When the police interview Karen, they reveal that the boy she claims to have seen was murdered in that house years ago along with his mother Kayako (Takako Fuji). Apparently, the husband-father committed the killings , and then committed suicide. Ever since then the house has been cursed and everyone who enters has disappeared or died a mysterious death.
Director Takashi Shimizu returns to this story for the fifth time. He made Ju-On and Ju-On 2 for video, and then helmed the theatrical versions of each before taking on this Hollywood remake. The territory is familiar for him, yet he still seems interested and able to find freshness. For The Grudge, he uses the dislocation of the American characters in Japan to heighten the sense of discomfort and unease. He also seems to enjoy the increased budget this Columbia-backed film affords him. The money shows up on screen, and The Grudge boasts some special effects and heightened production values. In fact, Shimizu can’t resist an early effects shot of his evil apparition.
Takako Fuji reprises her role as the angry ghost from Ju-On in The Grudge (Columbia Pictures)
But what essentially makes both Ju-On and The Grudge work is not money and effects. It’s Shimizu’s ability to build tension and create a creepy atmosphere that proves most effective. In Japan, Shimizu did not have big budgets, which is also the case with other successful Japanese horror films such as Ringu and Dark Water, and so he had to rely on ingenuity rather than pricey bells and whistles to entice audiences. As a result, Shimizu’s films build mood and tone carefully so that the viewer gets enveloped in a world where ghosts can be terrifyingly real.
In a sense, Shimizu does for ghosts what Alien did for extraterrestrials. Alien arrived after audiences had been charmed by cute aliens in Star Wars, and it served up a vicious and unstoppable alien creature. Ju-On/The Grudge offer an equally evil and unstoppable creature but this it’s a ghost, which in American films often tend to be tortured souls that reach out to the living in order to have some wrong righted (Gothika is a recent example of that scenario). But in Simizu’s films, the characters that work to understand the ghosts, to show compassion for their plight, and even to try to solve the mystery of their murders receive no special consideration. The specters’ rage is not lessened one bit by this show of concern. Everyone—good, bad, kind, indifferent—who comes in contact with the haunted house is equally likely to fall victim to it. This sense that everyone is vulnerable increases the anxiety for the audience.
The film also arrives in San Diego on the heels of UCSD’s Japanese Film Symposium, which considered as one of its topics the idea of “forgetting” in contemporary Japanese cinema. The difference between Ju-On and The Grudge points to an interesting cultural difference. At the Japanese Film Symposium, visiting University of Toronto professor Eric Cazdyn suggested that many recent Japanese films share a “motif of forgetting that’s constantly being raised in them, either forgetting because of a trauma or forgetting because one was terribly drunk the night before or forgetting because of amnesia and so many other reasons because one is questioning their own ability to remember their identity. And in many ways the forgetting continues and persists throughout the film.” And this kind of forgetting is very different from the way forgetting is depicted in American films. Here, it is always dealt with and resolved by looking to the past to find resolution and closure.
In Ju-On, the sense of forgetting pertains to what happened to the characters of Kayako and Toshiro, and the way the house “remembers” their deaths. In Ju-On, looking to the past, to what really happened, does not help to solve anything, and the ghosts essentially choose to forget their humanity and allow themselves to be consumed only by the rage that pushes them forward to take more lives. In The Grudge, much of this same mood is retained but with more of an effort made to bring closure and offer a more straightforward explanation of things. Stylistically, this represents another difference between Japanese and American filmmaking: Japanese horror doesn’t strive to make sense of things whereas American horror usually tries to explain itself so that we know why some evil creature is doing what it’s doing. In Japanese horror, 2+2 can equal 5, and you’re just asked to accept it And maybe that’s what makes it scary, the lack of rational thought that exists behind the story. When all rules can be broken, it unsettles an audience.
The Grudge successfully repeats the scares of Shimizu’s Japanese films and proves that the director loses little in translation. Some American viewers may find the horror too tame (since it is more suggestive than graphic although it does have an occasional jolt of explicitness). But if you are willing to be seduced by the film’s tone and mood, you will be rewarded with some genuine chills.
Sarah Michelle Gellar remains in the horror genre that won her a cult following with TV’s Buffy, but she moves in a different direction with The Grudge. As Karen, Gellar is a vulnerable victim with no slayer powers to aid her in fighting back. In The Grudge, Gellar succumbs to the terror rather than facing up to it and kicking its butt. There are some talented supporting players here—Bill Pullman, Grace Zabriskie, and the always enjoyable Ted Raimi—but they are very much in service to the plot as Gellar is.
The Grudge (rated PG-13 for mature thematic material and disturbing images) offers a more satisfying remake of its original than The Ring was of its Japanese original. And there are a slew of other Asian horror (and non-horror) films waiting in the wings to be remade as well if this, as with The Ring, proves successful at the box office. Look for titles such as Dark Water, The Eye and The Ring 2 (which will have Japan’s Ringu director, Hideo Nakata, at the helm). Plus Lion’s gate has partnered with ju-On/The Grudge producer Taka Ichise for J-Horror, a series of six horror films to be made in Japan by Japan’s best in the genre. So while American horror has been rather anemic in recent years, Asia has been providing some fresh blood to invigorate the genre. And Asian horror is pushing the genre in two extremes—one being the atmospheric works of Shimizu, Nakata and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and the other extreme being the over the top excess of such filmmakers as Takashi Miike and Takashi Kitano. And for horror fans, all this is great news. (P.S. Check out the original Ju-On and its worthy sequel, Ju-On 2 at rental houses, they are worth seeking out.)
