some variant of that phrase).
65	* TheCavalry: Horrifically subverted when a large fleet of ships gets close to Kurozu-cho, [[spoiler:only to be swept up in a MegaMaelstrom]] within a matter of minutes.
66	* CellphonesAreUseless: An early example, given that the story is presumably set in or around its original publication year of 1998. Once the town goes ClosedCircle, cell phones are shown not to work there.
67	* CentralTheme: All of the episodes revolve around the idea obsession is destructive. While spirals are involved, the obsession takes many forms, such as the need to be the center of attention or the pursuit of unattainable goals or people.
68	* CharactersDroppingLikeFlies: [[spoiler: By the end of the story all of the named characters (with the possible exception of Mitsuo, who is now a snail-person, and Tanizaki, who resisted the transformation suffered by the rest of the townspeople) are almost certainly dead.]]
69	* CharmPerson: Kirie's and Sekino's spiral hair has a hypnotic effect.
70	* ChekhovsGun: In the "Mosquitoes" chapter, Keiko's cloth-wrapped item. It's a [[spoiler:hand drill.]] In the same chapter, Shuichi's [[spoiler: bug spray]].
71	* ClosedCircle: Quite literally in the later chapters, as the curse allows people from the outside to enter Kurozu-cho but never leave it. Attempting to do so simply results in spending days walking in a circle only to arrive back at the town.
72	* CompressedAdaptation: In the film, chapters 3, 5, 9, and 10-19 were all cut entirely, and many chapters that were not cut were reduced to one or two short scenes.
73	* CosmicHorrorStory: The town is [[spoiler: built on top of an impossible spiral structure]], which proceeds to cause increasingly horrible things to happen before [[spoiler: absorbing the entire town.]] [[spoiler: It has done so countless times before and will do so countless times again.]]
74	** A deleted chapter hints that [[spoiler: the curse of the spiral pattern extends to, or possibly funnels down from, a cosmic level, manifesting in the shapes galaxies take as they spin through space.]]
75	* CreatorInJoke: The lost chapter centers around Shuichi being the first person to discover a new galaxy, and he becomes extremely adamant that it ''not'' be named after him, as he wants no association with what he perceives to be a source of evil. This is almost the exact same plot as one of Ito's other manga, ''Manga/{{Remina}}''.
76	* CreepyChild: [[spoiler:The children who create and ride tornadoes definitely fall into this trope, although they were presumably normal prior to being orphaned and influenced by the Spiral]].
77	* CursedWithAwesome: The one thing the Spiral curse does that can actually be seen as a positive is [[spoiler:allow the StarCrossedLovers in chapter 5 to escape their abusive families by twisting themselves together likes snakes and escaping into the sea. The whirlwind riders also see their newfound ability to fly using tornados as this, but they eventually get pulled into Dragonfly Lake while trying to catch Kirie and Chie.]]
78	* DeathByAdaptation: [[spoiler: Mrs. Goshima]], who isn't confirmed deceased in the manga until chapter 19, and [[spoiler: Shuichi]], who doesn't die in the manga, but is instead [[spoiler: frozen in time inside the Spiral, presumably for centuries.]]
79	* DeclarationOfProtection: Shuichi to Kirie in the movie. Note that this does not occur in the manga, despite popular belief that it did.
80	* DeliberatelyMonochrome: The 2024 anime adaptation is completely black-and-white to match the manga.
81	* DemotedToExtra: Chie, who is a central character in volume 3, has less than two minutes of screentime in the movie.
82	* DespairEventHorizon: For the overwhelming majority of the story, Kirie seems to be willing to do whatever it takes to keep herself and her family from succumbing to the Spiral. In the end, though, it becomes too much to bear. [[spoiler:Her brother has turned into a giant snail, her family is frozen in time staring at the Eternal Spiral, and her boyfriend is badly injured and unable to move away from the same EldritchAbomination]]. By the time she reaches out and grabs Shuichi's hand, she is too weak to continue any further and succumbs.
83	* {{Deuteragonist}}: Shuichi, and later Chie.
