Cube? Great movie. Sphere? An underrated masterpiece. The Ring? Terrifying. The Blob? Even more so. And the scariest villain in Silent Hill was Pyramid Head.

Enter Uzumaki, a 1998 collection of stories about a town haunted (possessed, perhaps?) by spirals. Not spiral-shaped creatures, mind you - just the shape itself, or the concept of it. The plot revolves around teen Kirie and her boyfriend, Shuichi, who have the misfortune to live in this doomed town. Shuichi's father is obsessed with spirals - shells, coiled worms, the swirling water in his bathtub. He spends hours staring at his collection of spiral-shaped objects and is angry when his wife cooks non-spiral dumplings. Kirie is drawn into his orbit when he says he'll pay "any amount!" for a spiral bowl from her father, a potter. His obsession eventually inspires him to mutilate his own body.

Shuichi's mother, the second victim, has an equal and opposite descent into madness. Terrified after witnessing what the spirals "did" to her husband, she refuses to be in the same room as one - in hospital, she won't let a nurse with curled hair treat her, and panics when she sees that the tube for her intravenous drip has been left in a coil. When she notices that her fingerprints are basically spirals, she, like her husband, does something that will leave even hardened horror fans wincing, bringing things full circle. After that, things pretty quickly spiral out of control...