the walls of the school. Kirie's classmate, Sekino, begins to grow her hair in exaggerated curls, taking over her mind and the minds of other female students. Whirl-like clouds appear in the sky, and during funerals, they are accompanied by smoky, ghost-like faces of victims who perished in spiral-related ways. Eventually, the entire town succumbs to the curse of the spiral—Kirie's father takes a drill to his eye after obsessively creating spiral shaped ceramics; a news crew reporting on the phenomenon lose themselves in a tunnel, only to be later found as humanoid yet snail-like corpses; and Sekino's snake-like curls grow to an abnormal height, wrapping around a telephone pole and cables electrocuting herself. A boy who wants Kirie to be his girlfriend throws himself in front of Inspector Tamura's car and is twisted around the axle; the car collides with a pole, causing Tamura's head to hit the windshield, leaving a spiral-shaped crack. When Kirie and Shuichi decide to search for Kirie's father, Shuichi's body twists into a spiral-like contortion. He crawls towards Kirie, asking her to "become a spiral too". Cast Production Development Uzumaki is based on the manga Uzumaki, written and illustrated by Junji Ito. Ito had stated that for most of his stories, he starts with a visual image and builds a story around the picture. For Uzumaki, he had a different inspiration of wanting to make a film about people who lived in a traditional Japanese row-house and seeing what happened. When drawing the row-houses, he found himself drawing a very long house that coiled into a spiral to fit on his page. The film was the debut feature for director Akihiro Higuchi, under his alias of Higuchinsky. While filming the television series Eko Eko Azarak, director Higuchinsky met Kengo Kaji who he proposed the idea of making a film to. Higuchinsky stated that he originally wanted to make a film like Star Wars but realized that "because I'm Japanese, I should do something different." Higuchinsky had been reading a manga magazine compilation which contained Ito's Uzumaki. Higuchinsky thought the manga was brilliant and asked Kengo Kaji to adapt the film, finding out that the manga was already in the process of being made into a film and that producers were looking for a director. Higuchinsky described the lure of Uzumaki using the Japanese word kikai, which translates to "strange and mysterious things (or people)",