84	* DoomedMoralVictor: [[spoiler: Ultimately, there's nothing Kirie and Shuichi can do to save their town, or even themselves. All they can do is embrace each other as they petrify, to deny [[AttentionWhore the Spiral]] the satisfaction of having them gaze upon it for eternity.]]
85	* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: Much of the manga is about how people deal with a mysterious condition that slowly becomes a widespread pandemic.
86	* DoubleMeaningTitle:
87	** "Twisted Souls", in the sense that the families have been morally twisted to the core, and in the sense that [[spoiler: the two lovers end up forever intertwined in a spiral]].
88	** The title of the overall series, Uzumaki ("spiral"), also counts. It can be read as the noun, the symbol of the curse itself; or the verb, the action which consumes the town.
89	* DownerEnding: It gets worse if you remember from the beginning of the series that the [[spoiler: narration in the first few pages, seen at the top of the page, talks about the events that occur during the series in the past tense and spends the ''entire'' series positive that no matter how bad it gets at least the main character's going to get out of Kurôzu-cho to tell her tale. She doesn't.]]
90	* EldritchAbomination: [[spoiler:The giant spiral ruins underneath Dragonfly Pond that are turning the town and everyone in it into spirals.]]
91	* EldritchLocation: [[spoiler:The area the town is built on in actuality is a giant spiral that assimilates everything above it over time into its pattern.]]
92	* EmpathicWeapon: Kirie's and Sekino's spiral hair.
93	* EnfantTerrible:
94	** The babies born to the bloodsucking pregnant women. They have some terrible tricks of their own.
95	** Also, the nasty children from the latter chapters. According to citizens, ''half of the structural damage'' is due to their pranks, exploiting the wind phenomenon.
96	* EntitledToHaveYou: Azami believes this of Shuichi, mainly because every other male within ten years of her age with whom she interacts becomes attracted to her, and she believes that Shuichi should be the same.
97	* EternalRecurrence: [[spoiler:As it turns out, everything that has happened in Kurôzu-cho is nothing more than the most recent iteration of a reoccurring calamity in the region. And it will likely still continue after the conclusion of the story.]]
98	* TheExactCenterOfEverything: In a deleted chapter, the cursed spiral that leads into the center of Kurozu-cho is implied to spread out on a cosmic scale, the spiral making up the entirety of the Milky Way Galaxy, if not the rest of the universe.
99	* FaceHeelTurn: [[spoiler:Tanizaki's party.]]
100	* FateWorseThanDeath: The eventual fate of the [[spoiler: entire town, considering Kirie is narrating the story in the past tense.]]
101	* ForcedFromTheirHome: Kirie and the others are kicked out of their terrace house by the people who sought shelter there, forced to brave the destroyed town with no shelter or aid. [[spoiler:It turned out to be for the best. By the time she comes back, the people inside the houses have succumb to serious BodyHorror and are trapped forever.]]
102	* ForcedTransformation: Some people are turned into snails, while others turn into ''much'' worse things.
103	* {{Foreshadowing}}: Chapter 3, "Scar", contains a manifestation of the spiral that's emblematic of the entire destruction arc, and Chapter 5, "Twisted Souls" mirrors [[spoiler: the eventual fate of Kirie and Shuichi]].
104	* FreakOut: [[spoiler: Shuichi, as of chapter 14, to the extent of which he has to be briefly replaced by a new deuteragonist.]]
105	* FromBadToWorse: The first two chapters feature the female lead's boyfriend's parent's deaths. The father becomes obsessed with spirals, killing himself by turning into a giant spiral. The mother, by contrast, becomes deathly afraid of spirals, hallucinating her husband's body in each one, and cutting off her own fingers tips, to get rid of the spirals. Then she finds out about the spiral in the inner ear... When they're cremated, their ashes turn into spirals with an image of their screaming face. It STILL gets worse. Much worse.
