Run The Series: JU-ON / THE GRUDGE
[*sinister gurgling intensifies*]
DISCLAIMER:
This is not a completely comprehensive overview of every single entry in the Japanese and/or American incarnations of the Ju-On / Grudge franchise. As such, the following films will not be covered herein:
• The 1998 prequel short films, In A Corner, and 4444444444.
• The American remake’s two sequels, The Grudge 2 (2006), and The Grudge 3 (2009).
• 2009’s Ju-On: White Ghost1, and Ju-On: Black Ghost2.
• 2014’s Ju-On: The Beginning of the End.
• 2015’s Ju-On: The Final Curse.
• 2016’s Sadako vs. Kayako.
• 2019’s The Grudge, Nicolas Pesce’s soft-reboot of - and parallel prequel/sequel to - the 2004 American remake, also called The Grudge.3
I hope you don’t mind these omissions. With the possible exception of the Ring crossover movie, Sadako vs. Kayako, none of the other above-listed films really have much of a positive reputation (especially Pesce’s film), and there’s only so many ways I can rewrite the same sentiment of “this was bad/boring/a waste of time” before I myself start wasting your time, so I figure it’s more prudent to skip past all that, and just stick with talking about the primary, Takashi Shimizu-directed MVPs of The Grudge cinematic universe…
JU-ON: THE CURSE (2000)
★★★½
- “Mum, why do you always go away somewhere?”
- “I'll be with you forever soon. Don't you worry.”
- “Dad killed Little Ma. Are you not really my mum?”
- “I'm always behind you. Remember that.”
If only they had released both parts of Ju-on: The Curse as the single solid story it was clearly written and shot to be, rather than committing the annoyingly silly act of greed that was unnecessarily splitting it into two separate movies, which only serves to leave Part 1 feeling abruptly unfinished (because it is), and leave Part 2 looking like a cynical cash-grab (because it was) that pads itself out to feature length by pulling a Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 with its recapping of the previous film for most of its runtime, before you ever get to the new stuff.
This bifurcation does a disservice to both halves, because if they were fused back together into the approximately 106 minutes-long individual film it's so obviously meant to be, then I could easily give the final streamlined product the full 4 stars the complete story very nearly reaches.
So I guess one must go rummaging around for a fan-edit somewhere that rejoins Parts 1 and 2 from their unfair cleaving in twain, like the editing equivalent of the kintsugi technique of repairing broken things with gold/silver/platinum lacquer adhesive between the cracks, so as to revivify them anew.
Oh, right, and also Ju-on: The Curse is creepy as hell, just as you'd expect. The low budget, the cheap look of the shot-on-video cinematography, the rare instances of nonetheless bad CGI, and the aforementioned dumb decision to cut the story in half, all contribute to it not being quite as scary as my memory of all things Grudge and J-horror-related used to make me feel as a kid. Yet even still, from these low-fi beginnings, it's clear Takashi Shimizu has the eye for crafting sequences of sickly suspense, clammy terror, and an atmosphere of all-encompassing dread infecting every waking moment, even in the brightest of daylight.
And oh sweet Jesus, the gurgling... the guRGLING...
JU-ON: THE CURSE II (2000)
★★★½
“If I told you of things you couldn't see, it would only scare you.”
If only they had released both parts of Ju-on: The Curse as the single solid story it was clearly written and shot to be, rather than committing the annoyingly silly act of greed that was unnecessarily splitting it into two separate movies, which only serves to leave Part 1 feeling abruptly unfinished (because it is), and leave Part 2 looking like a cynical cash-grab (because it was) that pads itself out to feature length by pulling a Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 with its recapping of the previous film for most of its runtime, before you ever get to the new stuff.
This bifurcation does a disservice to both halves, because if they were fused back together into the approximately 106 minutes-long individual film it's so obviously meant to be, then I could easily give the final streamlined product the full 4 stars the complete story very nearly reaches.
Has this review itself so far been a verbatim copy of my review for Part 1, as a cheeky means to illustrate my point? You're goddamn right!
But at least here I can now add my bonus thoughts about how, in the segments that are exclusive to Part 2 (once you wade through the opening half hour of repurposed footage from Part 1), Takashi Shimizu cranks the insanity of the uncanny horror of his world way up, the surreality and claustrophobia of the noxious atmosphere of impending inhuman doom slowly clenching around you like a fist.
As the crucial second half to the overarching story begun in Part 1, The Curse 2 hammers home the tangibly scary feeling this is a horror scenario that is completely inescapable. No exit, no reversal, no solution, no help - once you're caught up in it, you're already fucked beyond compare, and your fate is sealed by forces outside the control of anyone but the vengeful spectres spreading their curse to anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path in any way.
JU-ON: THE GRUDGE (2002)
★★★★
“People have died in that house again. You're the only one left that I can talk to about that case.”
