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So a few years ago I saw a film called Uzumaki. It was a Japanese horror film, one of the creepier, more bizarre movies I’d ever seen. The movie was about a town obsessed with spirals; that odd, repeating pattern that occurs often in nature and human art. The movie featured a variety of weirdness, including a boy who turned into a snail, spiral-patterned cremation smoke and a girl whose hair curled and took on a life of its own. I slept with my head under the covers that night.

I picked up the original Uzumaki manga by Junji Ito because I liked the movie and was curious to see how it differed from the original three-volume story. It differs quite a bit. The plot is mostly the same, though cut quite a bit shorter in the film. The main difference is that the manga is far, far, far more disturbing than the movie.

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Showtime’s Masters of Horror series has a great concept: each hour-long episode is directed by a famous (or semi-famous) horror director. The roster of directors is international and impressive. John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Tobe Hooper, and Stuart Gordon all take a hand in creating the first thirteen episodes, and Takashi Miike’s Imprint is the final episode of the first season.

Miike is a director who can’t be labeled; he’s done everything from children’s films (The Great Yokai War) to touching comedies (The Happiness of the Katakuris) to gory psychological action movies (Ichi the Killer) to the just plain weird (Visitor Q). His horror films are few and far between, but Imprint is quite possibly the best entry in the first season of Masters of Horror, and proves that Miike can create terror with the best of them. But Miike is still Miike. Imprint was never aired on Showtime, due to its extremely graphic content, and is only available on DVD.

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