106	* GeniusLoci: Kurozu-Cho, it would seem. Even more so with the Spiral itself - upon seeing it, Shuichi theorises that the spiral city was built by someone, but now it continues to expand without anyone to build it, and that perhaps the entire curse was a result of it not being seen from deep underground.
107	* {{Gonk}}: The original snail-person. Even before his transformation.
108	* HauntedHeroine: Kirie in the movie, although she comes close to it on some rare occasions in the manga.
109	* HelplessObserverProtagonist: Most of the story consists of Kirie watching as her town is consumed by the Spiral Curse.
110	* HeroicBSOD: Shuichi, very gradually. [[spoiler:He never recovers.]]
111	* HeroicRROD: Kirie in chapter six [[spoiler:after her hair absorbs all of her energy]]. A rare example where the affected protagonist is still able to stand up despite being unconscious because she's literally being held up like a puppet.
112	* HorribleHousing: Kirie and her family have their home destroyed by a storm, and are forced to move into one of the cheapest houses in the town; one of the ancient terraced houses that have no furniture or room separation, where two other poor families were shown living earlier in the story. [[spoiler:When the spirals start to destroy the town, ''everyone'' is forced to move into these terraced houses, as they're the only ones that haven't fallen apart. Kirie and and her family are kicked out of what used to be their house by the people who sought shelter there.]] By that point, things were so dire that [[TooDesperateToBePicky nobody cared how crappy the houses actually were.]]
113	* IcarusAllusion: [[spoiler:The gang of whirlwind riders in chapter 15 attempt to chase down Kirie and Chie only to drift too close to Dragonfly Pond which pulls in their tornados along with them.]]
114	* IDontLikeTheSoundOfThatPlace: It doesn't translate well, but depending on the reading, Kurozu-cho can mean either "[[ClosedCircle Closed Town]]" or "Black Vortex Town". [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] in that the town's history and psychological effects mean that it was almost certainly named for its terrifying Spiral curse.
115	* IKnowMortalKombat: Jack-in-the-Box's stuntman skills. [[spoiler:They don't work.]]
116	* ImAHumanitarian: After Kurozu-cho becomes a ClosedCircle, almost everyone resorts to consuming the flesh of the Snail People. [[spoiler:This eventually includes Kirie, the series' protagonist]].
117	* ImportantHaircut: Kirie is short-haired for more than half the tale after the chapter that shows the first time the spirals affect her directly, turning her from TheScully into a believer.
118	* InNameOnly: The movie.
119	* KarmicTransformation: Tsumura in the "Snail" chapter.
120	* KidsAreCruel: Several of the human villains in the later chapters of the book are children [[spoiler:who have figured out how to create and ride tornadoes through the ruins of Kurozu-cho]].
121	* KilledOffForReal: [[spoiler:Chie]]
122	* LaserGuidedKarma: When people start [[spoiler: turning into snails]], the future victims are often those who are cruel to the preceding cases, either by bullying, [[spoiler: destroying their eggs]], or [[spoiler: maliciously eating them]].
123	* LifeDrinker: The spiral-affected ''hair'' does this, draining its victims' life forces to extend and sustain its growth. Sekino is killed in this way, over-extering her need for attention and pushing her hair's spirals to their limits, limits which require all of her life force to be met.
124	* LighthousePoint: A lighthouse with a spiral staircase causes problems at one point.
125	* LivingStatue: Given that the story [[spoiler:is being narrated in the past tense by someone caught up in the Spiral's curse]], this seems like a likely end result for [[spoiler:all of the people it turns to stone]].
126	* LoudGulp: Shuichi on multiple occasions, notably in chapter 4.
127	* LuddWasRight: By the last chapters, any semblance of modern society in the village has completely vanished.
128	* LustObject: Arguably, Shuichi is this to Azami around the end of Chapter 3.
129	* MadnessMantra:
130	-->'''[[spoiler:Shuichi]]:''' [[spoiler:Mad... Mad... the town's going mad... Mad... Mad...]]