Something that was rekindled in me, during the course of watching the original Ju-on movies for the first time, was the memory of what my childhood self found so spine-chillingly scary about Kayako (as she was represented in the American remake), and by extension, what I similarly found scary about Freddy Krueger. Two horror movie icons from two different parts of the world, whose origins, motives, and tone of menace almost couldn't be more diametrically opposed, yet whose supernatural abilities to ensnare their victims both hinge upon a kindred power to manipulate the fabric of reality in ways that shouldn't be possible. And it is within that liminal space between reason and madness, between what is and what should never be, that the likes of Freddy and Kayako reside.
Nowadays, I can recognise that Kayako is ultimately the scariest out of the two. Freddy was a villain in life who delights in his villainy in death, and can only bend reality to his whims within the confines of dreams and nightmares where he rules supreme. But Kayako is a vengeful spirit who does not wish to be one, who exists in eternal torment and pain, is doomed to repeatedly inflict that torment and pain on the living, and crucially, can invade and manipulate your reality while you're all too wide awake.
I couldn't articulate it 20 years ago when I was a kid, but now I see with clearer eyes what it is about Freddy, about Kayako, and about the sort of horrors they personify, that make them so conceptually frightening. Kayako especially so, as exemplified by the iconic bedsheets moment which encapsulates exactly what makes her so terrifying:
It's the complete elimination of the merest fraction of personal space, temporal-spatial logic, and any of the supposed governing laws of all we think we understand about the universe. From such a force unbound by any physical or human limits, there is no sanctuary, no safety, no rules, no reversal to save you, no recourse to undo what's already been set in motion.
Freddy Krueger can be outwitted, defeated, maybe even bargained with, or at the very least can be survived. But the curse of Kayako is that there is no shred of hope or salvation for you once you're directly or indirectly in the orbit of the accursed house she was brutally killed within. You can't pass the curse of her along to someone else to save your own skin, like making a copy of Sadako's tape from Ring.
Kayako's curse is as simple, immovable, and inevitable as death itself - if you cross her path, whether knowingly or unknowingly, your hours are finitely numbered, and there is nowhere you can hide that she will not find you.
Also:
You know what the biggest surprise was for me to find out about Ju-on: The Grudge, compared to what I remembered from the American remake that I'd long ago seen first?
That the non-linear storytelling structure Takashi Shimizu had been employing for these films wasn't only a narrative gimmick for its own sake, but it actually had a subjective emotional purpose it was communicating all along, before this film let the black cat out of the bag!
My god! You're telling me we had some mind-bendingly cool, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey shenanigans afoot in the Grudge universe the whole time, AND SEEMINGLY NONE OF THE FILMS IN THE AMERICAN VERSION OF THE FRANCHISE HAVE KEPT THAT ASPECT?!
What an absolute embarrassment.
JU-ON: THE GRUDGE II (2003)
★★★★
- “Hiromi, help me! I can't get out of that house!”
- “What house? Hey. What happened? Talk to me! You've been strange lately.”
- “Hiromi, you mustn't! You must never go to that house! You can't come in!”
Honestly, the last half of Ju-on: The Grudge 2 is what saves and dramatically elevates the film to be four-stars-worthy.
Prior to that, I had a growing, nagging worry that this was going to be a much lower-rated entry in the series for me, due to the idiosyncratic non-chronological manner in which Takashi Shimizu always tells his Ju-on tales having the effect of making this film's plot even more tricky to figure out than usual, alongside a seeming disregard for continuity with the apocalyptic implications of the previous film's conclusion, and some of the new horror set-pieces bordering on the unintentionally goofy.
There was much to appreciate in parallel with the nitpicks, however.
Even though it's a theme not explored all that thoroughly, there's an almost meta reflexivity to Shimizu, and his cast and crew, staging this film's story around a fictional cast and crew making a filmed production within the in-universe true-crime house of horrors; a house that actually existed in our reality for many years; a real (un-cursed) home people lived in, that the franchise would return to again and again to rent out for filming purposes, until the house became a tourist attraction, and ultimately got demolished in 2019.
It's also fun to see Shimizu's directorial confidence and skill visibly improve with each new Ju-on film, until he gets to this one, and he's having a blast experimenting with new ways to constantly push the limits of the concept of Kayako and Toshio's curse to breaking point.
The previous Grudge established that the sheer evil power of the house (the Ju-on Ground Zero, as it were) can make the boundaries of space and time very slippery for everyone ensnared by it. Personally, I love when this idea gets utilised in stories about ghosts and the supernatural. Whether it's in films like Insidious 2 and A Ghost Story, in TV shows like The Living and the Dead and The Haunting of Hill House, or in the novella You Should Have Left, the notion of a haunting manifesting itself as the merciless shuffling of regular human temporal chronology like a deck of cards - where past, present and future are collapsed into a predetermined sequence of random events incomprehensibly experienced out of order, which can then only be untangled and understood after it's too late to ever stop it - always sends a thrilling chill up my spine at how fascinating and unsettling it is to imagine going through such a thing yourself.
