A title card tells us that a Ju-On is a curse that is born when a person dies in a deep and powerful rage. The film will then spend the next 90 minutes showing us exactly what it means.
Ju-On: The Grudge was part of a cycle of Japanese horror films (collectively known as J-Horror) that came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike their American counterparts (which were mostly self-aware slashers and other schlocky, gore-inflicted films) J-Horror tended to focus more on mood, and the psychology of fear, with plots that revolved around Japanese folklore. The violence was usually off-screen and not very graphic (though there were exceptions – I’m looking at you, Takashi Miike).
For a few years, J-horror became quite popular in America and several of them were remade by Hollywood. Someday I may do a theme where I review the Japanese horror films alongside their American remakes, but for now, we’re just talking about this one.
Ju-On: The Grudge was actually the third film in the Ju-On franchise (the previous two were straight-to-video releases) but it was the first one most of us watched (I’ve only seen this one and the first American remake).
The film is really a series of vignettes, each focusing on a different character, most of which are set in the same house located in Nerima, Tokyo.
I’ll be honest here, I just watched the film but if you paid me $1,000 to explain who each character was and what their relationship to each other is, I’d still be broke. Each vignette is so short, and each character is given so little to distinguish each other from each other I’m at a loss to tell you who is who.
They all do seem to be related to one another either by family or friendship or work. It begins with Rika (Megumi Okina) a social worker volunteer being tasked by her boss to visit an old lady at the cursed house (though neither of them realizes it is cursed at this point.) She enters to find the old lady in a daze, lying in bed. She picks her up to find that she has soiled herself.
After cleaning her up and doing a little housekeeping she hears a noise upstairs. In the bedroom, she finds a closet that has been taped over and she hears a cat meowing inside. Opening it she sees the cat and then a small, pale boy. She goes downstairs to call her boss and witnesses a black fog kill the old lady. Rika then passes out.
Others come to the house and most find themselves infected by the curse. They’ll become haunted by the boy, the cat, and the boy’s parents. Sometimes they’ll be killed inside the house, other times they’ll take the curse with them infecting their homes.
The film jumps around in time, making it a bit disorienting.
We will learn more about the boy and his family, and why they are haunting this house, but it really doesn’t matter. The plot isn’t really the point. Scaring the bejeebus out of us is the point and this film does that really well.
There are jump scares aplenty, and all sorts of creepy noises and visuals. These evil spirits appear out of nowhere – sometimes they attack, sometimes they just scare the characters, and sometimes they aren’t even seen by the character but by the audience giving us a jolt of fear. This happens so often that you’ll find yourself tensing up in anticipation, looking in corners and backgrounds half-expecting to see a ghost.
Quite a few of these sequences have become iconic for horror fans. The girl walking on all fours, contorting herself in unusual ways, the hand in the shower, the girl under the covers, etc. have all become part of our communal horror fabric.
I can’t say that Ju-On: The Grudge is a great film in any sort of artistic, cinematic sense, but it is a great one to put on late at night when you are all alone and scare yourself silly.
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