and that "the allure of Uzumaki is not that the uzumaki itself is scary but rather the changes in the people caught up in it. " The original production of the film was going to be an independent production and would be part of an anthology film, but during production, Toei Animation decided to have it become a bigger film. The film was backed by Toyoyuki Yokohama's Omega Project, a company that married Japanese and foreign funding to make J-horror films for an international market. The company had previously had success with the 1999 film Audition. Production Higuchinsky desired to be faithful to the manga as possible. At the time, the manga had not been completed yet. To help his crew express a Japanese style in the film, he had his staff watch Akuma no temari uta. The film was primarily shot in Ueda, Nagano Prefecture, with a few locations in Tokyo. Higuchinsky said the film was shot in about two weeks. Promotion and release Uzumaki was released in Japan on 11 February 2000. It was released as the first half of a double bill with Tomie: Replay, a film based on the manga Tomie, also by Ito. The film was released concurrently in the United States as it was in Japan with a limited run in San Francisco. Omega's vice-president Akiko Funatsu stated that San Francisco was chosen due to "all the internet activity there". The film was shown at the 2000 Fantasia Film Festival. Reception On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 56% based on 25 reviews, with an average rating of 6.09/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Uzumaki uses its creepy, David Lynch-inspired atmospherics to effectively build a sense of dread, but ultimately fails to do anything with it." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 62 out of 100 based on nine critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". In his review of the film for The New York Times, critic Elvis Mitchell noted the way the film develops mood, finding it part of the cycle of Japanese films like Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Hideo Nakata's Ring as "vivid, state-of-the-art scare films that move so swiftly that psychological underpinnings are a luxury". Mitchell concluded that in the film that "things really get weird, though not particularly scary", calling the film "ultimately disappointing". Varietys Dennis Harvey described the film as "intriguing, if