So with that ingenious, insidious time-twisting sandbox open for him to play around in, Shimizu goes all out in exploring various ways the curse's disorderly puzzle-making of time creates even more uncannily nightmarish, malevolent paranormal phenomena the new cast of characters are forced to endure. Reminiscent of the works of Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land specifically), Shimizu enthusiastically toys with film language even further to convey the unravelling of a stable reality. The dynamic cinematography and expert editing are deployed with devious precision, discontinuity between different geographies bridged with eerie dreamlike ease by characters crossing from one frame to the next, and scrambled chronologies putting the cart before the horse with regards to cause and effect overlapping in the wrong directions.
Yet with this initial rabid experimentation being more interesting and easier to latch onto than the plot or characters we're presented with, the first half of Ju-on: The Grudge 2 makes it harder than usual to feel invested, or to understand how the disparate non-linear vignettes fit together, the piecing together of the narrative puzzle keeping you at arm's length from investing in the story beyond the superficial. Add to that some of the horror visuals tipping over into the realm of silliness (e.g. the sentient wig crawling on the floor, or a football turning into Toshio's disembodied head), and you can see why I was bracing myself for a let down.
But then, from around halfway through onwards, the film finally kicks into high gear with the advent of the Enter The Void-esque story centred upon the tragic fate of Chiharu (returning from the previous Grudge), which is perhaps the single most powerful, existentially gut-wrenching segment in the entire series.
And soon after, Shimizu brings you kicking and screaming into an exponentially crazier and crazier finale, ratcheting up the delirious bonkersness to Malignant levels of “holy shit, we're DOING THIS?!” awe-struck elation, before finishing up with an incredible epilogue that acts as a perfect conclusion to the series.
No horror franchise is ever truly dead, of course, and so while this marked Shimizu's send-off to the Ju-on universe he created (discounting his work directing the first two American Grudge movies), naturally this would be far from the last time the curse of Kayako and Toshio would wreak havoc on the big or small screen...
THE GRUDGE (2004)
Extended/Unrated Cut
★★★
“It is said in Japan that when a person dies in extreme sorrow or rage, the emotion remains, becoming a stain upon that place. Death becomes a part of that place, killing everything it touches. Once you have become a part of it, it will never let you go.”
Much like Gore Verbinski's The Ring was my 10 year-old self's introduction to J-horror (albeit through a Western lens), so too was this Sam Raimi-produced remake of The Grudge the version I saw first, during that 2000's boom of variable-quality American remakes of usually acclaimed Asian horror movies.
If you grew up around the same era as me, there's a solid chance you'll have experienced a time when copying the iconic Grudge death rattle sound was a frequent occurrence among kids in school trying to creep each other out, or failing that, to annoy the hell out of each other for a laugh.
I can vividly recall that when I saw this Americanised Grudge on DVD in the mid-2000's, it was one of the absolute fucking scariest films I'd ever seen. Even though its non-linear storytelling was a bit too confusing for me to wrap my head around at the time, the only things that mattered were that the antics of the little ghost boy with the cat screams, and the gurgling ghost lady crawling and cracking with every unnatural contortion of her twitchy body, were among the most terrifying things I'd ever seen in a movie. All this despite it being what I later found out was the watered-down PG-13 theatrical cut (even though in the UK, this tamer cut was still rated 15 by the BBFC... the same certificate given to the more violent, extended “unrated cut”).
Fast-forward to present day, and by this point, it had been nearly two decades since I'd last seen The Grudge remake. Long enough so that I'd wound up watching Scary Movie 4's parody of The Grudge far more times than the actual film itself. (Yes, this does indeed rob the remake of some of its potency, particularly when Bill Pullman appears in both films as basically the same character, barring the exception of his Grudge character's suicidal leap from a tall building in the opening scene having gotten grafted onto Charlie Sheen's Scary Movie 3 character taking an accidental overdose of boner pills, before his jump off the balcony leaves him dead on the ground below, oversized erection impaled in the concrete.)
But having finally seen Takashi Shimizu's original Ju-on films for myself, I now know that 2004's The Grudge was not only a remake of 2002's Ju-on: The Grudge, but also a compilation remake of 2000's Ju-on: The Curse, Ju-on: The Curse 2, and even a little bit of 2003's Ju-on: The Grudge 2.
What the remake - and the American version of the franchise in general - inexplicably chooses not to carry over, however, is the original series' eventual reveal of the time-and-space-bending powers of the accursed house. Something which would've been amazing to know about 20 years ago, rather than having the American films misrepresent that aspect of the Ju-on universe all this time by way of omission!