131	* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: When Jack-in-the-Box [[spoiler:comes back as an apparent hopping zombie]], it's revealed that he's actually bouncing on a spring stuck in his spine. ''But'' [[spoiler:there is still a talking clown toy, and he moans something after the coffin is opened]]. Whether the former is just [[ThroughTheEyesOfMadness Kirie being a little unhinged]] after the events of the last chapter and the latter is just escaping gas is never explored. However, the springs in both the corpse and the toy are spiral-shaped, leaning the events toward the supernatural.
132	* MeanCharacterNiceActor: Fhi Fan and Masami Horiuchi, who played Shuichi and Ichiro respectively in the movie, are actually quite nice. Can't say the same for their characters.
133	* MegaMaelstrom: Being aquatic spirals, whirlpools are ubiquitous in the waters in and around Kurozu-cho. As the story goes on, they get extremely large. [[spoiler:One of them finally sweeps away the last shred of hope that the main characters have by consuming the rescue ships sent to Kurozu-cho]].
134	* MenActWomenAre: Inverted with the two main characters, Kirie and Shuichi. While there are exceptions, Shuichi mostly passively responds to his circumstances while Kirie's actions drive the plot of the story.
135	* MisophoniaGag: Shuichi gets ''very'' irritated when the town's clock goes off, complaining that it "just pierces through the ears". That phrase [[ArcWords comes back several times]], each to highlight a character's growing instability and discomfort with their surroundings, while others aren't bothered at all by whatever noise happens to be creating the problem.
136	* MonsterClown: [[spoiler:Jack-in-the-Box's gift- his namesake, which comes to life to threaten Kirie.]]
137	* MoreThanMindControl: A frequent ''modus operandi'' for the Spiral. Although it can act in such an all-consuming way that it completely overwhelms a victim's personality ([[spoiler:as with Shuichi's father and Azami]]), it's much more unnerving when it takes advantage of a person's weaknesses to get them to succumb to its influence. Kirie's father is motivated by his love of pottery, the two lovers in "Twisted Souls" are motivated by their love for one another, and in the end [[spoiler:Kirie and Shuichi are motivated by a combination of love and despair]].
138	* MortonsFork: At the end. [[spoiler:Move too fast: tornadoes. Move too slow: turn into a snail. Stay outside the rowhouses: risk the tornadoes and anarchy; stay inside to be entangled with everyone else.]]
139	* MythologyGag: "Medusa" has some similarities to the "Hair" chapter from Junji Ito's ''Manga/{{Tomie}}''.
140	* NervousWreck: Played fairly straight with Shuichi.
141	* NonActorVehicle: Korean model Fhi Fan, who played Shuichi in the movie, had never acted before, and never did again after the movie.
142	* NoSenseOfDirection: You might think you can walk straight out of Kurozu-cho, but you'll end up walking right back into the town.
143	* NothingIsScarier: The neighbor's son in the row house from Chapter 13 is never seen, but it is implied that he is suffering from a very severe version of the spiral "warts" that affected everyone else on the property. Given what we see of one person heavily afflicted with the disease (but still alive), he couldn't look good.
144	* OhCrap: [[spoiler:Chie]], upon realizing that she's [[spoiler: trapped inside the spiral building.]]
145	* OnlySaneMan: Shuichi, which quickly reaches the point of absurdity.
146	** Then again, he along with a few other people had ''every'' single opportunity to just get out of town before things ''really'' started going to hell. [[spoiler:By the time he actually ''decides'' to do it, it's already too late.]]
147	** Tanizaki as well in the end. [[spoiler:By willingly cooperating with the curse, he ultimately becomes the last ''reasonable'' human left alive in the village, and as he’s last seen walking away through the labyrinth, there’s a genuine chance that he’s the only member of the cast (sans Mitsuo, who also survives but only after being turned into a Snail Person) who survives the finale outright.]]
148	** In the movie, Ichiro is this.
149	* OurVampiresAreDifferent:
150	** Upon getting bitten by mosquitoes, pregnant women start [[spoiler: sucking people's blood. Drills are utilized.]]
151	** [[spoiler:Jack-in-the-box's corpse brings hopping vampires to mind.]]
