What Scenes From The Manga Are Cut In The Uzumaki Live Action?

I went in excited and came out thinking: they kept the spine but not all the ribs. The live-action of 'Uzumaki' centers on Kirie and the town spiral plot, so lots of the standalone grotesqueries from the manga got cut. The manga thrives on short chapters that focus on peripheral people and absurd spiral occurrences — teachers, shopkeepers, children, and odd couples — and many of those scenes are either missing or reduced to quick mentions.

Specifically, you’ll miss several intimate body-horror moments and quirky sideplots that made the manga feel like a living, breathing cursed town: episodes about residents whose hobbies or jobs spiral into obsession, protracted sequences of hair and body transformations, and a few unconditional-weirdness chapters that don’t advance the main couple’s story but add atmosphere. The film’s director decided to streamline for runtime and cohesion, so expect character merges and omitted subplots. If you want those stray, deliciously awful vignettes, the manga is where they live.

I binged through both the manga and the live-action and kept thinking about how different the pacing felt — the film tightens things into a neat, horrifying arc, while the manga delights in a steady drip-feed of weirdness. The biggest thing I noticed is that the movie trims out a ton of the manga’s little vignettes. Junji Ito’s 'Uzumaki' is basically a collection of spiral-infused mini-horrors, and the live-action keeps the central couple and the town’s spiral obsession but drops or compresses many of those one-off episodes that give the manga its piled-on dread.

For example, a bunch of secondary-character-focused chapters don’t make it in full: the small-town people who slowly become spiral-obsessed in private ways (hair and body mutations, hobbyist spiral crafts, weird pregnancies and births described in gruesome detail) are largely hinted at rather than shown in their full, grotesque detail. Environmental/atmospheric chapters — the ones that focus on spiraling architecture, the ocean/sea/sky turning into spiral phenomena, or prolonged schoolhouse madness — get shortened or merged into montage-like sequences. The film also compresses backstory and merges characters, so entire arcs for some side characters simply vanish.

If you loved the manga’s steady accumulation of weird, read it again after watching the film — you’ll notice dozens of omitted set pieces and smaller horrors that, when strung together, make the book feel even stranger than the movie allows. I left the theater wanting more of Ito’s slow-burn episodes; that itch is best scratched on the page.

I’ve compared the panels and the scenes side-by-side and the pattern is clear: the live-action adaptation of 'Uzumaki' streamlines Junji Ito’s episodic hauntings into a tighter narrative, which means many of the manga’s short, surreal chapters were cut or heavily truncated. You lose numerous side-character arcs, long atmospheric transformations (think spiraling landscapes and slow, creeping community-wide behaviors), and several of Ito’s small but shocking body-modification moments that don’t directly involve the protagonists. The film focuses on the core couple and the town’s collapse, so if you want the full buffet of bizarre townsfolk stories and the slow accumulation of dread, the manga is still the richer experience.