Sure, the time-twisting stuff is perhaps partially hinted at within the remake by the sequence where Sarah Michelle Gellar is made to inhabit a flashback to what Bill Pullman experienced in the house, and even though he can't see her, there's hints that she can be felt by him across time. Yet, if you weren't privy to knowing the extent of the time-slipping insanity present in the original Ju-on films, you'd likely read this sequence as more in line with Scrooge in A Christmas Carol being shown his past as a passive observer, rather than an active participant whose actions can directly impact the course of events.
But hey, at least with the higher budget and resources he had to remake his original film for an American audience, Takashi Shimizu was finally able to pull off the gag with the jawless girl way more convincingly than he could afford to in Ju-on: The Curse. (Though alas, even this isn't immune to the parodic tainting from Scary Movie 4, as I can no longer feel the jolt of fright that image once provoked in me, because all I can think of is the spoof's version of the jawless girl being used by passing office workers to lick their envelopes with her forever-dangling tongue.)
As far as these American remakes of the noughties go, Shimizu handling the reins of redoing his own film means that The Grudge is just sturdy enough to not fall fully victim to the compromises that befell other (bad) US remakes of Asian horror movies back then. Shimizu keeps the pace, tension, and atmosphere relatively as patient and subdued as he did before (at least with the expanded runtime of the unrated cut probably allowing more scenes to breathe), rather than what might've happened had some other gun-for-hire guy came in with a hacky music video aesthetic, prioritising flashy quick cuts, sloppy CGI overload, and wall-to-wall jump scares. (You know, like what happened with the abysmal American version of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse.)
Thankfully, perhaps because of Sam Raimi's appreciation of the original Ju-on: The Grudge as one of the scariest films he'd ever seen, and his resultant respect for Shimizu's vision, maybe that's why Ghost House Pictures didn't try and make the remake too overly slick, at least in comparison to various other horror remakes coming out around then.
Is it still unnecessary for this Grudge to exist?
When we have the original films to compare it to, then yes.
But then again, it is arguable that it's only because the remake happened, and that it was so successful, that the West ever got the opportunity to have the original films distributed over here for audiences to see. And even then, there wasn't a home video release for the first two films - Ju-on: The Curse 1 & 2 - outside of Japan until 2022, thanks to the efforts of Arrow Films! How much longer would that have taken, if ever, were it not for the 2004 remake making the Ju-on films reach a worldwide level of awareness, and a global audience's desire to seek them out?
Do these ends thus justify the remake's means?
Considering the net positives, I think it's a yes to that, too.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention:
The remake's addition of the jump scare with Kayako's face in the window was so effective, that even when Scary Movie 4 replicated that moment as a joke, it still worked on me just as well as it had in the actual serious horror movie it was spoofing it from.
Take that as you will...
If you enjoyed this edition of Run The Series, you may be interested in perusing the previous instalments of this strand of film franchise retrospectives, which you can check out down below:
Well, okay, here’s a very quick review:
JU-ON: WHITE GHOST (2009) - ★★½ - It's amazing how much the necessary atmosphere of dread and unease White Ghost tries to build gets so instantly deflated by the decision to have the spooky old grandma ghost goofily carrying a basketball around with her everywhere she goes. Such an absurdly anachronistic sight it is, that no matter how hard it's attempted to be justified, it doesn't even need the Grudge parody in Scary Movie 4 to spin it into a joke, 'cause it's already scored a spoof slam-dunk against itself.
JU-ON: BLACK GHOST (2009) - ★★ - Even by Ju-on standards, Black Ghost has the most self-sabotagingly hard-to-follow, disjointed execution yet of the non-linear chronology gimmick that is this franchise's bread and butter, and alas, no amount of the quasi-Malignant subplot can make up for those shortcomings.
God, how I hate that trend of prequels/sequels/reboots calling themselves by the same name as their predecessors (occasionally adding/dropping a “the” from time to time), needlessly confusing matters for anyone trying to talk about, and differentiate between, the movies in these franchises. The Thing (2011)… Evil Dead (2013)… Blair Witch (2016)… Flatliners (2017)… The Predator (2018)… Halloween (2018)… The Grudge (2019)… The Suicide Squad (2021)… Candyman (2021)… Scream (2022)… Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)… Hellraiser (2022)… I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)… WHEN WILL THIS MADNESS END?!!?!
The recent American remake of "Grudge" is interesting, because you can tell they kind of re-edited it behind the director's back. Some of it is very scary, but they tried to offset the slower bits with repetitive jump scares out of another movie. The newer version really emphasized, to me, why we're so scared of the normal house at the end of the block, and how there's a ghost hiding within the mundanity. It's also an -rated effort, which is cool. I've been meaning to go back and check it out.
Fromtheyardtothearthouse.substack.com