152	* ParanoiaFuel: [[invoked]] The spiral curse needs a starting point to manifest. Unfortunately, it's ''very'' creative and can start in incredibly abstract ways. The cochlea? Springs of a jack-in-the-box and a car suspension? A lighthouse staircase? A crescent scar? ''Pace of life?'' All of these and more are ripe opportunities for the supernatural to take hold and unleash its spiral horror, which can lead to some real-life paranoia about the symbol. This paranoia also destroys Shuichi's mother, in an opposite situation to her husband. While he dies from his obsession with the spiral, his wife is tormented by the spirals she suddenly notices, and is killed by her attempt to remove the spiral in her ear, subsequently feeling like a spiral due to her loss of balance.
153	* PrecociousCrush: Mitsuru, who is 12 or 13, has an insistent crush on Kirie, who is 18.
154	* PrehensileHair: Kirie's hair becomes this in the "Medusa" chapter, and her friend Sekino joins her. For the most part, it only mesmerizes, but the heads of hair eventually fight, playing it straight.
155	* ProneToTears: Kirie in the movie--and Shuichi comes pretty close to being the male version of this, sometimes, in the manga.
156	* PsychologicalHorror: The genre of the story.
157	* PunnyName: In the Snail chapter, the strange student and the bully are named Katayama and Tsumura, respectively, after the Japanese word "''katatsumuri''" ("snail").
158	* RayOfHopeEnding: [[spoiler:Kirie's monologue in the last few panels imply that she, Shuichi, and the rest of the town will be able to move again when the centuries pass and they will not age due to being frozen in time. Kirie and Shuichi might even have a chance to break the curse once it starts again on the newly-built Kurozu-cho.]]
159	* RedshirtArmy: The rescue ships that come to Kurozu-cho, [[spoiler:only to quickly vanish beneath the sea]].
160	* RoomFullOfCrazy: The collection of spirals in the first chapter and on the cover of the film.
161	* RubberHoseLimbs: Happens to quite a few victims of the Spiral. Unlike most examples of this trope, cases in this story are played horrifically enough to involve grotesque and sometimes fatal levels of injury.
162	* RuleOfScary: Needless to say, most of the insanity that goes on in this series doesn't make a lick of sense when you consider the laws of physics. But ''goddamn'' does it make for some unsettling material.
163	* RuleOfSymbolism: Much is made about the spiral serving as both a symbol that grows outward and draws inward, mirroring the destruction of the town- the spiral grows in influence and takes everything with it. Additionally, the center of the spiral is key to the curse- it hides the secret behind it, and the completion of the shape ends the current cycle. Even further, the spiral is a symbol of motion and perpetuity- it can't be stopped, and will always exist.
164	* SanitySlippage: [[spoiler:Shuichi, who, ironically, is the [[OnlySaneMan first one to realize the terrible things about the town.]]]]
165	** [[spoiler: Curiously averted for Kirie, who never really loses her cool nor shows any other hint of impending insanity throughout the whole story, even though, differently by Shuichi, she ends up facing most of the worst horrors personally and at great risk for her own life]].
166	* SceneryGorn: Prominent especially in the later chapters of the graphic novel, when the landscape around Kurozu-cho starts to twist into distorted shapes. [[spoiler:Taken to an extreme in the last chapters, "Labyrinth" and "Completion", where the town's spiral-longhouse shape is completed and where the main characters discover the spiral ruins under the city respectively]].
167	* SelfDeprecation: The afterword chapters feature Ito himself, and are comical in nature rather than scary. They depict the writer/artist bumbling through his research for the manga in a series of humiliating misadventures.
168	* SentientCosmicForce: The Spiral seems to have some level of sapience, as it is able to target specific people in some chapters knowing full well it's doing so, such as [[spoiler: the hurricane in Chapter 12 that's in love with Kirie.]]
169	* SerialEscalation: Early events tend to occur on a small scale, with the Spiral affecting individuals or small groups of people. By the end [[spoiler:typhoons are being directed toward Kurozu-cho, and an entire naval detachment is swallowed whole by a whirlpool]].
170	* ShootTheShaggyDog: They go to all that effort of surviving through most of the Spiral, lose everything [[spoiler: and everyone]], only to end up [[spoiler: frozen in time, while conscious, for centuries at least, in a city made entirely of spirals]].
171	* ShoutOut: In a late chapter, a model of Gamera can be clearly seen among the ruins of Kurozu-cho.
172	* SinisterGeometry: Pretty much the underlying style of horror present throughout the story. Special mention has to go to the [[spoiler:Spiral City underneath Kurozu-cho, though]], for its sheer scale and ominous nature if nothing else.
173	* SlidingScaleOfAdaptationModification: The movie is a type 2, maybe 1.5.
174	* SlowTransformation: The process of turning into a snail person usually takes several days.
175	* SpringCoil: PlayedForHorror ([[BlackComedy predominantly, anyway]]) as another form of [[ArcSymbol the omnipresent spiral shape]]. After [[StalkerWithACrush Jack]] gets killed in a horrific car accident, Kirie and Shuichi dig up his grave to stake his corpse, only for it to suddenly come alive and ''bouncing'' after them as ''[[BodyHorror his entire lower half disintegrates]]'', using a spring stuck in his spine to chase after them. However, once he completely falls apart, the two realize the spring was part of the car suspension that wasn't removed from his body -- [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane it's left unclear]] if his corpse was merely propelled by escaping gas or if it was the result of something supernatural turning him into [[VisualPun a literal Jack-in-the-box]].
176	* StalkerWithACrush: Jack-in-the-Box and Azami. And Wakabayashi, however briefly. Heck, there's a ''hurricane'' with a crush.
177	* StarCrossedLovers: The two kids in the "Twisted Souls" chapter.
178	* AStormIsComing: Shuichi panics when he realizes that it's typhoon season, and nearly repeats this line verbatim. [[spoiler:He's right to be concerned]].
179	* StressVomit: Overlapping with VomitDiscretionShot, Shuichi in chapter 4.
180	* StubbornHair: They try to comb Kirie's PrehensileHair in the "Medusa" chapter but it doesn't stick.
181	* SubvertedTrope: The spiral itself is one for Japanese art, as it's usually a cartoon symbol for warmth/blushing on cheeks. Here, it's turned into something much less friendly.
182	* SupernaturalFloatingHair: One manifestation of the spiral takes over hair, lifting it up in mesmerizing spiral disks.
183	* SupernaturalHotspotTown: The seaside town of Kurôzu-cho, which is plagued by supernatural events related to spirals, ranging from people turning into snails to BodyHorror based around bicycle springs and hair curls, and [[spoiler:it's all linked to a spiraling structure beneath the town]].
184	* SurrealHorror: The Spiral itself.
185	* TimeAbyss: In the last chapter, the apparent source of the Spiral curse is revealed: [[spoiler:an enormous, ruined Spiral City buried under Kurozu-cho]]. At a minimum, it's several thousand years old. [[spoiler:The human victims of the Spiral, since they appear to remain conscious, will eventually fit this trope as well]].
186	* TogetherInDeath: In Chapter 5, "Twisted Souls", when it looks like their families are about to separate them for the last time, Yoriko and Kazunori contort and stretch themselves into long, thin, snake-like forms and then wind their bodies together to form an unbreakable, two-headed creature with a rope-like body. Finally together, they dive into the sea, never to be separated. [[spoiler:Kirie and Shuichi end up a similar way in the final chapter, albeit still alive and frozen in time along with the rest of the town in the underground spiral city until the curse resets and a new Kurozu-cho is built over]].
187	* TooDesperateToBePicky: Once the town gets ravaged by the twisters, the people become increasingly desperate in their efforts to survive. The most obvious change is that they all begin to eat the snail-people, despite that they were all once human.
188	* TownWithADarkSecret: Does it ''ever'' have one.
189	* UndergroundCity: An example that apparently falls into the Buried City variety. [[spoiler:There's an enormous, spiral-shaped urban ruin under Kurozu-cho]]. Who or what built it is unknown, but its original designers seem to be long dead. It's become a sentient GeniusLoci determined to continue building itself.
190	* UnnaturallyLoopingLocation: Once the town gets consumed by twisters, the townspeople get trapped. Any attempts to leave send them right back to where they were. The protagonists discover this for themselves when they try to go through the hills, somehow circling back around until they were face to face with people leaving the town.
191	* ViciousCycle: The events that take place in Kurozu-cho repeat every so often, in a pattern that only becomes clear once it's probably too late to do anything to stop it.
192	* VillainousCrush:
193	** Azami has an innocent crush on Shuichi to begin with, however, after she becomes cursed by the Spiral, she starts trying to force herself on him in a much less innocent way and even murders someone to have her way with him.
194	** This happens much more explicitly with the hurricane that falls in love with Kirie and chases her throughout all of chapter 12.
195	* VillainousRescue: [[spoiler:Related to the hurricane that fell in love with Kirie, the second hurricane, presumably also in love with her, saves her from being attacked by a spiral horn-infested Wakabayashi by throwing a dislodged wooden stake through his neck.]]
196	* WaifProphet: Shuichi becomes a male example of this after chapter 2, though he starts predicting the future from shortly after his introduction.
197	* WeaksauceWeakness: How does Kirie survive the rabid mob of drill-wielding bloodthirsty women? [[spoiler: Bugspray. Not lit like a blowtorch, just bugspray. To be fair, they ''are'' infected by mosquitoes.]]
198	* WhamEpisode: "The House". [[spoiler:Stories in the first two volumes are terrifying, yes, but still within a somewhat MagicalRealism setup. Starting from "the House" it's post-apocalyptic SurvivalHorror. With twister-riding super-power delinquents.]]
199	* WhatHappenedToTheMouse:
200	** Kirie's friend Shiho, who had been a recurring character through the series, is absent from Chapter 11 on, with no one addressing her disappearance.
201	** What happened to [[spoiler:Mitsuo]]? He's last seen on a sheer cliff [[spoiler: as a snail person in hiding]]. Could he possibly be [[spoiler: the sole person in the town to survive the cataclysm at the end and live out the rest of his natural life, albeit as a snail]]?
202	** And where's [[spoiler: Tanizaki]]? We last see him [[spoiler: cleaning up twisted corpses in one of the final chapters. Once he exits, he's gone for the rest of the series.]]
203	* WhatMeasureIsANonHuman: The snail-people, milked for every bit of squick possible.
204	* WhenDimensionsCollide: The laws of the spiral world begin to rapidly overtake those of physics throughout the story.
205	* WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity: The Dragonfly Gang.
206	* WorstNewsJudgementEver: In the movie, Ichiro Tamura ''and'' Chie Maruyama are guilty of this. While an entire town is being plagued by horriffic and mysterious deaths, all Ichiro wants to do is study the Saito family--and all Chie wants to do is talk about the giant snails. It certainly doesn't help that Shuichi, the de facto "head" (of sorts) of the Saito family, does not want Ichiro doing a story on his family.
207	* YankTheDogsChain: Rescue boats are sunk by sudden whirlpools.
208	* YearInsideHourOutside: [[spoiler:Kirie and the others spend an unknown number of days wandering the hills trying to escape, but when they give up and go back to town, an unknown number of ''years'' have passed within it.]]
209	* YouAreWorthHell: Through all the events of ''Uzumaki'', not once do Kirie and Shuichi question their love for one another, or consider abandoning each other. [[spoiler:And by the end, it's clear that they will truly be together forever.]]
210	* YourHeadASplode: At the end of the lost chapter "Galaxies," [[spoiler: the astronomer Torino receives an overabundance of galactic radio waves, causing his head to grotesquely enlarge until it explodes "like an egg in a microwave," according to Kirie. It then shoots into the night sky to exist as its own galaxy]].

Context Manga / Uzumaki